Kendall Koppe is delighted to present Function Creeps, Craig Mulholland's second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition brings together a new body of work that extends over a variety of media, including; video, sound, sculpture, drawing and screen printing. The term Function Creep is often used to describe how governmental technological intervention is incremental and unseen.
Systems originally intended to perform narrowly specified functions are expanded to
react to new (political) circumstances, thereby sidestepping or pushing the limits of legal frameworks meant to protect issues of privacy and data protection.1
Mulholland utilises the aesthetics of mindful luxury as a function creep of commodified mindfulness, such as exclusive retreats and ultra-specialised wellness practitioners. The exhibition creates a brand identity to author and disseminate artworks that incorporate and resemble aspects of bespoke luxury products, such as exclusive credit cards, leather goods, wellness packages or aesthetic clinics. Mulholland applies the language of luxury retail throughout the installation. Combining digital fabrication techniques with more traditional craft, the works borrow aspects of counterfeit production, alluding to the delusion and contradiction inherent to such luxury lifestyle industries.
Function Creeps (2025) becomes a parody that aligns the ambiance and language of mindfulness practices with luxury advertising, as though internally marketing the products of the exhibition itself. Mulholland examines the co-option of mindfulness by corporate culture as a function creep - here a form of bio-power employed to induce enterprising people to govern themselves in the drive for greater worker efficiency and capital growth. According to Foucault, it is this link between enterprise culture and individual wellbeing that is most instructive: economic activity is optimised by promoting entrepreneurship. Within the exhibition artworks are explicitly branded, authenticated and authored with an imitation company logo FCREEPS, in deliberate inverse to the assumed authorship and subjectivity of the artist's hand or signature. The artwork's entrepreneurial mode made conspicuous. Mulholland questions their complicity and the impact of their own practice in relation to Foucault's 'neo-liberal turn' in governance, identified in 1979.
1. Broeders, Dennis. The New Digital Borders of Europe: EU Databases and the Surveillance of Irregular Immigrants'. International Sociology 22
Craig Mulholland (b.1969, Glasgow) lives and works in Glasgow. They are a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and a recent recipient of a Development Grant Award from Canada Council for the Arts, the Glasgow Visual Artists Award and the Creative Scotland Artist Award. Mulholland is currently a lecturer and researcher in Fine Art at The Glasgow School Of Art. In 2018 they founded the artists group HOMMAGES with designer Carmel O'Brien and artist MV Brown.
Mulholland's work is currently included in TWODO Collection: 2020-2024, NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen. Recent exhibitions include NEU PNEUMATIC! with HommAges, Glasgow International 2018, SAY WHAT YOU MEAN WHAT YOU SAY, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow, ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM, LGP Gallery, Coventry, DUST NEVER SETTLES, SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow, GRANDES ET PETITES MACHINES, Glasgow School of Art, touring in expanded form to Spike Island, Bristol, 2008, HYPERINFLATION, Tate Britain, London.
