By 1994, Rosi and I had moved to Portsoy, a small fishing village on the coast of Banffshire in the north east of Scotland…
Rosi was at that time a newly qualified social worker, and she had started to work for Moray Council. I had left my position as a lecturer in the Environmental Art Department of Glasgow School of Art, in order to develop my own philosophy of environment.
One evening I joined some friends for a game of badminton, and as I was playing began to feel strange sensations in my chest. Of course I knew what was happening, and so did Dr Mitchel, and six months later I was in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary having heart surgery. Nevertheless, I was still a member of the Society of Scottish Artists and before I went into hospital, I made the following artwork for our 1994 annual exhibition, and as an intervention in Scottish newspapers….
Half way up the main staircase of the Royal Scottish Academy there are situated two alcoves – one on either side. Visitors to the main exhibition halls have to pass between these two alcoves, into which I had sited two plinths. Each plinth had a stone boulder placed on top, and above each was suspended a small handwritten notice.
I also made the following press release:
At 06.00 hours on Friday 23rd Sept. the most southerly and the most northerly points of Great Britain were severed. The stone which was removed at lowest tide from the shoreline beneath Lizard Point lighthouse, Cornwall, is 485 mm in length and weighs 18.35 kg. It is igneous granite. The stone which was removed from the shoreline beneath Dunnet Head lighthouse, Caithness, is 503 mm long, and weighs 25 kg. It is sedimentary sandstone with iron and copper banding. These stones now face each other on marble plinths situated to either side of the entrance staircase of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. Suspended in space above one stone is a small rectangle of thick watercolour paper, on which is handwritten…
…and above the other stone is suspended by thread a paper card which reads..
No actual photographs remain of this work in the alcoves of the RSA. I was not up to things while preparing for the operation. I have to admit that I wasn’t that confident, in fact I was so frightened that I produced this work for the SSA using the pseudonym of Jokey De’ath. However, the staff and doctors of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary lived up to their reputation, and I survived to write this little story…
The staff of ARI are great. Not only have they the fantastic technical skills of their profession, but because the patients are mostly all over the place emotionally after the levels of anaesthetic, the nurses in particular must have great social skills.
After waking up in the cardiac intensive care unit (where I apparently turned my head not to Rosi but to a nurse, telling her I loved her!) I was moved to a small room in the high dependency unit. On the wall opposite my bed was a painting done by some previous patient and donated to the hospital with kind thanks. It was a painting of a mountain covered in snow and I hated it, not only because it looked so cold, but because the more I looked at it, the more it began to look like a dead fish – a skate! So I took the painting down and hid it from view under my bed, which the nurses all thought was hilarious. Anyway, in a couple of days I was well enough to be moved to a ward with other patients, but the nurses were ahead of me, for there on the wall opposite my bed they had hung the painting of the dead skate!
Some time after I got home, I also made a painting for Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, to thank the doctors and nurses for saving my life and making me laugh…
I was invited to make a proposal for an artwork for the campus of Strathclyde University in Glasgow…
Although the original model for the proposal no longer exists, the above photo-montage shows how the work might have appeared. It would have consisted of two very large mirror-polished stainless steel profiles of the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty. These would be standing on either side of a large birch tree.
I was grappling with Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, and with Dasein ‘being-in-a-world’ with ‘equipment-ready-to-hand’ – just ‘being’, and having just been through a life changing experience myself, all my works of this time had a certain ontological dimension…
