This proposal was for an environmental artwork consisting of six glass houses to be sited next to the City Walls of Derry/Londonderry in Northern Ireland…
This proposal was the final stage submission in a competition run by Derry City Council and the Orchard Gallery, and comprised a very detailed large scale model, photographs, and a written statement. I will let these do the talking…
Text of the 1997 statement:
DESCRIPTION: This proposal is for six glass houses to be sited in Orchard Street, Derry/Londonderry, in Northern Ireland. The site is adjacent to the city wall, on either side of the Newgate Bastion, and the wall at this place would an integral component of the artwork. Each glass house would be sixteen feet long, seven feet wide, and nine feet high, and be of 13mm toughened and laminated glass construction in an anodised aluminium and Irish oakwood frame. Each glass house would contain soil to a depth of about two feet, with three horticultural luminaires suspended above the soil. The soil would be taken from the exact line of the political border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, being thoroughly dried and sterilized before installation.
1997 ARTIST’S STATEMENT
INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT: – Thinking which seems to prevail in the West, in the latter half of the 20th century, has begun to question how we construct the world as such. We read that spoken language is the basis of this structure, and that our linguistic relationship to the things around us is representational. We re-present things in the physical environment by words, and by doing this we are able to fix them into a linguistic world structure, as objects standing in reserve for the use of a technological society. This is how we have capitalized on our relationship of dominance over them. That we have begun to question this dominance or ownership, has perhaps been prompted by recent events in the physical environment. Much contemporary art tries to deal with the relationship of subject to object (or the denial of this relationship) and of our understanding of time on which it founds itself. This often results in works of apparent abject, naked desperation, because when social structure is placed in jeopardy, there is no world. My current thinking concerns an anomaly in this artistic setup, in that it is precisely just that. What I say is that these experiments can never be anything more than the examples of how to deconstruct, and not actual deconstructions, so long as they take place under the auspices of the construct ‘Art’. What is so intriguing about this project in Derry/Londonderry, is that it will take place in a street, of a city, of land that has known abject desperation. There is no need to find it, or manipulate it into art. It is simply here in people’s memories, and this could lay open the unique possibility for real development in language. I anticipate that people will write on the surface of the glass houses. This writing would be essential to the experience, the catalyst for its meaning. But to discourage the possibility of more vigorous inscription, and to encourage a feeling of personal and community investment in the work, we should develop a strategy aimed at creating the right atmosphere around the project, and for disseminating information about its basic elements. As part of this initiative, I could live and work on site, for the duration of the project.
CONCEPT: The glass houses pertain to their situation, and they perform as one component of a work of art that can be viewed and thought about. Like any work of art, they operate at the periphery of colloquial language, in a domain of ambiguities. I can attempt to write some of these down, but the list is by no means definitive:
•With careful design and construction, the six glass houses could be seen as special places of sacred nurturing. Almost like small temples. But they would also be empty of life, with dry sterile soil, almost like dust. Their internal space would be quite distant. Is that the distance of the spiritual or of the incarcerated?
•A warm glow from the horticultural luminaires inspects the soil for signs of life, but it also gives a dark, and distant glimpse of prison lighting.
•The soil they contain is taken from six places on the exact boundary between two political structures. It has become thoroughly mixed up in the process, and it rejects all claims to ownership.
•The city wall is an important part of the artwork. The impregnability of its defensive structure as such could be interrogated, when seen through the glass houses.
•Territorial marking is a language composed equally from territory and marks. It is already well established in Derry/Londonderry, and is a language perhaps more symbolic and spatial than signifying and linear. Because the soil within the six glass houses would reject any claim to ownership, when the first writing does take place on their surface, a new more poetic syntax would be formed. A written language that cannot be derived from dominating speech, but which can only be written as a subtle difference from the surface on which it is written.
•In effect it would reduce ‘territory’ to ground, and reinstate marking as arche-writing.
•A mythogrammic language such as this might have ancient associations, and to refer to Doire or Daire seems right. This is why the main stanchions and beams of the glass houses are to be made from Irish oak wood. The whole space here could be an oak grove of the mind.