Blackness Public Art Programme, Dundee.
In 1983 I was approached by Elizabeth Kemp, who was the arts officer for Dundee City Council…
A feasibility study had been commissioned by the Scottish Development Agency, the Scottish Arts Council and Dundee City Council into the possibility for a number of public artworks to be made for the Blackness area; as a result I was asked to make proposals for works in West Henderson’s Wynd, Miln Street and Brown Street. This part of Blackness is an industrial area with both older jute mill buildings and more modern factory units. Also located here are the Dundee City Council dog kennels and the Dundee Indoor Bowling rink.
All things resonate with each other, that is the meaning of a world. But this is not merely a philosophical statement, this is reality. Each thing IS the very physicality of the things around it, as the quasi-phenomenality of quantum entanglement implies. In other words, moment by moment we create and re-create our own spacetime as an ever-changing world of things.
And by the time you get off the bus at the West Port in Dundee and walk down Brown Street, towards the Milne Street Industrial Complex, you would already have been created by and re-created an infinite infinity of worlds – simply by being alive. As you walk along, these infinite worlds continue to be re-created by you and the other things of Brown Street. Together, you have created the few moments it has taken for you to walk to Milne Street.
And in Milne Street, like in any other world, life has been going on for ages – you can see it in the gravel worn to dust, you can touch it in the pitting of the sandstone walls. Every living thing has its own understanding of Milne Street. From the cat that walks along a wall at midnight, to the milkman whose cart once rattled down the cobble stones, to the grass that will one day force its way through an unkempt pavement. We all by our own understanding hold open the space of the world with each other. No matter what we think we see around us, there is no absolute space and time. The only absolute is Singleness.
In 1984, long before I understood these things, I stepped off the bus, walked down Brown Street and into the many worlds of Milne Street and West Henderson’s Wynd. If a world is a deep song always already singing, then I needed to listen to that song, and by doing so be absorbed by it. For only by doing so would I be able to make proposals for public artworks in these streets. Works that would resonate with the meaning of the song. There were many industries and people there, and I made appointments to speak with them and listen to them all. It was through these meetings that art would develop. Or so I thought.
I remember standing one morning at the corner of Blinshall Street and Milne Street. By this time I’d already had a meeting with the committee members of the Dundee Indoor Bowling Rink, and we had identified a possible site for a mosaic mural on the front of their building on Milne Street. It was a beautiful morning, people were going to and fro, and the dogs in the City Council kennels on Brown Street were barking. I was beginning to enjoy being here, and I had already made an appointment to meet the owner of a small printers’ business in Milne Street Industrial Complex. But my first task was to make observational sketches to get a more general sense of the place…
Milne Street Industrial Complex proposals and drawings.
Milne Street Industrial Complex is an open courtyard formed on its southern flank by small industrial units and on the northern side by industrial units and also the City Council kennels. At least that’s what it looks like in reality. What it actually is, is an infinite infinity of worldly things, each the meaning of the others – their actual time and space. The printer not only prints images and words on paper, he understands these words, and the paper, and the printing press, and the factory, and Milne Street, and in that understanding creates them and them him, moment upon moment. And if I was undertaking this project nowadays – with the benefit of 35 years of hindsight, I would probably try to deconstruct the printing process to disclose these connections. But at that time I was not so sure of my ground, and the printer and I were just discussing broadly the processes of his operation that might influence any possible artworks for the exterior walls of the Complex on Milne Street. These walls were of recent concrete block construction, suitable I thought, for some kind of mural? But as we were talking, something happened which would have a profound bearing on all my work in Blackness.
As I mentioned previously, I was aware of the constant barking of the dogs in the City Council kennels, and I asked the printer if it didn’t annoy him. ‘You get used to it’, he replied. And just with that the barking stopped – absolute silence – ‘that’s a dog being put down’, he told me. But as we wound up our conversation, I knew that something had happened, a sudden absence, an abrupt change to the deep song of things in Milne Street. Then one dog barked, then two, and very gradually the song of the pack returned. Somehow to me the listener, they sang of life, death and rebirth.
Over the next few weeks, I started to make some sketches, nothing definite – in fact just the reverse. It was as if I was trying to describe some world that lay among the many worlds of Milne Street – not quite seen, not quite unseen. For the gable wall of the industrial units a mural – not trees but rather the shadows cast from non-existent trees, and in front of them a planter, shaped (quite unconsciously) like a primitive animal form exploding…
The moment when the dog was destroyed had a profound effect on my thinking about an artwork for the City Council kennels. After speaking with staff there (who verified that dogs were occasionally destroyed) I made a drawing for a large mosaic ‘ghost dog’ to be sited on the gable wall of the kennels (on the other side of the entrance from the shadows of trees mural.) There was an open stair to the upper food storage level of the kennels, which seemed to me almost like a stairway to dog heaven. So I proposed that a new circular planter be made around the base of the stair – a mandala, which I took to be a symbol of wholeness and life. I also designed new outdoor runs for the dogs…
In addition to the above, I made drawings for certain changes to be made to the back wall of the courtyard. The issue was that the concrete block wall simply sliced through the elevation of an elegant building in Blinshall Street. My solution to this – one which I hoped would be in keeping with the ethereal theme of the works – was to plan for a brickwork skin for the concrete wall. The idea was that the design of brickwork would, so to speak ‘complete’ the missing features of the building behind, when viewed from the entrance gates of the complex…
Life, death an rebirth would be the underlying theme of all my artworks in Dundee, running through the narratives of works at Milne Street Industrial Complex, the Dundee Indoor Bowling Rink and the West Port Public Toilets. It was a deep song of existence that the dogs were singing, and because I was listening, I was physically changed by it. Their song became my song as it was translated into visual language.
The ancient Egyptian god of the dead was Anubis – a man with the head of a canine. Anubis was the god of embalming and the dead. (Since jackals were often seen in cemeteries, the ancient Egyptians believed that Anubis watched over the dead.) There was an Egyptian-esque quality to the drawings I made for murals to be incised into the entire length of the Milne Street elevation of the Complex. These works were never carried through (because the funding bodies asked the head of the painting department of a prestigious Scottish Art School to criticize the work, which he dissed without reference to myself and what I had been trying to achieve, in terms of simply speaking with those around in order to create.) But the drawings give an idea of the Egyptian-esque quality of the proposals. I am not sure whether an Anubis figure actually featured in these drawings, but I include it to suggest that the Anubian role had reversed as I now sang with and for the dead dogs.
And I’m still singing with these dogs of Old Dundee. Here’s a video I made in 2019 that links the dogs to my more recent thinking about understanding space and time. Mark Bonnar narrates.
Milne Street Industrial Complex. Artworks in progress or completed.
The Shadows of Trees mural on the gable of the Complex was first sandblasted to a depth of 5mm. To do this, I scaled up the drawings and transferred them to hardboard sheeting. This was cut to form a template mask that was attached to the wall. The sandblasting was then carried out and the template used to mask the area for painting…
Dundee City Council Kennels gable wall.
Ghost Dog mosaic. 1984.
Dundee City Council Kennels gable wall.
Ghost Dog mosaic. 1984.
Dundee City Council Kennels.
Outdoor runs for dogs. 1984.
note.
The old Kennels did not have outdoor runs for the dogs, a situation which both kennels staff and myself wanted to change. So I designed these and they were built by the City Council.
Dundee City Council Kennels.
Mandala planter and stairs.
Miln Street Industrial Complex, view to rear wall.
Brick artwork. 1984
Note.
Although the idea here was to suggest the hidden section of the building behind, it was also to try and continue the lines of the road surface from this side into the mural, thus creating a space between here and there, inaccessible except under certain circumstances.
Milne Street pavment patterns (1984)
During the time I was working on ideas for Miln Street Industrial Complex, The City Council Engineer’s department (with whom I’d been working closely) started to replace the pavements in Miln Street. When they had reached the stage of re-tarring the surface, I saw that there would be an opportunity for me to join the process. My idea was to make masking templates out of hardboard which I could use to create simple patterns from the white chippings that were being rollered into the hot asphalt. This experiment was approved by the engineers and the results are shown below.
DUNDEE INDOOR BOWLING RINK
Mosaic Mural 1984.
Dundee Indoor Bowling Rink is situated at the corner of Miln Street and West Henderson’s Wynd. It is a capacious single storey building which in 1984 was surrounded by a rough unmade area for parking. I’m not sure (at a distance of 35 years) whether I made the initial contact with the committee of the Dundee Indoor Bowling Club, or whether the possibility of an artwork on the main wall in Miln Street had been established as part of the feasibility study. At any rate, I made this proposal for a mosaic mural after consulting with the committee, and playing bowls with them. What came out of these meetings was the importance of the psychological side of the game. My idea was to make an abstraction which described the game of bowls as an extension of mind and body – an expression of the innate feel or touch required in bowling.
As the photograph shows, the artwork consisted of two shots played, as it were from opposite ends of the rink. Mosaic bowls form the fulcrums for the shots – the moment around which the bowler extends their mind towards the jack. On one side of the fulcrum the body of a bowler is suggested, still dynamically connected to the earth in colour and form, and as they project their thoughts, through the bowl, feeling for the jack, that movement of mind is suggested in a long tenous rainbow of coloured mosaic.
But there is also an additional, perhaps more speculative interpretation of the artwork. By the time I was working on the designs for the Bowlers Mosaic, I had already produced my ideas in response to the situation of the dogs at the other end of Miln Street, and the underlying theme of life, death and rebirth was still resonant in me. So this bowl, this fulcrum around which the bowler extends their mind can also be seen as a moment of absolute commitment – the moment of death around which life and the possibility of rebirth play.
So indeed, there is a certain Egyptian-esque quality to the mural on the Dundee Indoor Bowling Rink. Their implied connectivity to the Kennels means that the dynamics of these thirty-five metre long mosaics are reversible. It is also possible to see them as large skeletal arms stretching back through death with creaking finger pointed, or with stylus held ready…
DUNDEE INDOOR BOWLING RINK
‘Bowlers’ mosiac 1984
note.
The size of the artwork was about 30M x 3M. It consisted of 18mm marine plywood sections with 25mm square coloured glass tesserae applied (many thousands). The glasswork sparkled in the morning sunshine.
PYRAMID AND CANOPIES ARTWORK
West Port Public Toilets, Dundee 1985
In 1985 I was asked to make proposals for artworks in the area of Dundee where the Hawkhill and Blackness roads converge – known as the West Port. Until recently, I had been working on the Milne Street artworks, with their associations to dogs, death and ancient Egypt. Under ground in the middle of the West Port there was a mens’ public toilet. This old photograph (© Dundee City Archive) which was taken in the 1960’s, shows the old superstructure of the toilets surrounded by iron railings…
By the 1980’s the West Port had changed considerably, with new roads approaching the town centre. It was into this environment that I came with ideas to upgrade the subterranean toilets and replace the aged Victorian superstructure with an artwork. The City Engineers Department undertook all the design and renovation works to the toilets, while I designed the various elements of the new superstructure. These elements will be fully described later, but basically they comprised a pyramid to replace the ancient glass roof (shown in the photograph below) as well as make new steel canopies for the stairwells to the toilets below. I made the pyramid, and designed the canopies which were then manufactured by local craftspeople. This photograph was taken after the canopy steelwork was installed and before the pyramid installation…
But the processes of renovation and building were taking some time to achieve, and people were beginning to wonder what was going on in the West Port. So I was asked to make a water colour painting that local newspapers could print to give people an impression of what the finished artwork would look like.
While the steelwork was being made by local craftspeople, I had been designing and making the pyramid at my home in Tranent, East Lothian. The pyramid is constructed from glass reinforced plastic (more commonly known as GRP or glassfibre) and was made from many differently shaped sections as can be seen in the photograph. This means of construction involves making a mould for every type of section, each one having to be precisely engineered from plywood to the correct angles, so that the resulting GRP sections could be bolted accurately together to form the pyramid. The front surfaces of the moulds were made of plate glass, which imparted a very smooth surface to the GRP. For each section, I had to mix two slightly different colours of plastic before hand painting and mixing them on the glass surface to emulate marble. Once this top coat was set, I proceeded to back it up with many layers of glass fibre to form each box-like section. When all the sections were finished, I built the pyramid for the first time in my back garden, and I’m glad to say that the great care I had taken to get the angles right, paid off, as the topmost sections were only minutely askew. I then transported all the sections to the site, and built the West Port Pyramid for real.
As part of the artwork, I had proposed that sandstone walls be constructed around the head of the stairwells. The stone was cut and the walls built through the City Council Engineers Department, and these are shown under construction below…
West Port Public Toilets Artwork 1986
The concept
A profound artistic theme such as that of life, death and rebirth, which was created for me by the dogs just over the road in Milne Street Kennels, does not simply go away. Rather, having come to form the very constitution of the artist, it persists as an underlying pressure, always deeply present, always looking for its next means of expression.
Since Victorian times there had been a public toilet at the West Port in Dundee but this had always been for men only, and when I started to think about an artwork for this area, I always seemed to return to that same gender anomaly. So I decided that I had no option but to make a proposal for new public toilets for women as well as men.
However, this could not simply be a proposal for the change of use of a public toilet. I had been commissioned to make proposals for a public artwork, and so I needed to grasp the meanings of the underlying language – those cultural pressures which had caused my revulsion at the thought of a men only public toilet, which I would have walked past fifteen years earlier without giving a second thought to. What archetypal shift had caused this change, and how could I reflect it in an artwork?
If by the term ‘archetype’ we mean something like any model of the collective unconscious which gives a species its best chance of survival, then by the 1980’s the archetype of ‘patriarch’ that had been so successful in the Victorian era was no longer viable. By the mid twentieth century there had been two world wars and the planet seemed to be on the brink of nuclear holocaust and environmental catastrophe. But since the second world war a less macho, and perhaps more matriarchal archetype had begun to prevail, one which through necessity, shows less will to dominate and more willingness to be related with its environment. By the 1980’s many various expressions of this archetype had risen to consciousness, and of particular interest to me were feminism and the green movement, and the subsequent rise of a new archetype of feminist man.
The underlying theme of life, death and rebirth that had been given to me months before by the dogs had found its next means of expression at the West Port Toilets. I wanted the artwork to be about the demise of a patriarchal mind set, and about the birth of new feminist man. And again I found myself thinking about the art of ancient Egypt, and in particular its great pyramids, symbols par excellence of transition from life, through death to rebirth…
For me, the pyramid was also a symbol for the structure of a patriarchal archetype – classically architectonic, hard edged with highly polished marbling, infinite and immortal. But now, having risen from the depths of a subterranean men only toilet in Dundee, it floats in the sun and on each face is inlaid a symbol – a reflection from the direction in which it faces. From the city churches reflects a golden cross. From the river Tay reflects a fish. From the University to the west there reflects a blue Roman letter W, and from the Angus countryside reflects a green tree. These symbols work to ameliorate the patriarchal structure, to one which is more willing to look around with humility into the context and the meaning of its existence…
I have always admired the generous sensuality of French civic design, not least the entrancing entrances of the Paris Metro Stations. But whereas the architecture of each entrance seems to welcome the traveller with surprise and delight, my designs for the stairwell canopies of the West Port Public Toilets in Dundee did not… could not have that confidence of form. Rather, these canopies, these urban trees, are a quiet, tentative opening to the possibility of feminist man. An uncertain spreading to reveal the birth of an archetype.
There are two ancient cast iron columns which rise from the depths of the toilets, one at either end of the pyramid – these could have been for gas lighting, but had been bereft of that function for many years. For the tops of these columns I made two globes – one moon and one sun, and I hoped at that time that they would illuminate the scene with a kind of gender equanimity. A classical pyramid rising from the gloomy depths of subterranean patriarchy, looking round and blinking in the light, with trees spreading to reveal its birth.
And finally, of course, I had carved two words into the stonework of the canopies ..
WOMEN MEN
