Skip to main content

Place is the Space - David Harding, Claudia Zeiske and Jean Cameron on transforming Scotland's artistic landscape in Glenrothes, Huntly and Paisley from the Ground Up

“I think interesting places that have really strong art schools tend to have really good music scenes,” said artist/musician Ross Sinclair recently in an interview about Artists who make music Musicians who make art. The exhibition, which he curated recently at Queens Park Railway Club in Glasgow, featured 100 of his contemporaries to illustrate the symbiosis between the sonic and visual worlds.
This probably wasn’t quite what David Harding had in mind when he set up the Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art in 1985, but as an alumnus of the course, Sinclair’s observation is one of the world-changing consequences of an initiative which recognised a sense of place as being vital to the work that came out of it.

The surge of DIY energy that came out of Harding’s course has been well-documented by way of assorted Turner Prize winners from GSA. The foundation stones for a more holistic, social-based attitude towards art being about something more than what you hang on a wall were set down almost two decades earlier, when Harding became Town Artist in Glenrothes. While the central Fife new town went on to become a beacon of community art throughout Harding’s tenure from 1968 to 1978, earlier initiatives, such as Craigmillar Festival Society, which existed in south Edinburgh between 1962 and 2002, similarly transformed the social landscape occupied by a population previously shunted out of sight and starved of civic and artistic facilities.

Since then, property developers and local authorities have conspired to rip the hearts out of urban centres by using so-called creative hubs or – even worse – ‘cultural quarters’ - as a short-cut to gentrification. The trickle-down effect of the Glenrothes and Craigmillar initiatives, however, has seen an increasing awareness of community-led projects that put their immediate environment at their heart. Since 1995, a group of residents in the Aberdeenshire town of Huntly formed Deveron Arts (now Deveron Projects) to use the town itself as a venue. Paisley, meanwhile, may have lost out in its bid to become UK City of Culture 2021, but looks set to continue with a rejuvinated sense of self-determination and civic pride at a grassroots level.

“People have different expectations of Paisley now, and Paisley has different expectations of itself,” says Jean Cameron, outgoing project director for Paisley 2021.”

Something similar is true of Deveron Projects.

“It’s put the town on the map,” says Claudia Zeiske, one of its co-founders, “and by linking the local to the global, it allows people to look at Huntly with fresh eyes, and with a new sense of identity and community.”    

Harding praises both initiatives, recognising their very different forms of transformative power, just as Glasgow’s tenure as European Capital of Culture in 1990 opened the city up in a way that the closure of the Arches marked the end of such enlightened civic thinking. This is a long way from Harding’s time in Glenrothes, when, care of Glenrothes Development Corporation, he sat on the local planning committee, working with architects and builders to create a series of sculptural interventions, including his famed hippopotamus series.

“A lot of people in Glenrothese felt an ownership of the work,” he says today. “That’s why what’s happened in Huntly is so special. To come up with the idea of the town as the venue is so holistic.”
While predatory developers hover over areas such as Leith intent on monetising grassroots culture, in terms of progressive thinking regarding the arts as part of everyday activity, the ongoing presence of Deveron Projects, the legacy of Paisley 2021 and Harding’s time in Glenrothes suggests that the wheel appears to have come full circle.

This is evident from works such as Forest Pitch, Craig Coulthard’s 2012 project which hosted a day of football games on land in the Borders where trees planted marking the lines of a football pitch are still growing. It was significant too that the 2015 Turner Prize, hosted in Glasgow, was won by Assemble, the young arts and design collective who regenerated a group of run-down houses in Liverpool’s Toxteth district.

All of this goes back further than Harding’s work, to environmentally inclined German iconoclast Joseph Beuys’ assorted Scottish interventions. These in part inspired 7,000 Oaks, in which Beuys planted seeds for 7,000 oak trees in Kassel, Germany. Coming full circle, Deveron Arts responded by commissioning artist Caroline Wendling to create a new piece of land art.

Harding’s own work was discussed at a recent conference at North Edinburgh Arts, and looks set to feature at events in this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival.

As artists help reclaim the landscape of public art, perhaps town planners, culture committees and artists themselves should pay heed to Harding’s final words in Glenrothes Town Artist, a  booklet published in the 1970s to highlight and document his post.

“I can only see growing opportunities for artists willing to lose a little of their precious regard for the object,” he wrote, “and to see creative activity itself as the main objective.”


The List, April 2018


ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL