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‘The art world has a real issue with making things overly conceptual, too complicated and using wanky jargon,” says Trackie McLeod. “It alienates people.” So, for his latest show, Utopia, the 32-year-old Glaswegian has decided to create something more welcoming and familiar: a pub.
Custom-built from scratch, the exhibition is a fully functioning boozer. McLeod will pull pints for punters, there’s a dartboard where you can take aim at images of Thatcher or Trump, and visitors can explore his mixed-media artworks, spanning print, sculpture and sound, and swing by to catch drag acts, DJs and panel discussions.
“I’ve even got a fruit machine that spits out chocolate coins,” he says. “Which is a comment on how these machines rinse working-class pockets for their own gain. Whereas with this work, everyone’s a winner.”
Utopia takes place at Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester, and was commissioned by its Young Curators team. Touching on themes of nostalgia, class, identity and gentrification, it is also an ode to pubs and working men’s clubs as vital community hubs.
“I grew up in places like this,” McLeod says. “All our family occasions were there – weddings, birthdays, funerals. It’s where all the disputes happened. Spaces that were cheap and cheerful but championed character and comfort. I’m trying to bring back a sense of togetherness that we’re lacking at the moment.”
McLeod – whose nickname, Trackie, is based on his propensity, when younger, for bringing out a fresh tracksuit to put on when a party ran into day two – is having a very busy run. After two successful exhibitions, Fruit (2024) and Fruit II (2025), he now also has Soft Play running at the Charleston in Lewes until mid-April, where he has recreated an outdoor play park in the exhibition space. It explores “the awkward transition from childhood into teenager”, he says. “When you’re playing as an adult in these spaces – like drinking and vandalising – but are still really a kid.”
McLeod struggled at school and didn’t connect with the art curriculum and its focus on “dead painters”, but one day an ex-student came in to give a talk. “He looked like me and sounded like me,” he recalls. “He spoke about Andy Warhol, Basquiat and Keith Haring. That was my introduction to art that wasn’t just necessarily painting. A real turning point.”
He still failed art: he is dyslexic and struggled with the essays. But he “accidentally” ended up at college studying design, and then at university, trying to find his groove. “I’ve been chipping away at this for a long time,” he says. “It hasn’t been a linear path. There have been lots of ups and downs.”
By the time of Fruit – which featured a whole car painted in a Burberry check, and a dovecote installed in the gallery – he felt he had found his stride; blending Scottish patter, popular culture, graphic design, 00s nostalgia and explorations of class. “It all came together,” he says.
It also coincided with McLeod exploring his personal life in more depth. He had already been looking at toxic masculinity, and began to intersect it with his own experiences of growing up queer in Glasgow. In one piece – funny and absurd, but also quietly powerful and moving – he framed a long list of things that were deemed gay in school, including using gel pens, reading and crossing your legs. “It was only putting it out like that that you realise: fucking hell, that was ridiculous,” he says. “The things I would do to change myself to try and fit in at the time.”
McLeod has stayed in Glasgow, avoiding the frenzy of London, which he feels is “oversaturated”. He remains unrepresented by a gallery and happily part of a DIY scene. Despite his growing success, he has previously had to fund his own exhibitions to make them happen, sleeping on sofas at friends’ houses. For all the talk of representation, diversity and inclusion in the arts, that hasn’t been his experience as a working-class artist.
“A lot of these galleries say they are championing underrepresented voices and most of the time they don’t,” he says. “They don’t practise what they preach. It’s just rich folk with limited life experience, pumping money into rich folk with limited life experience. The art world feeds on nepotism, privilege and the bank of mummy and daddy. There’s definitely a glass ceiling for working-class artists.”
It’s been a slog for McLeod, but doing things on his own terms seems to be paying off and he now welcomes people to swing by Utopia for a pint and a chat. “I don’t have the answers, but I’m living proof that you can mark out your own path and it is possible,” he says. “But we need more working-class voices, more queer voices, and more POC voices, because it makes for more interesting art.”
English (US)