Sally Hackett: Padlocks of Self-Love Workshops

Sally Hackett is working with Hospitalfield on a long term commission as part of the development of our blacksmith made garden gate leading to our walled garden.

This project encourages individuals to celebrate love for themselves in an act of creativity and expression. We are often surrounded by celebratory bias towards romantic love and couples, the padlock represents this – often placed in a cheesy way crowding the edges of bridges in cities like Rome and Paris to represent a couples undying love. While we celebrate duo-unions in lots of ways: weddings, anniversaries, engagement parties, we only celebrate the individual through a birthday.

Love for other people is beautiful but rarely do we dedicate our love to ourselves. This project is intended to allow people to take time to offer up their devotion to themselves. Inspired by the padlocks that burden city bridges with lovers initials, participants are invited to join Sally to make a self-portrait in wax that will be cast into metal (an everlasting material) and soldered onto a padlock, representing their dedication to themselves. By attaching their lock to the gate at Hospitalfield, instead of being bound in metal to another human being they are bound in metal to themselves. To be acknowledged and reminded each time you enter the walled garden.

Workshops take place throughout the summer. Individuals and groups are invited over three summers to work with Sally to create their padlocks. Please sign up for this year’s workshops here.

The commission will be completed with two commissioned Sally Hackett sculptures encompassing these ideas as finials on either side of the gate posts in April 2023.

The Garden as the site for Padlocks of Self-Love resonates with the positive effects for wellbeing that people experience when in gardens and nature. These individually crafted works resonate with the tradition of arts and crafts at Hospitalfield.

About the Artist

Sally Hackett is an artist and educator living and working in Glasgow. Sally makes sculpture with a range of materials of widely different shelf lives and sell by dates from glazed ceramics to peanuts, garlic husks and toilet rolls. Spurred by intuitive making, Sally creates her work predominantly around emotion and mental states. Characters appear showing stories of social intricacies, heartbreak and human failure but with a playful aesthetic of bright colours and cartoon faces. Her work aims to simultaneously express both joy and pain. The playful aesthetic of the work mirrors the sentiment, displaying the energy and beauty present in imperfection. Sally’s interest in pedagogy often sees her working directly with community groups and children to create works collaboratively or facilitate others in their act of creating. She has worked on educational projects with a wide range of organisations, completing projects and residencies with Glasgow Royal Hospital for Children, GOMA, Project Ability, Platform, Panel and Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Recent exhibitions include ‘A toilet is a wishing well’ Generator Projects (2020) ‘A Weakness for Raisins’ CCA, Glasgow (2018) ‘From Glasgow Women’s Library’ (2018) and ‘The Fountain of Youth’, Edinburgh Art Festival (2016).