cooper

It’s a couple of days after the fire at the Glasgow School of Art when I first meet Thomas Joshua Cooper.  Down on Sauchiehall Street people stop and look up Garnet Street, searching for the Mac’s familiar shape and seeing instead derelict window frames and the blackening imprints of flames on the brickwork.  Cooper’s studio on Renfrew Street is a block along from the Mac, and to get there I have to skirt a cordon still pungent with the scent of smoking wood.  On the doorstep, Thomas’s wife Kate Mooney is waiting with a mop and a bucket.  She’s been cleaning off clots of soot and the after-effects of pissed spectators…