Vestiges Park - Glasgow Visit

One of my favourite things from the trip to Glasgow was the visit to this temporary park, Vestiges Park. A group of artists took over a piece of wasteland next to the sculpture studios for the time of the glasgow international art fair and turned it into a sculpture park.

We were introduced to Kirsty Shindler from Low Salt and some of her collegues who help to look after and build the park.

One of the freakiest things in the park was this shed, it was filled with hands. The hand on the door was disgusting, so realistic and squashy, bleugh!

One cool interactive part of the park was making plastercine models and postioning them in this rockery. I made a whalephone. There were some really intersting little models in there.


I loved how these artists had turned what was a dump into something with beauty and mystery. As you walked through this park you wondered what was coming next and the witty nature of the art works here was intreguing.

Glasgow Sculpture Studios

We were shown around the sculpture studios by Naill Mcdonald. We saw the exhibition of Jimmy Durham who had been doing a residency there. He had focussed on scottish history and created witty work on that theme with golf references reaccuring in most pieces. Duram regually collects things on the streers and likes to use things that are rugged and cheap in his work, which gives the objetcs more interest.

We were also shown around the actual studios and all the facilities there. Naill showed us his studio, it was a fair size but the whole building was really cold, I don't think I could have worked there all that happily. We really do take our college facilities for granted.

David Noonan Speil - Glasgow Visit

We were introduced to Kendall Koppe from the Washington Garcia gallery by Naill MacDonald whilst at the Mitchell Library. There was an exhibition by David Noonan Speil there and we were given a talk by Kendall. David Noonan Speil collects imagery from mysterious sources, often with quite a sinister dialogue. He likes ambiguity and is influenced by stage props and theatre. The pieces in this exhibition are silk screens on fabrics.

GLASGOW!!!!!!!

I went on the trip to Glasgow with college recently. It was really useful and I learnt quite a bit about the types of studio artists outside of college use and the kinds of materials they use.


This plaster piece with lights in was quite interesting because it reminded me of mine and Ruth's sculputres.

Recent Exhibition in College Cafe.

I recently took a look at the exhibition that was taking place in the mosaic cafe in college. There was a group show on of artists who had been working around the college for several months and we had gotten to know a couple of them through working in the plaster workshop on a daily basis.

I was intregued by the way that this piece had been displayed, just simply by balancing them on a metal rod just crudely screwed to the wall. Somehow it seemed to suit this way of being displayed however odd it appeared. I was trying to think of how else these pieces could have been displayed and thought about perhaphs stacking them like a brick wall.


The spaceship piece had clearly had a lot of time and effort put into building and painting the spaceship and the level of detail on the spaceman inside was quite impessive. The projection piece inside was very difficlut to make out though, I couldn't decide whether this was because of the shape of the screen or because the room behind wasn't dark enough. Perhaphs the artist intended the video to be hard to see.

I had seen this piece in its upright form, as a teepee not too long before the exhibition. However the whole thing seemed to have died a little. I wasn't sure if this was intentional or not, but from the drawings along side the piece it showed it in an upright form so I guessed it hadn't meant to be this way. There was something strangely intreguing about the thing as it was though, I wanted to peer to see if anyone was trapped underneath. I hope me and Ruth are not faced with this kind of situation at our exhibition, packing will be essential.

The fish tank was my favourite piece at this exhibition. I was viewing this piece on a really sunny day and this helped to enhance the light and dark of the gravel giving off an amazing pink glow. Larna had chosen the perfect spot for this type of piece, it really was site specific due to the whole glass box thing like that of the fish tank.

Not Quite

During our sessions in the lighting workshop we have tried lots of different layouts for displaying our sculptures. Ruth and I have decided to ignore the beatle sculpture because he is too delicate and heavy to move to the exhibition site, but keep the 4 other sculptures.

The best layout that we have found is to have all 4 sculptures in a circle facing each other, leaving the viewer feeling as if they are left out as they appear to be plotting against us. This sinister feel fits nicely into the overall theme of the piece. We want the whole thing to be ambiguous as to whether they lay in the realms of reality or still in a dream-like state.

We have decided that to have the wires and bulbs showing seems to add something to the piece, it adds to the rawness and ambiguous nature of the piece. Now our issue is to find out once we get to the site whether we need just one central bulb, or to have 4 bulbs for each sculpture, we will asses this when we see how the lighting is in the space.

The title has been something that we have been thinking about for some time, but everytime we try to tell anybody about our piece we always say the phrase "Not Quite", for example: "well they're not quite smooth because we want them to seem raw and like they're not quite real" so we have pretty much come to the decision that "Not Quite" is the title.

Currently we are building wooden stretchers for transporting each creature to and from the exhibition space and working on how to wrap them in the most secure way.

Parcel Tags

It has been decided that for our exhibition we are going to create fliers from already exsisting fliers, painting them white and then screen printing ontop with our details. Recycling, cheap but probably slightly illegal, but we can probably get past that.

We also want to hand out parcel tags with details of our show being screen printed onto them. These tags can be left is strategic places and adds to the theme of lost property.

It has been my mission to buy the tags, 250 for handing out for marketing purposes but also another 1000 tags to use as a window display. By hanging the tags in the windows at the space it will mean that people are not only drawn to them (kind of as an art piece) but also means they can't see inside the shop very well, which will hopefully drag them inside.

I eventually settled on the site http://www.theessentialscompany.co.uk/ to buy the tags from. They are cheap and have a huge range of different sizes and colours, not to mention lots of other useful things from string to different papers. The parcel arrived within about 2 days of ordering them which I thought was good.

The only other main issue we currently have for getting these fliers and tags out there is getting enough support to get them printed. WE NEED YOUR HELP! Some of the marketing people have contributed literally nothing so I hope they at least show their faces this week.