In 1985 I joined the Society of Scottish Artists…
The SSA have a large annual exhibition in the galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy on Princes Street in Edinburgh. As an environmental artist, it was important to me that I not simply exhibit in an art gallery but in some way respond to the social and physical context. So for my part of the 1985 show I asked for two side alcoves of the sculpture court in which to make an environmental artwork. The work was influenced by all the thinking I had done for the Dundee West Port Toilets Artwork on the subject of being new (feminist) man. The artwork consisted of two ‘rooms’ – a womens room and a mens room.
womens room : A large dining table is spread with white table cloths and laid with plates of harvest fruit and nuts. A television monitor with images of countryside rushing past, is draped with grey pink organza. Beneath the table are a carpet and red velvet curtains, where a large rope coiled into a ball.
mens room : A large dining table spread with white table cloths and laid with plates of animal bones, driftwood and four wooden cross forms. A television monitor with images of countryside rushing past is draped with black organza. Beneath the table are a carpet and blue velvet curtains, into which a large wooden darning needle points to gravel and bones and dust.
But how does this piece relate to the Royal Scottish Academy, the building and the institution – the physical and the social context?
Everything about the building is both magnificent and abhorrent to me. The building with its fine Doric columns is like an ancient Greek temple, a holy place where nature in human form was worshipped. But then sitting on its roof like a great plum pudding, compressing the columns into a prison-like configuration as if finally confirming that man-god overcame the sheer Otherness of living things – is the statue of Queen Victoria.
But if I think as I do, that artists should be empowered to stay away from that place and get out into the communities where they belong, what was I doing there and why did I become so engaged with the Royal Scottish Academy building? Because the work ‘womens room mens room’ is a feminist work that calls for womens fundamental relatedness with alterity to be restored as the paradigm of human existence. The rope both coils its way to enter the female like a sperm and in the same gesture like an unraveling ball of wool it threads its way across the sculpture court to point a darning needle accusingly towards the moribund donor of that sperm (it is a moot point as to whether a man or a woman threaded the darning needle). And if the building had known that the intention of the work was to signal the end of gender stereotyping, it might have finally collapsed under the weight of that ridiculous statue on the roof.
… and when in 1986 I was invited to take part in the Glasgow Group Exhibition at the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street, I produced an artwork with similar intent to womens room mens room….
This work, called ‘the last supper’ consists of an arrangement of four tables each with three chairs and twelve place settings with plastic fruit. At the ends of the tables, four monitors show footage taken in the country roads of East Lothian while strapped to the back of the local farmer’s pick-up truck.
This work is also an anti-imperialist interrogation, but this time of western religions’ distancing from the sheer awkwardness of other things. What it implies is that you get what you pray for, a meaning which bounces off the frames of all the pictures in the room.
At the heart of the work, one of the chairs has been pulled aside, and on it a wreath is placed. There is a note on the wreath which simply states,
‘via negativa’
In 1986, a new ‘Garden of Contemplation’ was being planned for Provand’s Lordship. Situated next to Glasgow Cathedral, this is the oldest house in Glasgow. There was a competition for the design of the garden and this was my entry…
The garden was to be a quiet place where people could come to escape the business of the city and be free to contemplate. I proposed to make an environment that was rich in meaning – mysterious but inspirational.
As can be seen from the water colour esquisse the ground was to be laid out in the form of a large cross made of slate and granite setts. Various other sculptural symbols are placed on the cross: A real but long dead ivory elephant tusk pulls the surface of the cross upwards to form a pyramid, and on the exposed soil (granite) we see that the word ‘PIANO’ has been inlaid in bronze. On the opposite arm of the cross there is also a pyramid that seems to have been forced apart by many coloured (mosaic) plants that spill out over the word ‘MUSIC’.
On the head section of the cross there are a set of carved sandstone steps, on the top of which a bronze ark with a lamb on board is precariously balanced. If the lamb had been the other way around, looking into the body of the Kirk as it were, then we may have thought it a metaphor for Christ and admired its beauty. But as it is, the lamb has turned its back on the garden and is looking over the wall to the outside, seemingly with the same rebellious spirit as the once mighty owner of the tusk.
Now looking towards the longer leg of the cross we can see a strange arrangement. Two mirror-polished stainless steel sheets are being held aloft in the beaks of four highly coloured bronze birds. On the ground, a group of large polished bronze fish circulate in the surface of the slate. If one were to place oneself in the circle of fish and move around, the effect would be as if in a hall of mirrors, but repeated in all directions, quite haphazardly… to infinity… to eternity.
And at the centre of the cross there is a one metre cube of polished black granite. A table cloth of carved white marble is ‘spread’ across the top surface – caught by some distant wind. Covered by the surface of the marble, so to speak, four plates seem to be laid out on the table precisely in line with the cross.
On the leg of the cross a steel ladder-back chair is placed, and on it is lying a Holy Bible, exquisitely carved from white marble. The chair is surrounded by four park benches, almost as if waiting to be interrogated.
These four park benches sit at the ends of two small paths, one of white and one of black cement; and these lead back to a low black and white bridge where the entrance gates to the garden are in the form of a Yin and Yang. The ladder back chair directly faces the Yang Yin gate.
I was commissioned by the Milton Unemployed Workers Centre in Glasgow to make this painting on wooden panels for their front wall….
The Railway Engineering works at Springburn had stopped building engines by the 1980’s and many people (mostly men) in nearby Milton had been been made unemployed. I wanted to create a work that reflected on that grim reality, but in a positive way. The image shows a man sitting in the ruins of the railway works, he is wearing blue dungarees, but he is as white as the dove that flies, released from his hand. The woman with hammer and binoculars seems to be implying that she knows the means to reconstruct that which has been destroyed.
The underlying theme is both linguistic and environmental. By releasing the object to its freedom, the subject of the sentence is, with that one gesture made whole. A symbolic thing in an environment of symbols, no longer an historical object in an infinite line of objects.
I was commissioned by the Scottish Development Agency and Renfrew District Council to design a mural that would be suitable for painting by the Council’s painters on this gable end wall in Underwood Road in Paisley…
I wanted to create a feeling of the once glorious tenement building that occupied the site, the only trace of which nowadays is the profile of its gable, stuck forever as part of the building next door. I wanted there to be a ghostly echo of its architecture resonating in the space it once occupied.
Because the mural had to be painted by the Council’s painters I had to keep the design practicable, perhaps overly so. So in the above image I’ve added a bit of modelling to emphasize the architectural form and describe what I was imagining in 1987
In 1987 I entered a competition for a mural to be painted in a 5m tall arched alcove on a gable end in Leith…
Although Leith is the port area of Edinburgh, Leithers are independent minded people, and people of many different cultural backgrounds live there. (I know because my dad was Polish and I am proud to call myself a Leither.)
I tried to reflect the multi-cultural character of Leith in the proposal, by making an image that has many possible and equally valid meanings. Unlike a book with its narrative and signs, this mural is more like a library of symbols, a cultural crossing place centred on the strange tree in the middle of the image. And if you’ve got this far dear reader, you’ll know me well enough to enjoy reading this painting as you will.