PAULY POCKET:
EVERYTHING MUST GO!

10-26 September 2026

It’s a phrase which belongs in a shop window, usually to speed up a closing-down sale. But it could also be a pretty good description of Britain in 2026.

For his new exhibition, Edinburgh-based artist Pauly Pocket brings together a collection of objects, signs and fragments rescued from the ordinary urban landscape. The old chippy sign, a glowing poster from a shuttered bingo hall, a NEWS sign at the scruffy corner shop - all places recognisable to anyone growing up in Scotland. But hardly the stuff of art, surely?

Pauly isn’t particularly interested in tidying these things up for an art audience. And even the gallery doesn’t get to decide how these symbols should behave. They’re hung at the height they were found, using the old screws, brackets and fixings wherever possible. Their usefulness may have gone, but they remain, still advertising, instructing and pointing towards places that no longer exist.

But hang on. What’s changed? What qualifies this as art? How is the artist even involved? Is it about the object itself, maybe? Or how and where we experience it?

By now you might be manifesting a wee bit of Warhol, perhaps Koons; the old Pop Art trick of taking the language of consumption and legitimising it through the doors of the institution. Nah. Pauly’s too street smart for that. Rather than exploit the vacuousness of the spectacle, he shows us what’s left – the massive void in our imaginations (what Mark Fisher called “depressive hedonia”) stunted by over four decades of neoliberal cultural logic and algorithm-infused junk dopamine. 

Galleries have always done a pretty decent job of deciding what’s meant to deserve our attention (Boris Groys called it ‘Art Power’ lol) but they’ve never been especially good at making people - especially from working class backgrounds - feel they belong.

Among other things, EVERYTHING MUST GO! chucks a half-Niddrie at this funny, sad – but ultimately liberating – contradiction.

Scott Lawrie, August 2026

All works in this show are available for sale, prices on application. Pauly Pocket was the winner of the inaugural Scottish Society of Artists CULTURE BOMB! prize, sponsored by Scott Lawrie Gallery.