Sheena McGregor

Challenges of working as a Co-operative and Beth Fisher’s role

Clip Title	Challenges of working as a Co-operative and Beth Fisher’s role
Interviewee Name	Sheena McGregor
Interviewee Role	Founding member of Glasgow Print Studio in 1972 and ran the workshop in the first premises, alongside Beth Fisher.
Interviewer Name	Kerry Patterson
Interview Date	12 June 2013
Clip Length	1 minutes 43 seconds

Transcription

SM: It wasn’t about having directors and just imitating like the Art School, these hierarchical, quite in some ways paternalistic structures. It was supposed to be much more modern and open. But I think it kind of closed ranks a bit.

KP: So did you, you still have like, kind of council, management meetings. Maybe you didn’t call it that but-

SM: We had huge, huge- and it was always about [they laugh] whose turn it was to clean the lavatory, you know. And it usually went on and on. It’s the old kind of commune ideas. It all comes down to who took the garbage out, never mind the ideology. But it- it.. There was uh, great big meetings but…and who owed the petty cash tin [they laugh]

KP: But I think, because everybody was so busy just getting on with it basically- you know, there wasn’t somebody there to kind of, you know record things.

SM: I mean Beth ran it.

KP: Yeah.

SM: You know Beth, she did a lot of the donkey work. And we did a bit of work together writing proposals for money -and sitting and you know, just trying to… don’t know if we even- I don’t think if we had a typewriter. We must’ve done. I don’t know what we did but I remember trying to bash out… Asking for money, we got that money from the Gulbenkian, we headed off to London, went down the east end of London to a printers, bought the Hunter Penrose [press]. That was exciting. Buying a press and coming home again, you know. That - that was fantastic. And even, you know, he gave me a shot on the press in London. Just to see if I could print probably but…. it was lovely. That thing about print studios where everything is absolutely covered in printing ink but what they were producing was totally immaculate. So there’s that kind of dynamic between the- the mess of the ink and the potential for chaos with something absolutely pristine appearing from it.