Author: Diana Sykes

Causing Chaos

September 2010 saw the opening of a significant Fife Contemporary Art & Craft (as we were then known) exhibition at St Andrews Museum. Although arrestingly titled Causing Chaos, the show had been very carefully planned for over a year and thankfully no chaos was involved in its delivery!

At that time, Creative Scotland wanted to encourage ambition in craft programming and we were fortunate to secure some special funding to achieve this. Following research, two projects were developed, the Marzee Collection and Causing Chaos. Both exhibitions allowed us to explore the dialogue between craft and visual art which lies at the core of our programme.

Claire Barclay

Visual artist Claire Barclay was invited to curate the show she eventually named Causing Chaos. In her own practice she shows an interest in materiality and craft techniques, often collaborating with people who have very specialist making skills. We were intrigued to discover who she would select, according to her own sensibilities and interests, to highlight craft as an art form. Unsurprisingly perhaps, she gravitated towards objects which pushed the possibilities of varied materials and shared approaches explored in her own sculptural practice. In her introduction to the exhibition Claire identified the artists’ common concerns expressed through “works which question or alter the way we perceive and use common everyday things” and present “dysfunction, invention and eccentricity”.

An exciting international group of artists from the United States to Germany was brought together by the project: ceramics by Johannes Nagel, Susanne Petzold, and Richard Slee; jewellery/metalwork by Shari Pierce, Estela Saez Vilanova, and Hans Stofer; sculpture by Claire Barclay, Siobhán Hapaska and Jane Simpson. 

Symposium

In addition to workshops for the public an accompanying symposium was held to provide an enjoyable professional development event for artists. It allowed us to bring Richard Slee, Hans Stofer, Shari Pierce, Estela Saez Vilanova and Jane Simpson to Scotland as speakers. Roddy Mathieson’s Mobile Foundry also visited the lovely Kinburn Park surrounding St Andrews Museum for the day. This introduced artists attending the symposium to each other through some collaborative making in the form of cuttlefish casting – an activity which echoed the exhibition’s blend of art and craft.

Circular Economy

Working with Claire Barclay on all aspects of the exhibition was a privilege and a joy. Her meticulous attention to detail extended to designing display equipment with James McLardy and Sam Kennedy which formed an installation bringing the exhibits together as a whole. Following the St Andrews show the display equipment was donated to another art organisation and the components were re-used in many subsequent exhibitions, including the prestigious Crafts Council Collect show in London. This chimes with our forthcoming exhibition at Kirkcaldy Galleries in 2021 which is inspired by the principles of the Circular Economy.

The exhibition publication is available from Fife Contemporary’s online shop (£8.50 & p+p).

Lockdown Posts 3

“The year of living differently.” Dr Margaret Harris (World Health Organisation)

20/20 vision means perfect sight and provided a handy title for a range of forward plans when 2020 was still in the future. We’re now half way through a year full of the unforeseeable. Locked-down in our homes for many weeks we are now permitted and encouraged to gradually emerge. The images here record some of the moments of experimentation and joy experienced by the Fife Contemporary team during confinement.

Our lives changed dramatically with the closing-in of the pandemic and we must now consider the possible shape of the future. Undercut throughout by uncertainty we navigate the language of the new normal and blended or hybrid activity. Interestingly, using language associated with museums and galleries, a pub owner asked by the BBC about how to leave lockdown safely, described it having to be a ‘curated experience’. We may try to carefully plan the process as we would an exhibition but we will have to engage with an increasingly complex and challenging context.  

Colliding with Covid-19 are the longer-standing crises of Climate Emergency and Black Lives Matter. The momentous challenge is to find a symbiotic way forward to address these seemingly distinct but related issues, locally and globally. The explosion of actions triggered by the death of George Floyd reminds us of the still open wound of racism, at its most acute for people of Black heritage. Covid-19 has disproportionately affected people of Black, Asian and minority ethnic heritage. The effects of the pandemic have also brought into focus social injustice more generally.

Climate heroine Greta Thunberg interviewed by Justin Rowlatt for the BBC stated that the only positive that could come out of the coronavirus pandemic would be if it changes how we deal with global crises: “It shows that in a crisis, you act, and you act with necessary force.” and that society has “passed a social tipping point, we can no longer look away from what our society has been ignoring for so long whether it is equality, justice or sustainability”.

BBC radio has been trying to address our multi-faceted challenge through their Rethink series featuring the responses of a range of guests. There is an opportunity, and necessity, to do things differently.  It feels as if we have reached a crucial point in human and social evolution.

At first my own view was that we needed the leadership of a profound and all-encompassing political vision. Realistically, the multiple fractures from the local to the international prevent this. As individuals we will have to take responsibility in both our personal and professional lives. We can find collaborators with whom to make a multitude of perhaps small but cumulative positive actions.

As part of this, creative practice can provide both comfort and challenge. We need to cherish humanity in all its diversity while recognising the damage caused by our anthropocentric world and making changes. Artists can highlight and inspire through their work in exploring, exposing and imagining our lives and our interaction with our environment. Three artists, in their eloquence with language as well as image, have recently expressed shared thoughts more eloquently than I can:

 Artist and poet Alec Finlay suggests in a blog for disabilityarts.online that “If we’re serious about making a new world then we need to learn more than one lesson at a time. We need recuperative forms of imagination.”

An Artnet interview by Taylor Defoe with Anicka Yi raises the issue that there is an alternative viewpoint of the earth from the human-centred one – difficult but timely to contemplate as humanity experiences a pandemic. The artist brings us back to human responsibility: “…historically viruses have wiped out a lot of the population – that’s just how they work. I feel that the virus’s work is a lot less treacherous and malevolent than the kind of violence that we inflict on each other as humans, as a society. To me, the virus is not really personal. It’s the social injustice that is.”

When challenged about the possible role of the artist at this time she responds: “I would say that, as an artist, I am not some sort of siloed, isolated entity…I think that artists can ask the difficult questions and demand a lot of accountability…We can’t do anything alone. We make an artwork and want to speak with an audience, that requires a symbiotic relationship.”

Lastly, in an interview for the Royal Academy by Louise Cohan, Lubaina Himid describes her current work which presents a hopeful and healing way to think of humanity coming together: “I’m currently working on a very, long, thin painting of about 60 different patterns, that will, I hope, go all the way around the room at a museum in Brussels; a Japanese pattern next to a Nigerian pattern, next to an Austrian pattern. You’ll see connections between them, and the point I’m trying to make is about the world we live in – that there are conversations to be had between these different patterns. It’s not an impossible combination. It’s not an impossible world.”

Double Visions – Contemporary Art from Papua New Guinea

In 2010 we presented what was probably the first exhibition dedicated to contemporary art from Papua New Guinea (PNG) in Scotland. The impetus was the University of St Andrews hosting the European Society of Oceanists’ conference. Its organiser Dr Tony Crook was also on Fife Contemporary’s Board and he set us the challenge of discovering work we had previously been completely unaware of.

• Details of the 2010 conference
• Downloadable booklet from the 2010 conference

The exhibition was initially shown at Kirkcaldy Galleries in late spring then came to the University of St Andrews’ Gateway Gallery for the summer:

• 15 May – 20 June 2010  Kirkcaldy Galleries
• 3 July – 14 August 2010 Gateway Galleries, University of St Andrews

An exhibition created by Canada’s Alcheringa Gallery with London’s Rebecca Hossack Gallery provided the core and was complemented by a focus on Mathias Kauage OBE (1944-2003) who had worked in Europe. The relatively recent development of a practice, involving the interaction between local tradition and imported concepts of innovation and techniques, was fascinating and prompted a more open comparison and evaluation of work from different cultures. Echoing our own interests, there was also a weaving together of visual art and craft.

Unexpected connections with Scotland quickly surfaced. Kauage had been a guest at the royal opening of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art and had consequently painted some colourful images of the Queen with her handbag always featuring prominently! A Scot, Tom Craig, had been instrumental in developing art education in PNG where he was the first Director of the National Art School. He had also arranged for fellow Scot Archie Brennan, who was then working in Australia, to come over to mastermind the decoration of the new Parliament Building constructed as part of PNG’s gaining independence in 1975. Brennan worked with local craft artists to produce impressive results. Attempts to track down Tom Craig during the development of the exhibition had sadly failed. However, contact with Archie Brennan, then based in the US, resulted in our being put in touch with Tom who was now back in Scotland. It was a particular joy to bring him to the conference where he renewed his connections with PNG and was acclaimed as family.

Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh is currently planning a major Archie Brennan (1931-2019) exhibition celebrating an artist and master weaver who was once their Director. A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to enable this to happen and if you would like to contribute, please use this link.