UTOPIA is a pub that sits somewhere in my imagination.

Introducing Trackie McLeod. Artist. Born Glasgow, 1993.

Artist Trackie McLeod is relatively young (half my age) and full of bold and funny ideas expressed via various media, his work is rooted in the lived experience of growing up in Glasgow, queer and working class in the 2000s. When I recently got the opportunity to sit down with him and chatter about his life and work, I grabbed it. And then he discussed with me a chance to get involved in a forthcoming installation in Manchester…

I’ve been thinking about his work since we met, and I reckon that most of all his art is about searching to understand and to be understood. Usually while smiling one of his big handsome smiles.

Before we started talking we discussed Keith Haring (I was wearing a Haring hoodie). Turns out that Haring means a lot to Trackie (I knew he would). Aside from this reference, we didn’t go deep into art history though. “I’m more inspired by celebrity culture, music, and funny stories you hear on the bus than artists”, he once said.

Trackie’s also not a fan of the phrase or the artistic practice of “staying in your lane”. He’s specialised in graphic design at and after Glasgow School of Art, but also uses video, sculpture, and photography.

He references lad culture and pop culture, once turning a pair of K Swiss trainers into something looking like a bronze sculpture. And on more than one occasion screen-printing the back of football shirts not with the names of players but with phrases like ‘SHIRTLIFTER’ and ‘NANCY BOY’.

When I sat down with Trackie, I rolled out a quote from David Hockney, telling him I think it’s applicable to his work. Hockney said, “just because you are cheeky doesn’t mean you’re not serious”.

“Agreed”, says Trackie. “I like that. I relate to that. I think I always try and use humour as a way to make the themes that I’m talking about easier to understand, easier to digest. I think humour is a good way for everyone to feel involved. Even if you’re not interested in art, it can help you get it.”

He bought a cheap secondhand Nissan Micra off Facebook Marketplace and spray-painted it in Burberry colours and exhibited it at Govan Project Space in Glasgow. Subsequently, finding the whole car a little unwieldy, he broke it into a few pieces so it could be more easily shown elsewhere. Bits were on display at his 2025 show Fruit II at The Bomb Factory’s Holborn Gallery in London.

Back then, he explained the overarching theme of Fruit II; “It’s about growing up queer in Glasgow, and the kind of shame that came with that. The performances, the silence, the things you did to fit in. Honestly, I can’t believe I tried so hard to fit into those norms. I can’t believe I hid parts of myself, just to avoid prejudice or how people might treat me. I’ve tried to capture those unspoken rites of passage, the uniforms, the rituals. I want people to feel the heaviness if they need to, but also to laugh and to see themselves in it.”

Creativity wasn’t a big part of Trackie’s early life in Glasgow, apart from a rare trips to Kelvingrove Art Gallery. He has a sister, Kayleigh, five years older than him, who he describes as “a brilliant, great human”. His parents were together until he was 7 years old, so the majority of his childhood and adolescence was with his Mum and sister; “My sister moved out when she was 17, and then it was just me and my Mum. It was a female dominated household, which was probably, for me, a blessing in disguise. At the time, I didn’t think it, but growing into a man, I realized that a lot of my best qualities come from the women in my life. A lot of my friends are women as well; my core group of friends from school are four girls.”

One of Trackie’s works is a newspaper clipping screenprinted onto copper – a blatantly homophobic article in the Sun penned by Piers Morgan in 1989 reacting to apparent “outrage” at a gay kiss of the TV show EastEnders. He’s used a hardwearing material to underline “that the same hate still exists, just in different packaging”.

He recalls how at school he’d be devising strategies to fit in; “I had to blend. And you learn at a young age as a queer man, especially because with gay men there are all those tropes and all those stereotypes, like the voice. I got grief for that, like towards the end of primary school.”

At high chool, an ex-student came in to give a talk about Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, and Trackie still recalls the discoveries of that day; “With Andy Warhol the screen prints, and the music and the film; art doesn’t need to be this one thing. There are multitudes. But also hearing the Keith Haring story, and just seeing the graphic nature of the work; a variation of the kind of graffiti I would see at home, but stylized and I’d never seen anything like that. That moment probably shaped a lot of what I do now.”

He failed his first attempt to get into the Glasgow School of Art, but now says that getting knocked-back made him more determined the following year. His thoughts about the School aren’t all positive, but finding a big queer community made a big difference; “It definitely made me have a lot of love for my sexuality. It was like, actually, I’ve struck gold here. Being gay is actually amazing!”

Trackie has collaborated several times with the billboard company BUILDHOLLYWOOD (in their own words, they’re “creative street advertising specialists”). One, a graphic that says “Boys will be… what we teach them to be” was motivated, says Trackie, by his desire “to make a bold statement about masculinity, especially given how extreme things have become with figures like Andrew Tate and the way young boys are being influenced online.”

It’s not a poster designed for a clean white art gallery wall, it belongs in public, visible from the street, where it grab the attention of unsuspecting passers-by, trigger thoughts, or start a conversation. As one fan of the artist has written, “That’s the power of Trackie’s work. It’s made for the people who aren’t always invited in”.

Trackie roots his artistic identity in Glasgow, but he’s also explained that “fundamentally all the issues I explore and that I am passionate about are human and so they’ll travel”. And if there’s one part of the world where Glaswegians are welcome, where there are shared industrial and post-industrial histories that resonate, and family and other many and various connections, it’s the North West of England.

Which brings us to Manchester, and Trackie’s first show in this city; UTOPIA at Aviva Studios, 19th to 21st February. Having been approached by the current Young Curators team at Factory International, and given the various themes discussed - including club culture, safe spaces, gentrification, changing city landscapes - Trackie saw the perfect chance to bring to life an idea he’d been thinking about for a while; to install a pub in an art space.

The pub will be in one of the big warehouse spaces at Aviva Studios. Once installed, it’ll function like any pub would; free admission, with some entertainments laid on too. Trackie is going to work there, behind the bar, between 3pm and 6pm each day, so the artist himself contributes “an element of performance” but also for him, it’s making a serious point; when you don’t come from wealth, there’s no fallback position.

He’s a working class artist, living a precarious financial existence; “For me, isn’t a certain life I could it could easily be ripped away from me. Being an artist isn’t a dead cert, and I could be back in retail at any point. So I thought this element of me working on it was something that interests me”.

Cheap pints, soft drinks - inevitably including Irn Bru - crisps, snacks. Visitors can sit and enjoy the music. The Factory International website tells us we can also “Explore new prints, sculpture, video and found-object works from Trackie that draw on his lived experience, tucked between salvaged chairs and rescued pub décor – a loving nod to what’s vanishing from our cities”.

Info for UTOPIA at Factory International below…

In Trackie’s words; “I mainly just want people to sit in it like a pub. It’s not about it’s an installation. I want it to function as a pub”. UTOPIA he says “Is all about bringing people together when so many of the community spaces we rely on are disappearing or moving online.”

He tells me in the pub he’s giving a space and a stage up to other creatives “that represent Glasgow, that represent queerness, that represent Manchester, that represent the variations of amazing young talent that are out there”. Some of the programming he’s put in the hands of Young Curators.

I confess to Trackie that I can sit in a café bar all day, go to a music venue all evening, and onto a club half the night, but, if I’m honest, I’ve never been much of a pub person. Partly because, growing up a lot of the pubs weren’t particularly safe, a bit too blokey, and not very welcoming to weirdos. And partly because I’m not a drinker.

“UTOPIA is a pub that sits somewhere in my imagination”, he says. “What we’re doing here is reimagining what a pub is”, Trackie explains. He mentions two places in Manchester he’s recently visited. The first, the DBA (aka the Derby Brewery Arms) - one of the slightly under-the-radar spaces in Cheetham Hill currently doing great creative work - “The DBA used to be a very working-class community pub now in its current existence it’s a venue catering queer and trans community”, he explains.

Trackie had also visited the still very traditional Peveril of the Peak the evening before and loved the vibe and the look. “That sort of aesthetic is dying out,” he suggests. As he’d described DBA as “amazing”, I sense his utopia would be a combination of both.

He explained that some of these issues will be part of a panel discussion in the UTOPIA pub, and asked me to join the panel alongside Rebecca Swarray (aka Mix-Stress) and others. We’ll discuss Manchester’s changing spaces, gentrification, looking back at how we’ve got where we are (without harking back too much), and, most importantly, what we can do going forward.

Trackie talks about visits to local Bowling Men’s Clubs in Glasgow (so called for the presence of either indoor or outdoor bowls). There’d be cheap drink, various acts, camaraderie and often a DJ; “All the family parties, 40ths, weddings or whatever were in these sort of venues, pre-internet, pre-smart phones. There was a sense of community, a sense of heart, a sense of love.”

There are general and conspicuous and valid anxieties about what we’re losing in our shared and civic life; feelings that we’re living a fragmenting rather than communal existence. And one sign of this is the lack of what the theorists call ‘third spaces’. You’ve got your home, and then you’ve got work or college or whatever, but a shared third space is somewhere not work, it’s not home, it’s an escape from that. Previous generations had an ale house on every corner, perhaps a sports club, a church hall, trade union function rooms. Now, since the demise of youth clubs, our young people don’t even get into the habit of seeking out a third space.

Despite not being a pub person, I acknowledge how for so many people they’re a haven, if not a home. Pub closures - which, by the way, became a trend far before Labour came to power – are so often a blow to the neighbourhoods they serve. But what’s to be done?

Trackie and I begin accidentally pre-empting some of what might be talked about on the panel, including mythologising our past. Trackie tells me; “Everyone looks back at their youth and, whether it was shit or not, still says everything was better in my day. I mean, I’m interested in that. Why does everyone look back with those, those simpler times? It feels like simpler times, but was it? Was it actually simpler? In my work it’s not wanting to go back, but it’s maybe wanting to explain, understand the trends, the things that we all did, and opening up a conversation, especially for millennials.”

To unpick things? “Yes, you’ve got to be in touch with yourself, otherwise you get to fucking fifty or whatever, and you don’t know who you are”.

Our thoughts drift back to the impact, potential and highlights of life after dark. I start telling Trackie about a particularly mad night I had once at the legendary Barrowlands ballroom up in Glasgow. “I love that space, love it there,” he exclaims. “I mean, you go to places like the Barrowlands and the Barras market, and that’s working class roots, that’s history, such rich history.”

Trackie on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/trackiemcleod/

Trackie’s UTOPIA in Manchester info https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/trackie-mcleod-utopia/

Further reading -

Teenage Perverts at the Hacienda