Working in public seminar series: Art, Practice and Policy
Seminar 3: Quality and Imperfection
Tuesday, 19 June 2007

Dedicated to the memory of Evi Westmore


Public Art - The perspective of the Highlands and Islands


Robert Livingston

I am the Director of High-Arts, which is the Arts Developments Agency for the Highlands and Islands.  High-Arts is delighted to be working with the UHI Millennium Institute and with On the Edge to help to present this third seminar in the Working in Public programme.

It is clear that the core group who have been going through these three seminars have been working very hard because this is the homework I got in advance of this evening's seminar.  It was very interesting to pick up from that some of the themes that are clearly coming through the programme we will be talking about tonight.

It seems to me that the concept of visual artists working in the public arena is in some respects still relatively new in the Highlands and Islands.  We have a host of galleries – large and small, public and private – but it is still a relative rarity for work to be made and presented outside that defining frame of the gallery. 

Perhaps the issue of the visibility of the artist is still there for us a slightly vexed one.  After all, I defy anyone to name the sculptors who fashioned Inverness's two most prominent public artworks, Flora McDonald at the Castle and the Regimental Memorial at the Station.  At this point somebody should put their hand up and say, they know – but no!  Well, never mind.

This disappearance of the artist I think still happens.  A few years ago, a trust dedicated to celebrating the work of the author, Neil Gunn, raised the funding for a major memorial to the author situated above Dingwall.  You will learn a great deal about Neil Gunn if you visit the work, but nothing at all about the identity of the artist.

Perhaps the most impressive and monumental public artwork of recent years in the Highlands and Islands has been a set of memorials to mark the crofting wars in the Western Isles designed by Will MacLean for several sites on Lewis.  The unveiling of these dramatic and imaginative works was a stimulus for large and inclusive community art events at the time.  But just a few years later – now – their presence on the web is virtually zero.  The ability of these memorials to contribute to, even to stimulate, awareness of and debate around the significant events to commemorate has been emasculated.  They are in effect dumb.

Here in Inverness, in the early days of the generosity of National Lottery Funding has made possible the transformation of the relatively low-key premises of Highland Printmakers into a new showcase for contemporary art and ARTM, Inverness. Just a few years later it had closed and the Printmakers had reverted to their original purposes of education and provision facilities.  A highly ambitious and well-funded programme of bold and often international conceptual art has been received by the people of Inverness, not so much with hostility, as with indifference.  The reasons, of course, are in retrospect obvious: a lack of appropriate context, a failure of dialogue, an unwillingness on both sides to engage and participate.

Fast forward to last September and an event held here in the heart of Inverness called 'Imagining the Centre' devised by Matt Baker, lead artist for the City of Inverness Project (we will see it this evening) in tandem in with Inverness's Public Art Co-ordinator, Evi Westmore.  This one-day happening (there is no other word for it) ranged to the thoughtful and the celebratory to the zany and to the bizarre and connected directly and immediately with the widest possible cross section of people out in the streets of the Old Town that Saturday.  That it did so is a tribute to both the dedication of the artists involved, but also to the clarity of purpose behind it, and the open-ended process of dialogue which it initiated and which is still going on.

That event is just one part of what I think is reasonable to describe as an explosion of art in public in the Inverness area.  Perhaps that is an inevitable consequence of the unparalleled growth of this new city.  'Imagining the Centre' proved, I think, how effective such work can be if it is approached in the right spirit and with the right understanding of the role and remit of the artist involved.

So that is why I welcome this programme of seminars so warmly – providing, as they do, an opportunity to step back at this critical time and take stock of issues and challenges which face artists today working in the public arena.  There are probably more artists – and more interesting artists – living and working in the Highlands than ever before.  But as our own recent research has shown, their roles, their identities, their places within their community, are still often unresolved questions.

I would like, if I may, to dedicate this seminar to the memory of our colleague, Evi Westmore, who in less than a year did so much to help foster this current wave of activity and whose tragically early death from cancer has robbed us all of a very rare talent.

It is my pleasure to pass over to Anne Douglas who is Director of the On the Edge programme at Gray's School of Art at Robert Gordon University and ask her to explain the wider context of this seminar programme.

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