Rachel Maclean's toy shop on Ayr high street appears like any other in a town centre at first sight. Step inside and you will notice that familiar promotional entreaties (恳求) are backwards: Don't Buy Me, Nothing Must Go. Everything is upside down and nothing is for sale.
Matilda Coleman, six, picked up one of the toys—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Disney princess(公主), and turned her upside down. Underneath the skirt was a pale-faced witchy (女巫的) version. The girl liked it, and then was confused that the toy wasn't available to buy. Maclean's work playfully breaks the grasp that consumer culture has on modern minds.
"What art can do best is to make you look at things that you're very used to in a different way," said Maclean (b.1987), a Glasgow-based multi-media artist who has rapidly established herself as one of the most distinctive voices in the UK. "Sadly the decline of our city centres is something that is common these days, so I want to bring people into a space where they can reflect on it in a fun way."
"When the shop first opened, everyone was interested in finding out what it was," said Parker, a local teenager. "It has lots of different themes about identity, consumerism, capitalism, but they are silent messages and everyone has different thoughts about it."
Maclean has taken over this former butcher's shop in Ayr as part of Jupiter Plus, a new arts and education initiative, which aims to reluyenate empty high street shops in towns and cities in Scotland with free art exbibitions and workshops for young people. People's immediate joy at seeing something happening in here is abivious and it drives conversations about how they remember the high street and how the space could be used again.
