By 1977 we had moved into one of the few housing areas that were built by the Development Corporation and which I had helped design…
In order to get back into my art, I decided that the best course of action would be to make an oil painting. My mother had often told the story of how my grandparents had been married in St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh, and I imagined making a painting of its vast interior spaces. So I went to the cathedral, but as soon as I started taking reconnaissance photographs one of the clergy appeared, insisting that the church owned the rights to all photography of the interior, and that I wasn’t allowed to take photographs… not even if my grandparents had been married there. Silly me!
But I’d driven all the way from Stonehouse to get some snaps, and so not to go home empty handed, I walked to another Episcopal church nearby – the church of St.John the Evangelist, where nobody batted an eyelid when I started taking photographs…
As I looked up at the magnificent ceiling and let my imagination play in the voids among the columns of the church, I became aware of a certain hidden symbolism. It seemed to me that all these negative spaces hinted at the form of giant, but absent phalli.
Now, at a distance of years I would connote that although the very fabric of the stonework and the plaster ceilings demonstrates the soaring ascendancy of Christianity’s via positiva, the phallic voids they contain surely means that the gender of Christianity’s god cannot be specified.
At that time, I could not have put these thoughts into words; instead, I toiled for one year to make this painting called ‘The Instruments and Attendants of Sacrifice’. It shows in organic terms the female – uterine, fallopian, elephantine, Daliesque creatures holding open a space for an absent and diminishing phallus…
We were keen gardeners, and in our little garden we grew our own produce…
The town of Stonehouse is situated close to the Clyde Valley, where there are many plant nurseries, and of course many glass houses. One of these had fallen into disrepair, and the nurseryman was happy to give me some of its wooden transoms and panes of glass, to build my own small greenhouse.
The usual way of constructing industrial glass houses was to build the timber framework first before glazing; but I wanted to be creative with the materials and use their inherent structural characteristics to the full. It struck me that if I turned the whole system inside out, I could indeed make a small but elegant building. The greenhouse in the photograph was held together by nothing more than tensioned stainless steel wires, running diagonally across the glass walls. The effect was pleasantly airy and light – almost ethereal, and as far as I know it stands there to this day.
Then, in 1979 I formed a small environmental art company called…
I had kept in touch with Nigel, my architect friend from art college days, and we had the idea of working on a free lance art and design basis with landscape architects in the Glasgow region. Our staple product would be concrete animals designed for kids to play on, and so I set about making a few plaster prototypes…
In the post-war years, the City of Glasgow was suffering from a chronic housing shortage…
…with people living in overcrowded tenements and slum conditions. The response of Glasgow Corporation was to compulsorily purchase these tenements and move the residents to vast outlying housing estates, and to new towns like East Kilbride. However, the people of Dennistoun in Glasgow’s East End have a strong sense of community and refused to be moved. In the 1970’s they persuaded the Corporation to officially acknowledge the Reidvale Housing Association (the UK’s first resident led housing association) – which gave the people access to government funding for the refurbishment of Dennistoun.
After the abandonment of the Stonehouse New Town project, a number of my former architect colleagues had moved to work for the Scottish Development Agency on their ‘GEAR’ – Glasgow East Area Renewal – project, and in 1980 I was commissioned by them to work with the committee of the Reidvale Housing Association, to produce a sculpture that would reflect the sense that people had of being a ‘community standing at the crossroads – at a moment of regeneration’…
“A community standing at the crossroads – at a moment of regeneration”…
The sculpture is made of glass reinforced plastic (GRP), made to look like bronze by the inclusion of bronze powder in the gel (top) coat – in a process known as ‘cold cast resin bronze’ which I had learned under the tutelage of Chalky Smart at Dundee Art College. I’m going to outline the process here because it was the first time I’d made such a complicated work, and also in order to give the process due respect. I had asked Bill Paris of Studio Paris in Larkhall to take some photographs of the sculpture in its clay state, and in this one he had asked me to pose with the work…
…of course I regret having done so because I look like such a plonker, but it’s the only one I have left Bill, and anyway it helps me to describe the process. But I see now that there is something else in this photo that is significant and which I couldn’t have realized at the time; it is the small wire triangle of the modelling tool, the symbolic value of which I hope will become clear as my story unfolds.
I had welded up a solid metal structure on which to build the clay model, and once this was complete Rosi and I set about taking the plaster of paris moulds from the clay figures. Pretty quickly we ran into problems though; not because of the complexity and sheer number of the mould sections, but because of the basic error that in my effort to make sure that the moulds were strong enough, I had put too much plaster in the water, which resulted in the sections overheating and warping as the plaster set. However, the people at British Gypsum were helpful and soon spotted the problem. After that it was just a question of removing the moulds from the clay, reassembling them all empty and setting them aside to dry thoroughly.
After I had bought in all the glass fibre, polyester resin and bronze powder supplies to complete the job, I set about applying beeswax and release agent to the interiors of the dry plaster sections. Then I started laying up the five layers of resin soaked glass fibre – but that’s when the trouble really started. For as polyester resin is curing, it gives off styrene gas which causes irritation of the skin, eyes, and the upper respiratory tract.
Of course I was all kitted out for working in such conditions with face mask and respirator – but at that time I was working in the Old Town Mill at Strathaven in Lanarkshire. This is an ancient building with very thick stone walls, thick enough to insulate our neighbours, a small insurance brokers, from any irritating smells coming from the curing resin. Wrong.
The first thing I knew about it was when an irate insurance broker holding a handkerchief over his mouth appeared at the front door. None of his colleagues could breathe and they were all standing outside on the pavement. I ran to the front door and looked out but saw nobody, and immediately realized that some day I’d have to exaggerate this story for effect… OK but the guy was right to be incandescent with rage (no exaggeration), because under short order I put things right by installing a polythene work-tent equipped with extractor fans direct to the outside.
writing
I am writing these words in April 2020 – outside my door the world is changing because of the coronavirus pandemic, and these things which I have thought about for many years now seem quite distant. Although the brief which I was given by the Scottish Development Agency – to make an artwork about “A community standing at the crossroads, at a moment of regeneration” – was in 1980, it seems strangely apposite now.
In the 1970’s I was becoming increasingly sympathetic to the Land Art and Feminist Art movements, and I felt deeply that I needed to make works in and about the Earth – as with the artwork ‘Messerschmidt cut’, which I described earlier. But I had also by that time become what I understood to be a ‘public artist’ – which is a contentious term, but which I understood to mean simply that I listened to what other people had to say before making a work of art about their situation.
I had met with the management committee of the Reidvale Housing Association a few times and we had discussed the way that the people of Dennistoun had stood up against the Glasgow Corporation’s plans to move them to other areas. It was from between the lines of these discussions that the sculpture began to take shape. And the fact that a number of women in the Dennistoun community were standing up to the patriarchal monolith that was the Glasgow Corporation’s housing plan is reflected in the gender and posture of the figures. They are human figures that symbolize that struggle – their symbolism written in a language that would have been accessible for every person there.
But I was writing also about myself, and it was important to me to describe the ascendancy of feminism – so the young female figure is not only a symbol of women in Dennistoun. She is not merely thrusting aside and toppling a local patriarch – a remnant of Victorian Glasgow. The older female figure is not only looking around optimistically to the future of Dennistoun, she is looking in wonder at the newly discovered power she has claimed for women. Well, forty years on and the glass ceiling still exists in monolithic structures…
Nevertheless the sculpture, which still stands in the garden of Reidvale Housing Association in Dennistoun, is special for me because it marks the first time I was able to define my own philosophy of meaning and environment in the language of others. And with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, if I were to read these four figures as a written sentence I would understand it in this way, that the male subject who in the past had dominated the narrative and imposed a certain linearity upon its telling, has now been overpowered by the former objects of his purview. These female figures symbolize for me my lifelong quest to comprehend how things – not objects – might actually exist in equanimity – which on the basis of quantum entanglement I now believe to be as a condition of singular mutual under-standing. That is what the older female figure is searching for in her gaze.
Proposed sculptural artwork for Whitevale Street, Dennistoun, Glasgow…
writing…
In Whitevale Street, Dennistoun there was a public swimming pool and wash house, which by the early 1980’s was due for closure. In this proposal for a large sculpture, I imagined the once popular Whitevale Baths on the day of their closure, and three Adonis figures, gods perhaps, swimming away from the baths and across the landscape.
The figures would have been each about 6m in length, made from ferro-cement, a process in which the form is constructed in layers of wire mesh which is then impregnated with cement mortar. Then the whole work was to have been covered in a mosaic of ceramic tile pieces.
I wanted to make a work of ‘social land art’ using the entire situation as the medium, like painting a multi-dimensional painting in time and space. But environmental art cannot exist in a vacuum, and of course it was for children to play on, but I hoped it would also be a work in which the adults of Dennistoun might find a certain frisson of irony. (Called Glasgow humour!)
I remember showing this work to one of the architects in the Glasgow East End Renewal project. But we both knew it couldn’t work because a recession had just hit the economy, and they couldn’t afford art any more. But as I look back at the swimmers with 2020 hindsight, I hear echoes of myself struggling to say that we are part of many universes, and we can comprehend things if we try to speak in a way that does not distance us from how we actually are. I refer to the things which we actually are, which constitute us as we constitute them AS the singularity of under-standing.