On the 11th and 12th of September 2009, Inverness Old Town Art hosted a two-day Invernessian Clanjamfrey event as part of Re-Imagining the Centre.
Re-Imagining the Centre is multi-dimensional artwork created for and staged within the traditional heart of the city of Inverness. The project has grown out of a three year public art experiment which has seen artists working alongside local people to redefine their city for the contemporary era.
The Invernessian Clanjamfrey punctuated this long-running programme of events and commissions with a two day debate that was conceived around a series of three sessions in which invited speakers acted as catalysts, introducing a topic before extending the dialogue to the floor.
Addressing issues of heritage, religion, creativity and identity, the Invernessian Clanjamfrey sought to analyse the varying contexts against which public art is presented, and in which public art seeks to engage.

Invited speakers were:
Matt Baker (IOTA Lead Artist)
Philomena de Lima (UHI Centre for Remote and Rural Studies)
Dr David Alston (historian)
Claudia Zieske (Deveron Arts, Huntly)
Sam Harrison (Open Ground)
Rev. Peter Nimmo (Old High St Stephens Church, Inverness)
Jan Hogarth: (Public Art Manager, Dumfries & Galloway)
Duncan McLean (Senior Landscape Architect, Land Use Consultants)
Ruth MacDougall

The Clanjamfrey was chaired by Alistair Snow.
The Keynote Lecture was delivered by Neville Gabie in Inverness Cathedral. Neville’s presentation was sponsored by PAR+RS and introduced by PAR+RS Editor Ruth Barker.

Exclusively for PAR+RS, Matthew Hearn (Editor of IOTA Publications, and Project Manager for the Invernessian Clanjamfrey) has transcribed Neville’s talk. The presentation is transcribed here in its entirety, along with the introduction by Ruth Barker, and a series of images of the Clanjamfrey collected by Inverness Old Town Art. For more, see Tilly McLeod’s Reflection article. All photography is by Ewen Weatherspoon, and used courtesy of Inverness Old Town Art.

PAR+RS keynote presentation. Invernessian Clanjamfrey.

Ruth Barker. I’m sure you all know this is the last of the presentations today and it’s going to be quite special. I just wanted to beg your indulgence for a couple of minutes, to say hello and also to give a very short introduction.

For those I haven’t managed to meet over the last day or two, my name’s Ruth Barker and I’m the editor of Public Art Scotland and we’ve been able to sponsor Neville’s Keynote presentation today which I’m very happy about. Public Art Scotland is an online resource that aims to build the capacity, the knowledge and the expertise of people working in the field of public art throughout the country. Check it out, it’s easy to do, just stick it into Google or its just publicartscotland.com and you should be able to find us.

The function of the site is three-fold really: it’s partly to archive and to reflect on projects that have happened in the past; it’s also to chart and to try to get a hold of projects that are happening right now; and the third thing that it does – which is quite important, especially in this context – is to be able to learn and to understand what might be happening in the future. That is really why events like the Clanjamfrey are so important. It’s these moments and these opportunities when we can come together to talk and to learn and to disagree with each other, and to inspire each other. And we can inspire each other towards what we can do and what we can think and how we can re-imagine all of our practices for tomorrow and for next month and for next year.

I think at the very centre of that is the opportunity to actually see people’s work. So I hope you’ve got a lot out of seeing the work on the streets of Inverness and also the work that’s been talked about in the different presentations today and yesterday. But I know you’ll also get a huge amount out of seeing the work in our next and final presentation because I think we’re actually very lucky to have Neville here to talk about his own practice.

I’ll just finish by saying that ‘place’ is an idea (sometimes it’s been a question) which has cropped up quite often over the last couple of days. But Neville’s practice actually deals with something broader than that, because his projects are always utterly rooted in very particular contexts. And I think the significance of those contexts extends quite a long way beyond their physical location, to encompass the social and the historical and the imaginative and especially what we might call the emotional location of those sites. Neville’s projects, as I’m sure you know, are very many and also very various. But throughout his work, his approach is always incisive and always articulate and always illuminating, and I’m sure they’re qualities which he will share with us in his talk today. I’m looking forward to it! So can I ask you all to please welcome Neville Gabie:

Neville Gabie. Thank you for that introduction Ruth. Well, I hope that my show lives up to something of what you’ve just said. When I saw Matthew’s timetable for this event, I was kind of thinking, ‘Last slot, would it have been better to go first or last, or what’s the best place?’ But I think, actually having been to all the presentations over the last few days, I think the last slot is almost the graveyard slot because there have been some fantastic presentations. I think what I’ve thoroughly enjoyed [has been] actually seeing the range of presentations and the work throughout the town over the last few days, so thank-you very much for the invitation to be here, and for that. Yesterday, Philomena [de Lima] in her talk was saying that one of the things she’s often asked is, ‘Where do you come from?’ Well I’m often asked a slightly different question, along similar lines. Very often if I’m meeting someone for the first time we have a conversation which goes something like this:

I’ll say, ‘Hello, I’m Neville,’
and they’ll say ‘What do you do?’
and I’ll say, ’I’m an artist,’
and they say, ‘Oh, you paint,’
I say, ‘No, I studied sculpture,’
and they’ll say, ‘What material do you work in, do you carve wood or stone?’

And it’s usually at that kind of point that the conversation gets really complicated because actually I work in a whole range of media. A lot of what I do is photographic based and now actually I have to apologise to anyone who’s Scottish and a football fan here now, this isn’t deliberate, it’s just bad timing that I’m talking abut a project that started in South Africa and its all about football.

A few years ago I went back to South Africa which is where I grew up, and I started photographing (just for myself) goalposts which I was finding in the landscape [Project: Playing Away – images here]. I was fascinated by [the way] its, it’s such a simple form – it’s two verticals and horizontal – but the possibilities for reinventing it are endless and I was really interested in the sculptural qualities, use of material, the sense of location, that each of these places had. I kind of realised as I pursued it that, as I said, its possibilities are endless. I came back from that trip to South Africa and – I did those works very much for myself – and I showed them to someone, and they said, ‘Oh but you couldn’t do that in England, you don’t have the vast space.’ You suddenly realise that actually through football you can travel pretty much anywhere in the world and find people reinventing their own locale. They speak so much, as I said, about place, and so it was a project which grew into a book which was published by Penguin and which has had various different forms. And just to show that my grand tour of finding goal posts has included Scotland, I’m showing one which comes very close to your territory actually, it’s a goalpost in a place which is called Skinnit which I think is just outside Tain?, so very close to here. So what I do is take photographs, on occasions actually I’ve been able to do some very interesting things with them. This was a project I did in Germany in 2006 where I chose 36 goalposts from different landscapes around the world which we then made as billboards and they were placed across Nuremberg. So photography forms part of what I do.

This is going back a few years but in 1999 I was asked to be artist in residence at Tate Liverpool. [Project: Up In The Air – images here] Liverpool is a city which has fascinated me for a long time, and I was really keen to go and do some work there. Whilst I was there I discovered the north part of the city and Kensington – probably one of the most disenfranchised communities in the city – where there were three tower blocks originally, like this, all being demolished. They were half empty, or half full with residents and I got permission to work in a flat with them initially, and then realised that there was potential to do something fantastic here, so actually over a five year period I developed a project called Up in the Air.

Originally there were three artists, Kelly Large, myself and Leo Fitzmaurice, but then for the last three of the five years it was just Leo Fitzmaurice and myself who developed the project. We had artists and writers from across the country and further-a-field coming and living in the tower blocks alongside the residents and making work in the blocks. As I said the project ran for five years, and I think one of the lessons that I really drew out of that, was that running a project over a long time gave us the opportunity to build fantastic relationships with the people who lived in those blocks, those residents. It was a relationship which was built on trust and as the project evolved we were able to do more and more extraordinary things in that building because of that trust. And I think time and trust is kind of key in a lot of instances, and again it was really interesting to see the work here and how it’s evolved over the three years.

There were lots of artists and writers who came and lived in there, some very well known and others not, but it was about this meeting point. For a lot of those residents they’d never had any experience of art before, and why should they? But I think what was very interesting is that for us as artists, we learned a lot from being resident with them in their buildings, on their territory, and I hope that they learned something of how artists can engage in those kind of communities. In fact, usually when we did anything with the project – the project toured to Berlin or at least an archive of it did and to various other places – we got the residents to speak on our behalf which was fantastic.

I’m only showing you that because I wanted to show you that I still make sculpture, I lived in those flats for five years but one of the pieces that I did was, I watched the deconstruction of those buildings which fascinated me. So I moved into a flat on the 7th floor and I literally deconstructed it. I began by taking out the doors, the floors, the ceilings, the windows, the balconies, everything. I stripped the entire flat back to its original concrete shell and all the material which was stripped out was gathered in one of the rooms in kind of solid block of stuff, so if you look very carefully you can see bits of toilets and baths and all sorts in there.

I also work with film and video, and a few years ago I was invited to become artist in residence at Kellerberrin [Project: Wide Eyed and Legless – images here].":http://www.nevillegabie.com/australia1.html Now Kellerberrin is a tiny town, it’s got a population of 600 people in a whole shire of 800 and it’s somewhere stuck on the edge of Australian desert, Western Australian desert so it’s between Perth and a little town right in the middle called Kalgoorlie. So it’s a very very tiny isolated community but again what was interesting was that people in that community had been running an international arts project, it’s called IASKA, which is, the International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia. They were really keen, since these communities, as I said, were straddled on the Great Eastern Highway, were places which were shrinking, which were dying, which have all sorts of social problems, but they thought the way of really understanding their community, invigorating it, was to run an international arts project there and they have artists from around the world living there for periods of four months usually.

So I arrived in Kellerberrin. Before I got there, I asked the curator, because I thought, ‘This is such a different context for me, I need to find a way of, kind of, becoming Australian quickly.’ I asked the curator before I arrived to find six people in the community, each of whom would give an item of clothing to wear while I was there, appropriate dress I suppose. So when I arrived there was a hat and a pair of shorts, and shirt, some boots and some various other things and that became my gear whilst I was there; so this is me in Australian mode. And there was actually a small video piece with each of the six people holding up the items that they donated.

A lot of the work that I did there, I was really interested again by the place because Western Australia is a very very vulnerable landscape for all sorts of reasons: it’s whole ecology is fragile, and huge parts of it are being just spoiled by the vegetation being stripped bare and salts coming to the surfaces, so you get these vast salt lakes, these deserts really. And what I wanted to do was fly kites. So I was flying a kite with a little video camera attached filming bits of the landscape. I’m not going to show you the film footage but what was really interesting for me was, I don’t know if any of you fly kites but it’s quite a physical activity. So you’re in the landscape, you’re in this terrain, you’re navigating it, and you’re also filming yourself as being part of it. But as well as doing that I also spent a lot of time speaking to people about that landscape, so there’s a conversation I had with an Aboriginal Elder, who lived in the town; with a farmer who ran a really big farming operation outside of it and with a geologist who was trying to kind of repair some of the damage from mining in those sorts of areas where arsenic and all sorts of other chemicals have been spilled on the landscape. What was really interesting is although they came from very different places, their relationship to that location was equally passionate, and that for me was really quite telling. So I showed you that because I work in a range of material and media, and the media that I use for me is simply a tool, whether it is a camera or a chisel or something else, it’s a tool.

The thing that is constant in my work is that it’s always made in response to a particular context; and it’s the contexts that I choose to work in that I think is the constant that runs through all my work. I’m really interested in places or landscapes, as I said, which are in a state of flux. And I use landscapes broadly: I mean the physical landscape but it might also be the population of that landscape or the politics, with a small ‘p’, of that environment, which are vulnerable, on the margins, in a state of change. Those are the kinds of places that I’m interested in working in. For me, those landscapes in a sense are a kind of mirror. They are a mirror for me to explore issues which are personal to me but which I hope have a greater relevance. So I pick the kind of places I work in really quite carefully, and fairly specifically, and I think that is the common thread through what I do.

Again with all the discussions yesterday, I was making notes on my carefully pre-prepared speech so now it’s almost illegible, but a lot of the things had to do with what we mean by public art, the public realm, what that term is exactly. Some of the other things that came up in our discussions yesterday, with Peter [Nimmo] and with others, were those ideas of the fringes, the margins, all kinds of interesting and relevant points. But I thought that just to give you more understanding of how I work, I would talk to you about one project in particular which I’ve been involved in for the past three years.

In 2006 I was commissioned to be artist in residence at a very large building site in the city centre of Bristol. [Project: BS1. Project website here.] The site is 37 acres right in the city centre and it was a corporate or a private developer doing this scheme [more images here]. I’ve never worked for a private developer before so that was interesting in its own right. But on any one day on this building site there was something like 3000 guys working on site, as well as offices full of people, so it was quite a complex site. The reason that I was interested in it was because when I was invited to take on the project I was invited with no brief. I was artist in residence with no brief. I was told I could make work if I wanted to, if I spent three years there and it ended up as a conversation that was absolutely fine too. It was the most open project I’d ever done and I think it was extraordinarily brave of a corporate client to do that. Now this comes back to something that Jan [Hogarth] mentioned earlier on: the reason that a corporate client was able to be that brave was because it had a public arts consultant – someone in the role that Jan’s doing – that actually negotiated and managed that project absolutely brilliantly. And I think I would echo what Jan was saying earlier on, that actually I think the role of that person is really significant in that kind of work, it’s a key role in fact.

So I arrived in Bristol in the middle of 2006. I’d done my site induction, And on my first day I did all the health and safety checks and I was issued with hard hat and high-viz jacket, steel toe-capped boots. I was even given a portacabin in the middle of the building site next to all the subcontractors, and so I arrived on the first day kind of like a kid at the playground for the first time, and I thought, ‘Wow! I’ve got 37 acres, there’s all this stuff going on, I’m just going to go and play.’ So I naively marched back through the gates and put my camera down and I realised very quickly that if I stopped in any one spot for 5 minutes I was in somebody’s way. Any time I stood somewhere, someone suddenly wanted to dig a hole there or pour some concrete there or measure something. So I immediately became aware that that this was someone else’s territory, and that I was an interloper there really. And I think that’s important, or it was important for me. I needed to know that as an artist, what they were doing was the important activity. And I needed to respect that kind of context. My little portacabin was actually very near the canteen and the canteen became a really significant part of my project for all sorts of reasons. Building sites are not particularly nice places, particularly for the people working on them. It’s very physical, it’s dusty, it’s dirty it’s all those sort of things. And the moments when people actually have space is when they take their breaks, and so those are the moments when you can actually meet people and perhaps engage.

The other thing that I learned the first time I walked through the gates of that place was that there’s 3000 guys working here, and the first thing I encountered were lots of different languages. And I discovered in fact there were 62 different nationalities working on that one building site. I’d probably struggle to name 62 different countries but it was just extraordinary that right in the city centre there were all these people from around the world working. That started making me think about this building site – this 37 acres hidden behind hoardings – and its location in the wider context of Bristol and what that might mean. Broadmead [the location of the building site] is located in a really interesting position in the city. It’s actually between a really old part of the city, St Paul’s which is mainly a Caribbean community St Jude’s which is now a mainly Somali community and it’s just an interesting crossroads. So this whole juxtaposition of community in the middle of the city was interesting.

I spent a lot of time in that canteen and, in fact, that was the point at which I began to understand the place and kind of enter dialogue with a number of people. And a lot of the projects as I said, they had their beginnings sitting down in there and just chatting. What I’m going to do is just run through a few of the little things that I did on that site, just to give you some understanding of how I work.

When I was in the site it was very early days. They were still laying the infrastructure for some of the roads at the bottom of the M32, and I found out that all these roads that were being put in were using granite from China. And I thought, this is 100 miles from Cornwall, there’s granite everywhere and we’re getting granite from China? It seems extraordinary, odd, terrible, y’know. Why are we doing this sort of thing? But I thought that actually what I needed to do was find out a bit more about it and explore the process. So I contacted the company who were importing the granite and I said _’I want to go to China, I want to see where the granite comes from. I want to understand that whole story and, if you like, these internationally connections.’ And they said, ‘please come, we’d love you to come and see where it comes from.’ [Project: A Weight of Stone Carried From China For You – images here.]":http://www.nevillegabie.com/stone1.html

So I flew to China; to Xiamen, which is south east China. The first shock I had, actually was that the quarry wasn’t a big hole in the ground, but was actually on the top of a mountain and in fact what they were doing was breaking up natural granite boulders on the outcrops of the mountain and dragging them down through. What I wanted to do was get one granite curb stone. The whole project follows the story of a single granite curb stone.

So I watched the curb stone being cut, and being broken up on the quarry. We then took it down, and it followed the route of all the other curb stones to the factory where it was processed, cut, packaged. And then what I wanted to do was bring my granite curb stone back to Bristol overland. So I then embarked on a journey with my granite curb stone using trucks, trains, eventually the ferry back to Bristol. So the journey began with a 48 hr journey from Xiamen to Beijing with a couple of truck drivers. One of them was called Mr Zioux, and neither of them spoke any English but they were absolutely fantastic in terms of looking after me – even telling me what I should and shouldn’t eat at Chinese motorway service stations – and helping me when I got to Beijing, when I got on the train.

So there’s the stone, on its trolley, in Beijing railway station. It seemed like a very good idea when I first thought of this project in Bristol. But when I started doing it, I had misgivings. Because when I first arrived at Beijing railway station I discovered that it is a vast place, where every sign is in Chinese and nobody speaks English and the train I had to get to was up escalators and down stairs and along corridors and without that guy Mr Zioux who was as strong as an ox, I would of given up there. But he kind of helped me get into the train. I had to book a passage for the stone as well, I had to book a berth for it. I gave the stone berth 13, I had berth 14, but that was a mistake too I later realised. I then went on a train journey, on a train from Beijing to Moscow, seven days and seven nights, which was fantastic except for border crossing between China and Russia. Attempting to explain exactly what I was doing with a granite curb stone, to Russian guards, was not the easiest. They made me take it off the train, down to the platform, push it through various customs offices. It nearly ended its days there actually, in Siberia, but in the end I managed. Wherever I went, the stone went with me. I took it on several walks; it just became a means of exploring location and place. So this [image] is the stone just stopped somewhere on a street in Moscow between two railway stations – I had to get from one to the other to get the next train and so on, and at last, the final leg of the journey was ferry crossing back to the UK. Actually before the stone was installed, it was used in an exhibition in the Jerwood space in London, and this [image] is it being installed in Bristol.

The stone as is now is just a curb stone alongside all the other curb stones in the street. It has a small text in Chinese so if you speak Mandarin you can read what it says. If you can’t, too bad. It just sits in the street alongside the others and I was interested in that idea that the site not only had all these workers from all over the place but that actually, to build a building, even though the physical space might be in the centre of Bristol, the network is so entirely global now. And that was kind of fascinating.

I think the other thing I learned which was interesting, is that although I started with this very negative idea about how terrible it was that this stone was coming from around the world, actually doing the trip really made me re-think and re-evaluate some of that and realise that actually nothing is so black and white. The reason that this company wanted to take me to China in the first place is that although the quarries are all owned by the Chinese government, the company themselves run the factory. And because they own it they were able to insist that it was run with UK health and safety standards, and that all the staff were the proper age. And so in fact you realise that although the project is happening in Bristol, it also sustained a really vibrant, interesting community across the other side of the world in a really positive way. So I think part of doing the project for me, was for me to understand things too, and hopefully make that story visible.

The other thing I should say about the project in Bristol was that the development is a 5/6 hundred million pound scheme, and their budget for arts ran into several millions of which I was only a tiny tiny part. Most of the work that was commissioned there was very big budget, permanent installations on a large scale. In the midst of that, what I was interested in doing was actually in celebrating some of the most mundane elements of a building, the bits that people don’t know, don’t notice, or walk over without even really being cognisant of, and making that, making the story of all that, much more visible. I’ll show you another very similar project fairly quickly. One day I was walking around this huge car park that they were building there, with space for 600 cars. I was speaking to an Albanian steel worker and he was telling me that all the steel that they were using to build this car park was actually recycled. And I thought, ‘well that seemed really interesting.’ In fact the client, Bristol Alliance, the Developers, didn’t even know they were just using recycled steel but as I tracked it back through I found out that all the steel to build a car park came from a plant in Cardiff. It was the ex-British Steel Plant, now owned by a Spanish company called Celsa and it has the most sophisticated modern steel works in Europe there and they only use recycled steel. Everything that comes into the gate of that plant is scrap metal and everything, I mean everything is recycled. Even the fumes that get burnt off are collected, the heavy metals are taken out and reprocessed, the slag is used for road fill, and the water that’s used for cooling is also in a recycled system, so it’s quite a sophisticated place. I thought this was fantastic, it was great.

So what did I do? I bought a car off ebay from a guy in Bristol. This image is of Paul. He lives about a mile from the building site, and he had a Ford Mondeo for sale on ebay, which I bought from him. His poor car had been in an accident but I still needed something that was road worthy, because I needed to be able to drive it. So this image is of Paul’s car and this is the beginning of the journey. The first thing I did was drive it to a scrap yard in Newport called Simm’s Metal, and they de-polluted it for me and again they were fantastic in the process. Now this conveyor belt is normally full of scrap continually being recycled, but because I said I wanted to collect just the scrap from this car please, they cleared the whole system for me and they put Paul’s car – my car – car through by itself. So we were able to scrap the car and turn it into 680 kilos of ‘frag’ (that what it’s called), or bits, which was then taken to Celsa the steel works. Because it’s so sophisticated, the moment I put the car into that big pot, we could track it back through computers right through the whole process. I spent several days at Celsa watching it re-emerge as reinforcing bar. So what we did was turn the car into 32ml reinforcing bar, and then it did the last bit of the journey back to the building site. We had enough steel from the car to make the reinforcing for one and a half concrete columns in the car park. So, if you drive to Bristol and you park in the Cabot Circus car park, levels three or four, and you see a column which says Ford Mondeo, that’s where the steel comes from and that’s its story and history.

The canteen: I mentioned the canteen before and we’re going back to the canteen. I was fascinated as I said by the fact that there were all these nationalities working in Bristol. And I thought that this was something really to celebrate. Perhaps as a, kind of, South African national myself once, and perhaps be cause I was aware of politics and the politics of racism and building sites and all the rest of it. And I thought ‘No, actually we need to celebrate this, there’s something fantastic about this.’ In a way it was a microcosm of what currently happens in the UK as a whole, as well as a microcosm of Bristol itself, which is a very diverse city. So I thought that I really wanted to do some projects around that.

So I had this idea which I thought seemed very simple at the time. ‘What I’m going to do,’ I decided ‘is collect recipes from all the guys on site, get everyone to write me a recipe from wherever they’re from.’ [Project: Canteen – images here.] So I began by producing leaflets in about 18 different languages, asking anybody on site to write down their favourite recipe from wherever it came from. It was hard enough finding someone to translate the leaflets into 18 languages But then I had this little pile of leaflets which I got back, and I had to do the process in reverse to even understand what people had written. But once I’d had the recipes translated I found someone who was able to cook that meal, and they cooked it for us, and then whoever submitted that recipe was able to invite whoever they wanted to come to a meal on the building site. At lunch time, instead of going to the canteen we’d set up another location and we’d have an alternate lunch, and that just became part of the activity.

This is a little incidental story, but when I first came up with this idea, the people at Bristol Alliance, the developers, and everyone was quite happy with it. I produced the leaflet in all the languages and I was about to issue it on the building site when one of the women who was in charge of press and publicity for Cabot Circus said ‘Hold it there. We can’t make this public: we can’t put these leaflets out, because if people in Bristol realise that there are all these foreign workers on the site there’s going to be such a backlash, and y’know we just can’t do it.’ And so we had some really interesting discussions that were very skilfully managed through Sam Wilkinson, who was my public arts manager consultant. In the end we actually persuaded this woman Michelle that we would watch the issue carefully, and so we put the leaflets out on the site to see how it went. When we issued the leaflets, the take-up amongst the guys on site was quick and fantastic. And six weeks later, Michelle in the Bristol Alliance office received a phone call from Bristol City Council who they were saying that they wanted to award Cabot Circus a special award for supporting diversity in employment. So a few days later we went to a big black tie dinner and of course Michelle was the first one up there to receive the award. I thought it was really interesting that sometimes there are battles which are worth pursuing, and I think that what the experience gave us, was again this word, Trust.

I come back to Trust. Making projects like this is about building partnerships, and building relationships. It’s about making relationships between the audience, the public, the client, and the commissioner; and that’s something that takes time. This image shows just some of the people from one particular meal. That’s Sam Wilkinson in fact, she came and joined in that meal. These are a whole lot of scaffolders who came for a meal which was from a recipe given by one of the guys on site who was Portuguese. He gave us a meal for rabbit. The meals varied in size, and because of the range of different recipes, sometimes they might have been quite intimate while sometimes they could be much bigger. There was a guy from Belize who wanted lobster in black bean sauce which was delicious, but our budget for that only extended to about 12 people and so it was quite an exclusive meal. Other times we did meals which were for 200 plus people so they really varied. Right in the middle of the development is an old medieval building, I think one of the oldest buildings in Bristol if I’m not mistaken, called Quaker’s Friars, which was being refurbished. The engineer there said, ‘Well, I think we need to do something medieval for this’ so they collected a range of medieval meals, hence the pig in this image. Right in the middle of this building site we had a meal for about 65 people, all the people involved on that site, which was a medieval banquet. So as you can see the plates were made of bread, and everyone sat under a tree in the middle of the building site and it was quite special.

Just to run through this meal very quickly. It’s the same car park, a very big car park, and some South African guys wanted to do a barbeque, on the 6th floor. Again, it seems simple, but the complexities come when you try to do it. We had to get something to cook in, to fry two whole lambs and all the rest of it in, on the 6th floor. So all the caterers actually said, ’We’ll do it on site’ and they arrived with all their catering equipment. We had to stop the cranes to lift it up to the top of the site. The poor guys working had to spend 2 hours with the smell of lamb wafting through the buildings, but then we had about 250 of the guys come in for lunch.

So it was quite an interesting project. I think I mentioned earlier on about a project not just being about the site and that community but extending it beyond the boundaries. What I did with each of the meals was try and find someone, usually local to Bristol but sometimes further afield, who could cook those meals. So as well as engaging people on site we started working with chefs in and around Bristol and all the meals were prepared by chefs from further afield. This picture is of a chef called Chef. And anyone who knows Bristol, if you go to St Paul’s and ask to be directed to a guy called Chef, you will be directed to him. He’s a fantastic guy and he works from a tiny street called Brighton Street, and if you go there on a normal day all there is a steel shutter. You wouldn’t even know it was a place to get food except that there are guys lingering there, and that’s because Chef is a really good cook. So Chef in fact did a huge big West Indian meal for us, which was brilliant. So the work became about creating a dialogue between people on and off site. This image shows one meal that I didn’t do on the building site. There’s quite a lot of Somali people in Bristol and it’s a difficult community to engage. Some work on the site but not many, and I think they feel quite threatened and vulnerable for all sorts of reasons. So we did a meal with the Somali people – again the recipe for which came from the site – but actually I held it in St Paul’s, off site, so that we could invite some of the women as well. So this image is of the final meal. And although I can’t cook, I’ve now published a recipe book, that contains some of the recipes from the project. I mention this, because for me these are temporary projects, but the publications are a really important part of the legacy. In some ways it’s about cooking, but it’s also about the people on the site, and a legacy in the sense that all the builders can have, can take, can participate in this process, this is theirs really. And I think again, it’s one of the issues with temporary works and with legacy and it was interesting to hear what you were saying about that.

This is another similar project. [Project: Cabot Circus Cantata – images here] When I was wandering around that building site, y’know you’d go round a corner and you’d hear guys singing to themselves in all sorts of different languages. And again, I thought that was really interesting. The first time I noticed it I was wandering around outside my portacabin – and you’ve got to imagine that there was noise everywhere, building sites are incredibly noisy places. It’s an assault, it’s an assault on all your senses being on a building site – but I was walking past the canteen and I heard this woman’s voice. And it was just this tiny, tiny little ephemeral voice in the middle of all this noise, and it just stopped me in my tracks. I was mesmerised by that. And it was one of the canteen staff who was Bulgarian in fact, but she was just singing a song to herself and I thought ‘Gosh, that’s extraordinary and that’s wonderful.’ So I thought that I really wanted to try to do something around that, around capturing that.

So I went around my site, just asking guys to sing a song, whatever it was, whatever language. And my idea was to work with a choir, so I contacted a guy called David Ogden who’s a composer who works with the City of Bristol Choir. And I said to David, ‘What I want to do is see if we can record songs on the building site, get a choir to learn the songs, and then get the choir to come back and perform the songs on the building site for the staff.’ And David was fantastic, so this was a project that then developed very much as a collaboration. For me collaboration is something which I enjoy and something which is actually an essential part of working outside of a gallery situation.

So we went around, and we recorded people singing, the choir learned the songs and came back and performed them on the building site. Now I’m sure probably most choirs would be the same, but the City of Bristol Choir is made up mainly of white, fairly middle aged, and fairly middle class people – without wanting to make too many assumptions. What was fantastic for me was taking some of the builders to meet the choir and then for the builders to be teaching the choir how to sing the song. There was a really wonderful interchange between these building workers who – and there’d be no other reason necessarily for these people from the choir to have met them – were exchanging all that knowledge about songs and words, and where they come from. Just going to some of those rehearsals were for me the magic of the whole event and the whole project. In fact part of me wanting the choir to come back and perform on site, was that I wanted the people of Bristol to in some way give something back to the site. So when we did the performance, we did it in the shell of an empty building and the whole 37 acres of the building site was miked up with speakers. So whilst the choir were busy singing in here, the workers across the site were hearing the sound. What was also true was actually a lot of people we met on the site – this is an image of a guy called Raymond – had fantastic voices and were part of bands or whatever, and they came and performed with the choir. So a lot of them came and performed their own work.

When I was on the building site I also saw very quickly that there were so many opportunities for artist engagement. And there were things there which I realised were wonderful, really good opportunities, but they were things that were slightly outside my own practise. So I made an arts council application to get additional funding. I applied for I think £35,000 and we got all of that, and then Bristol Alliance matched it in-kind and in funds as well. That extra money allowed me to bring in seven other artists to make work on the site, responding to different aspects of it.

Bristol Alliance provided us with a flat in the city centre, and told me that I could invite whoever I wanted. I didn’t have to go through an interview process, and they didn’t want to vet the people I’d invited, so I invited people who I thought could respond to different aspects of the scheme and draw out different things from it. But again, a bit like the project in Liverpool, I wanted people with a range of gender, age, experience, nationality to come. One of the people I did a project with a long time ago was an artist I like very much, a Romanian artist called Dan Perjovschi. Dan ran an underground newspaper for years during the Ceausescu regime in Romania. It was quite a politically based newspaper but since the collapse of that he still works in that kind of way, being quite critical of how Romania in particular has absorbed a kind of Western consumerist philosophy. So Dan came and worked on the site and he did a huge frieze in the canteen, which was again responding to things very immediately, quite politically on the site. He also produced a free newspaper which was distributed on the site and off, and in the end we also used a shop unit, which Dan did a fantastic frieze in. And this was only last October, at a time when the recession was already beginning to bite. So Cabot Circus opened on the 25th September and as I said to Dan, I think it was really picking up and responding to some of those issues immediately. And I really felt that it was quite important to have someone who in a sense had that outside, critical sense of what was going on.

This is a young French artists called Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, who again I’d met before and she came and spent a lot of time on site. And I’m just showing you one of the works that she did, but she began photographing some of the spaces as they were being constructed, produced some really large prints of the photographs, but then they were just lost under the plastering. So they are documentations of spaces as built but buried under the plaster so perhaps one day they might be re-revealed, as a trace of something but hidden.

What was really immediate to me was that, as I said, you could sit in the canteen and at one point you can be chatting to someone from Serbia about the war in Yugoslavia and then there’s a guy from Angola next door to you, and the conversations were really interesting and rich. So I wanted someone who might deal with that in some way. And with that in mind I invited a writer to come and work with us and it was a woman called Donna Daley-Clarke, who’s a Caribbean author. And she came and again spent a lot of time on site, which I think was interesting as a woman, as a foreigner but also as a writer and being able to pick up on some of those stories.

Dryden Goodwin is a London-based artist who did a whole series of portraits and he was interested in just doing portraits of people regardless of whether they were managers or site workers. And this is Leo Fitzmaurice with whom I worked with very very closely in Liverpool. He’s an artist who’s work I really rate actually, and Leo’s very interested in consumer items such as newsprint, magazines, window advertising and indeed deconstructing those. And Leo actually wanted to work in response to the older part of Broadmead rather than the newer, specifically the old shops and the architecture of some of the shops. So he’d find a shop unit – this was a shop called High and Mighty – and he then, using that architecture, deconstructed it. So that’s the original High and Mighty sign deconstructed. And then he, using a similar sort of way did a series of turning these shop windows into a wonderful series of light boxes in a sense, but deconstructing the architecture and that information. And I thought at the point at which Cabot Circus was all about logos and branding, that to have an artist who was responding to those issues was really relevant.

As I said, Cabot Circus opened on the 25th September and sometime in October – actually the end of October – I went to Antarctica as artist in residence at Halley Research Station. [Project: Artist in Residence, British Antarctic Survey – details here] So I went suddenly from the site of 2/3000 people in the city centre to a place where there were 40 of us, with our nearest neighbours 800 miles away and into a landscape which was extremely silent and quiet. And I flew my kites. And that was us on the base, a very different community, and a very different kind of environment. Equally vulnerable and equally relevant I think, but in many ways Antarctica is a story for another day.

I think rather than talk more about Antarctica, what I wanted to do was just see if I could sum up some of the issues which I hope the work has raised, and certainly the debates over the last couple of days did. We use these terms – Public Art, Public Realm – and they’re terms that I certainly struggle with a little bit. As an artist, I think that all art in a sense is for a public; whether that public is encountered in the context of a gallery or a street. For me art is about debate and it’s about engagement, so for me of course art is about public. I happen to choose to work outside the gallery because I’m really interested in that engagement with an audience, which is much more immediate and direct. I’m not saying that that’s any more or less valuable than working in the context of a gallery or somewhere else, but it’s what means most to me, as a practitioner. And I think that for me, working outside the context of a gallery means as an artist you can’t really hide. You can’t hide from the issues, you can’t really hide from the debate, and you have to be able to find a way of negotiating and of engaging with an audience, whatever level that happens to be. That doesn’t allow one, as an artist, the luxury of ‘hiding’, for want of a better word.

And that, to me anyway, is part of the value of working in that sort of way. But I think the language of that is difficult. I think what’s unfortunate about it for me, is that there is a real lack of serious critical debate about work that happens outside the context of a gallery. Which I think is a great shame because I think it has equal merit, equal value, and is raising as relevant issues as work that happens within the context of the gallery. And it’s great that Ruth is here, and that Ruth does what she does with PAR+RS, and I think that it’s organisations like yours and others which are beginning to address those issues and that debate. And I hope that that’s something which ought to be, and which should be extended. So that’s something which is really very relevant and important for me.

The other final thought is that we’ve talked quite a bit in the last few days about fringes, and margins, and the edges of things. It came up in Peter’s [Rev Peter Nimmo’s] conversation yesterday, and it’s something that is relevant and important for me. And I think that, whether it’s the vulnerability of a landscape in Australia or Antarctica, or it’s a community of people hidden behind hoardings on a building site, I’m really interested in what happens on the margins. I’m interested in where you work, in fact, Ruth [Macdougall]; those kind of places I think are really relevant. And not wishing to tread on the toes of Scottish football fans again I just want to return to those goal post images for a minute, if you could bring them back to your mind. I think, when I was travelling, looking for photographs, it was a good excuse to look in all sorts of corners of the UK and beyond. What I discovered was actually the most interesting goal posts you found were in the most marginal, most rural, and most disenfranchised places where you don’t have the infrastructure or facilities and where people have to mend and make do, and invent. And I think I see a huge parallel between that and what we do as artists. If you’re in a city, and you have the support of galleries and everything else, that’s all well and good. But actually when you’re outside of the city, when you’re in Dumfries or Sutherland or wherever it is, and you’re trying to deliver contemporary arts practice, you have to be really inventive about it. You have to think outside of the box, and you have to be imaginative: you have to mend and make do. You have to do what Claudia [Zeiske] was talking about yesterday. And that, for me, is the most exciting and interesting territory, and that’s something I learned from looking at goal posts. Thank-you very much.