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 be a work in which the adults of Dennistoun might find a certain frisson of irony.(It’s called Glasgow humour!)
I remember showing this work to one of the architects in the Glasgow East Area 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.