I usually stay at the exhibition site at home or abroad for two weeks for research and production. A short period of work and research with a deadline in sight puts me in a kind of high concentration where every detail is noticed and can be a trigger for new work. The combination of making exhibitions and traveling creates a productive way of working for me. I also find it interesting to note that you often don't have to travel that far to discover new things. It's more about the concentration with which you look than the place you go. Yet during my short working periods I increasingly felt that I was missing something important, something you don't get in two weeks. I was very curious about how a more permanent change of location would affect my work.
For some time now my interest in Glasgow has been growing. This started with some works by Cyprien Guillard who lived there for a time early in his career. He made art there with apartment buildings that were on the demolition list. Here he really used the building as the material for his work. So no work over, on, in, or in front of it but really with the building. Like the work Beton Belvedere, a driveway for a posh house made from the pulverized concrete of a demolished residential tower. Glasgow is a real working class city. Made big by shipbuilding which was abruptly privatized and ended in the 1980s. This left a very large proportion of the inhabitants unemployed. Many buildings also fell into disuse. It is still clear to see that
Glasgow has a rather rough past. Yet a lot of good art comes from there. The art school has a good reputation. And a friend of mine lived there for a few years and recommended that I go there.
There I found the Masters of Letters in Fine Art Practice/Sculpture (MLitt) program. A new program with a long self a bit contradictory name. With this program, the academy wants to offer an alternative to the classic MFA program that is often used as an extension of the bachelor's degree, but turns out to be less suitable for artists who have been working for a while or people with, for example, a design background who want to make a transition to fine art. It occurred to me that this could be a kind of twelve-month work period with lots of feedback on my work and access to various facilities such as workshops and large printers. In retrospect, this turned out to be fairly accurate. What also attracted me was the experimental status of this course within the academy. We were the third batch and there was not a very set program. However, we could make wide use of the workshops at the academy.
There were only four other students. From the Netherlands, Spain France and South Korea. The academy rented us a spacious studio in The Whiskey Bond (TWB), an old distillery on the edge of town that now houses creative industries. On the first two floors of TWB sits The Glasgow Sculpture Studios, a studio building set up in the 1980s by a group of coastal artists. They have, studios, project space and good wood, metal and ceramic workshops. Here they also carry out professional commissions from third parties. After a laughably extensive health and safety introduction (they are standard in the UK, through the academy we even had to take the course to stand on a ladder, before we were allowed to stand on and ladder) we were also able to work here and after a few months we were even asked if we wanted to earn some extra money as a freelance carpenter. This was of course a welcome addition to the loan I had to take out from DUO (Dienst Uitvoering Onderwijs). About twice a week we had tutorials with teachers, either in the studio or at another location in the city or academy. The rest of the time we worked on our own work.
Because of the small group and the location outside the academy, a pretty familiar feeling quickly developed. There was a lot of talk about the work and the studio also functioned as a kind of living room. We also quickly came into contact with the artists of the Sculpture Studios. I experienced it as a great advantage that we were both inside and outside the academy.
After about two months, we created an exhibition on an empty floor of our studio building with all previous years MLitt students. Sixteen artists participated, most of whom were still living in Glasgow and many had even found studios at the Sculpture Studios.
I was surprised by the number of people at the opening. It's kind of typical of Glasgow's art scene. There are a lot of artists living there and few institutions and galleries. As a result, many exhibitions and project spaces are set up by artists themselves and there is a great appreciation for self-organization. Also, rents in Glasgow are not that high so artists have time to set up projects next to their own practice and side jobs.
The city is crossed by the Clyde River. During the Ice Age, a large glacier pushed a lot of land mass here resulting in a landscape with quite steep hills. Then it was thought that it would be a good idea to make a city center on these steep hills according to the grid system. Straight streets with violent up and down movements seem to imitate a kind of fairground attraction. I love the polder and always look in amazement at mountains with houses on them. You could just flatten everything before you start building houses, couldn't you? It does make cycling a real top-class sport. Every day I climbed from the lowest point in town to the studio on one of the higher hills. Where luckily there was also a shower. At the end of the day I hardly had to pedal to get home. Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road and bike lanes don't really exist so I had to be pretty careful not to get squashed by a bus or cab in a hurry. It was a real thrill to ride a bike through the city. Especially the long stretches downhill where you had to pay very close attention and regularly had to slam on the brakes for a red traffic light.
You also had to approach the city differently if you were on a bicycle. To get from A to B, it was often more convenient to bike around quite a bit and avoid steep hills. Cycling became a way of combining discovering a new city with exercise. I even followed the Clyde Canal from Glasgow to Edinburg on one of the few sunny days. A trip of 60 miles. Quite long but just doable in a day, it seemed to me. Unfortunately, in the middle part of the trip the road turned out to be so bad that I needed a lot of energy to move forward. The shocks also made my back hurt and I had to walk a lot. Of course I hadn't brought my bicycle light and the last three hours I had to find my way in pitch darkness with completely sour legs. Fortunately, I arrived in Edinburgh just in time to take the last train back home.
My plans for developing my work were initially focused on exploring the city and specifically high-rise buildings. I had long had a fascination with flats but had never directly deployed this in an artwork. However, I soon realized that my fascination was mainly focused on the Dutch gallery flat from the 1960s. This way of building where streets are stacked on top of each other was developed from an idea of progress but was soon overtaken by time. In the eighties and nineties it had many social problems but recently these buildings are being renovated on a large scale and adapted to the times of today. So there is still something positive to come out of these buildings despite their bad reputation.
However, Glasgow's high-rise buildings are of a completely different order. These flats are much more massive, badly built and also the socio-economic situation of the inhabitants was/is much more dramatic. So dramatic that I too am convinced that demolition is the only way out. I decided to abandon this project because I could not actually find anything positive in these buildings.
And meanwhile, during bike rides to these flats or the places where they once stood, I discovered other interesting things, including the butterfly bush.
This shrub likes poor soil and is a real survivor. It does very well among the rubble in the empty spaces of the city. It also digs well into the porous sandstone of older buildings that have not been properly maintained. It seemed as if someone had gone through the city with a purple and pink highlighter and marked where something big once happened.
Glasgow is a very cool city, it usually drizzles and often rains, this column is also too short to describe a whole year. Thanks for your attention and have a nice day.
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