Between 1999 and 2005 the workings of the Artworks Programme: Gorbals was recorded as a web diary. After being offline for sometime this web diary has now been restored and is now available in an archive form.

With a total art budget of almost £1M the public art programme accompanying the most recent regeneration of Glasgow’s Gorbals was one of the most ambitious ‘percent for art’ projects of recent times (1999- 2007). With this in mind, the culture of risk-taking that underpinned the work was notable from the outset – with the overall creative direction entrusted to a young duo of artists that the Crown St director met through a temporary art intervention on the site of one of the demolished tenements.

Heisenberg (Matt Baker and Dan Dubowitz) created the Gorbals Artworks blueprint to deliver three categories of project – Integral, Public Realm and Itinerant. Matt Baker remained with the project as Lead Artist until 2005. The overall aim was to interact with the physical and social momentums of change in the area and, in all, more than 30 projects were produced by international, national and locally based artists. This was the third time in 150 years that this iconic scottish community had been razed to the ground and completely rebuilt – each successive rebuilding has been presented as a new ‘model’ for housing development – creative response to this utopian ideal seen alongside
the entrenched mythology of the Gorbals was the dialectic behind the artworks project.

www.theartworksprogramme.org

Image:Gorbals Hopes and Dreams