On NVA

by Ruth Barker, 4 Aug 2010

Hello,

I met with Kitty Anderson today, for some very pleasant lunch and a catch up on her current work for NVA in Glasgow.¹. Kitty, as some of you will know, also works as Communications Manager for The Common Guild, and until February this year was also at The Modern Institute, so she has a pretty amazing track record working for successful and innovative arts organisations in the city.

NVA are doing some very interesting things these days it seems, so it was great to get an inside perspective on what they’re up to. Two current / upcoming projects interested me particularly. I’ll give an overview of both (they’re very different) and then say a little about why my attention was so caught.

The first project is Glasgow Harvest, taking place at Tramway’s Hidden Gardens on 28th August, and billed as a ‘celebration of urban growing’. Here’s what the flier says:

“NVA invite everyone who grows their own food on whatever scale to take part in Glasgow’s biggest ever open air meal.

Come along for a day packed full of home produce, live music and performance. Get your own edible punk haircut, eat a poke of chips from the Great Scottish Double Chip Challenge, compare Allotment Soups, make a giant Jam Wall, marvel at Glasgow’s most Eccentric Sheds and help judge the Creative Containers competition.”

Visitors are also encouraged to bring food to share, design and plant a creative container, and make a jar of jam. All in all it seems as though the project is highly engaged with its context, sited as it is within the broader SAGE initiative from NVA and ERZ landscape architects.

The other project Kitty mentioned that caught my attention is the plan – still at early stages – for NVA to work with the site of St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, and the neighbouring Kilmahew Woodlands². Much of the discussions for St Peter’s are still tentative and, indeed, the process currently seems poised at a somewhat fragile moment. You can read an old (and maybe a bit out-dated) press release from NVA’s archive here. But I do want to draw your attention to this bit – it’s part of a statement from Angus Farquhar (NVA’s Creative Director) that’s quoted in the release:

“The site [of St Peter’s Seminary] carries a remarkable 500 year history of human intervention, from the mediaeval foundations of Cardross Castle, the survival of natural woodlands and a stunning Victorian designed estate, to the powerful imposition of the 20th century seminary buildings. A creative landscape is driven not by a single focus or perspective on its heritage, conservation, environmental or leisure value, but by an inspired reading of the layers of history that underpin it, that define its complex character and the visionary artistic responses that can expand this narrative into a new century. The plan will allow us to look at temporary and permanent ways to take these ideas forward.”

So, why did these very different projects strike me as so pertinent? I suppose (as always) it’s for a few different reasons. Partly there’s the way that NVA operates. I’m quite fascinated by the way that they seem to have found a new model for art production, and that that model seems remarkably fruitful. From a background in theatre, Angus has brought his energy and sincerity to a wide range of contexts and seems to have charged them all with a spirit of creative endeavour that is quite remarkable.

You can see the results in that here are two projects being carried forward at the same time by the same organisation and which – though they exist at very different scales and with very different intentions – share an overarching ambition that somehow draws them together. And yet there’s more than just a vague sense of approach that links them. Because both projects also share an ability to take an incisive look at humans’ complex relationships to landscape and culture. Together they continue NVA’s remarkable practice of exploring the patterns of behaviour and imagination that shape who we are and how we think. In the proposed project for St Peter’s, that is played out against the grand scale of cultural history and its attendant structures of religion, belief and heritage. In Glasgow Harvest, we discover it at the far more intimate but equally fundamental level of the personal production of food and community. But through both we still see (I think at least) how NVA continue to investigate and illuminate our multi-nodal points of relation to our world and each other. As their 20th anniversary approaches, that suddenly seems like quite an achievement.

Thanks for lunch, Kitty!

More later,
R.

¹ Read a PAR+RS Feature in which artist Anthony Schrag interviews NVA’s Creative Director Angus Farquhar here.

² There are some fantastic pictures of St Peter’s on the Hidden Glasgow site here.