writing
I am writing these words in April 2020 – outside my door the world is changing because of the coronavirus pandemic, and these things which I have thought about for many years now seem quite distant. Although the brief which I was given by the Scottish Development Agency – to make an artwork about “A community standing at the crossroads, at a moment of regeneration” – was in 1980, it seems strangely apposite now.
In the 1970’s I was becoming increasingly sympathetic to the Land Art and Feminist Art movements, and I felt deeply that I needed to make works in and about the Earth – as with the artwork ‘Messerschmidt cut’, which I described earlier. But I had also by that time become what I understood to be a ‘public artist’ – which is a contentious term, but which I understood to mean simply that I listened to what other people had to say before making a work of art about their situation.
I had met with the management committee of the Reidvale Housing Association a few times and we had discussed the way that the people of Dennistoun had stood up against the Glasgow Corporation’s plans to move them to other areas. It was from between the lines of these discussions that the sculpture began to take shape. And the fact that a number of women in the Dennistoun community were standing up to the patriarchal monolith that was the Glasgow Corporation’s housing plan is reflected in the gender and posture of the figures. They are human figures that symbolize that struggle – their symbolism written in a language that would have been accessible for every person there.
But I was writing also about myself, and it was important to me to describe the ascendancy of feminism – so the young female figure is not only a symbol of women in Dennistoun. She is not merely thrusting aside and toppling a local patriarch – a remnant of Victorian Glasgow. The older female figure is not only looking around optimistically to the future of Dennistoun, she is looking in wonder at the newly discovered power she has claimed for women. Well, forty years on and the glass ceiling still exists in monolithic structures…
Nevertheless the sculpture, which still stands in the garden of Reidvale Housing Association in Dennistoun, is special for me because it marks the first time I was able to define my own philosophy of meaning and environment in the language of others. And with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, if I were to read these four figures as a written sentence I would understand it in this way, that the male subject who in the past had dominated the narrative and imposed a certain linearity upon its telling, has now been overpowered by the former objects of his purview. These female figures symbolize for me a lifelong quest to comprehend how things – not objects – might actually exist in equanimity – which on the basis of quantum entanglement I now believe to be as a condition of singular mutual under-standing. That is what the older female figure is searching for in her gaze.