Nicole Wermers

Nicole Wermers’s Reclining Female #6 (2024) looks out over Glasgow.

- Phin Jennings

The Common Guild, Glasgow, UK

The sculpture’s upper portion, a nude female, rests on one elbow as she admires the view from her vantage point atop a wooden board balanced firmly on the work’s lower half: an abundantly stocked housekeeping trolley. The Capella Building, where she sits, is a plate-glass office development in the city’s business district. The large, seventh-floor gallery space had remained unoccupied from the building’s completion in 2008 until it was taken over temporarily last year by The Common Guild. Despite her corporate surroundings, however, Wermers’s figure is most definitely not at work.

Four similar sculptures are dotted around the room. In public spaces, trolleys like this are so ubiquitous that they all but disappear. Here, there is something beautiful about them. Flanked by fabric bags for clean and dirty linen,