Developing the Arts in Orkney

CLARE GEE is the new Arts Development Officer in Orkney. In the first of a two-part conversation with ALISTAIR PEEBLES, Clare and Alistair discussed the situation she has inherited in Orkney.

CLARE GEE TOOK up her post as Arts Development Officer with Orkney Islands Council in May this year, when she moved here from Hartlepool. The new post has been funded by Orkney Islands Council, Orkney Enterprise and the Scottish Arts Council. She is OIC’s first-ever arts officer, and until she was appointed, Orkney was the only local authority in Scotland which lacked an official with direct responsibility for the arts. In spite of that, as everyone knows, for many years the arts in Orkney have been doing very well. It’s a paradox, noted often. This minute indeed, as I write, as if to chirpily underline that paradox, Radio 3 is broadcasting a lunchtime concert by the Nash Ensemble. The concert was recorded during the St Magnus Festival in June this year, in the St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall. What could be better?

To answer that and other questions, Clare Gee and Alistair Peebles entered into the following conversation. It took place during early August, and was conducted by email.
 
Alistair Peebles: Clare, you’re the first arts officer ever to have been appointed in Orkney. Yet it might seem that the arts have been thriving here even in the absence of someone within the council who has a specific remit to look after them, or who knows or cares all that much about them, what their function is and how they should be encouraged. Have we been missing out?

Clare Gee: From what I’ve seen and experienced since being here, the arts have been thriving. Orkney is known for quality – whether that be food, landscape, archaeology, its rich wildlife or its arts, crafts and festivals, and there is a genuine appetite for more arts based opportunities.  People here are incredibly resourceful and determined, and have developed an amazing array of quality arts activities, events and festivals, often through a huge amount of voluntary input and personal motivation.  Significant numbers of artists and makers live in Orkney, and large numbers of local people take part in community drama, festival performances, music and exhibitions.

To name just two organisations, with the St. Magnus Festival, Orkney has an internationally recognised music festival which challenges and delights with its programme, and takes community participation extremely seriously, and the Pier Arts Centre, as well as bringing exciting and challenging contemporary visual art to Orkney and exhibiting work by local artists, holds an internationally important and significant collection of British art. 

“… clearly, people involved in the arts want to see improvements and developments in this area.”

I suppose, with all that going on, you might wonder if there is a need for an Arts Development Officer and if there is anything left to develop. I certainly wouldn’t say that Orkney has been missing out by not having an Arts Development Officer, and the ingenuity and independence that has developed to ensure the arts happen in Orkney is phenomenal, but I would say that there are things that someone with a strategic overview and specific experience of arts development and arts management can add, that will benefit.

AP: It’s interesting that you should mention the Festival and the Pier in the context of a discussion of local initiative. The Pier recently passed its 25th anniversary, and the Festival is now in its 28th year and, as you say, they are held in great esteem locally and internationally. However I was speaking to someone recently who could remember the early days. We were talking about the fact that they both started pretty much at the same time, in the mid-1970s, but we also noted that both were created around ideas which arrived here from outside. The Pier, as you know, was Margaret Gardiner’s inspiration, and – this is not to underplay the importance of the local people who were crucial to the success of both – without the presence of Peter Maxwell Davies, the St Magnus Festival would never have happened.

Clearly the right calibre of local support existed for these developments – their moment had come! – and a lot of imagination and hard work have gone in over the years, but we also remembered the considerable resistance there was to both of them, and the lack of imaginative thinking in some quarters. Heads still shake as keynote philistinisms are recalled. ’Twas ever thus, perhaps. But it’s good that the Council has cottoned on to the importance of those organizations, to what they are in themselves, and to the many benefits they generate for the economy and prestige of the county.

Perhaps nay-sayers serve a useful function – there’s merit in healthy skepticism, and perhaps as you say, it creates ingenuity and independence on the part of those who are at the forefront of making things happen (though it can also be exhausting) – but there’s surely none in being deliberately wrong, I mean in not taking the opportunity to get a wider perspective. For my own part, I am delighted that we now have an Arts Development Officer. I want someone here who can help bring that perspective, make connections. Someone who can help foster and guide arts initiatives in Orkney, whether they originate locally or further afield. Someone who can help the politicians and the rest of us do joined-up thinking, hopefully in partnership. I want utopia now, if not sooner.

So, a strategic overview sounds good to me. Can you sketch in a few details?

CG: I am aware that change can be daunting and stressful for people, and it doesn’t matter where you are – there will be attitudes that everything’s fine as it is so why change?  The Orkney Arts Strategy, written by Brian Beattie, following on from the work he did to audit the arts in Orkney, made over 100 recommendations for developing the arts, so clearly, people involved in the arts want to see improvements and developments in this area.  One of the recommendations was to create the post of Arts Development Officer, with a very strategic remit rather than being a hands-on deliverer of arts activities and I think that reflects the fact that a lot is going on, but as you say, it needs to be joined up.

Having come from the north of England, I have not been involved in the arts here before and don’t have the Orkney-specific long memories, though I have my own and they are comparable in a lot of ways – I was working in Tyne and Wear when the arts development team in Gateshead were struggling to gain support to erect the Angel of the North!  They had the backing of the council, but huge amounts of negativity from the public, and the usual comments about the use of funding to put up a sculpture rather than putting money into schools and hospitals.  The enormous pride that now exists around the Gormley sculpture and the direct relationship it has had with the regeneration of Gateshead proves that the idea was a good one and the people involved were right to stick with it.

I think it can be useful to have a ‘fresh pair of eyes’, and this might sound strange, but being new also gives you a kind of naivety which can be extremely useful – you can be a bit cheeky!

Since I’ve been here I’ve taken a fresh look at the arts strategy and talked to lots and lots of people, including members of the Orkney Arts Forum.  There are a number of general themes, and some specific issues, which seem to be at the top of most people’s priority lists, and I’ve added a couple myself.  This is now evolving into an arts development action plan.  The four general themes are not surprising – develop and increase the opportunities for participation in the arts, ensure that people have access to good quality advice and support in the development of their arts activities, pursue the development of improved and/or new arts venues and raise the profile of the arts in Orkney. 

“But artists of all kinds love coming to Orkney: they get a lot out of their time here, and they give a lot in return.”

Under those headings, or aims if you like, are a number of specific project ideas to, for example, develop community based dance (and other art-form) activity, support volunteers, improve performance and exhibition venues for local performance and to encourage touring to Orkney, create networks and forums for artists to share, communicate and debate, and encourage the use of arts in the delivery of key public services (arts in health for example).

AP: Your story about the Angel of the North, and in particular its connection with regeneration, reminds me of stories I’ve been told about some districts in New York. If they’re rundown, and artists are provided with studios at low rent, then galleries and other businesses move in behind, the area becomes fashionable, property values increase and the general amenity improves. There’s an area in Jersey City whose name I forget where several blocks of difficult urban territory are being given that treatment just now.

Thanks for the detailed answer; I’ll return to some of the comments you made in a moment, but it came to my mind as I was writing, that there’s no publicly supported studio space for visual artists in Orkney at present. (Not that the place is rundown, of course.) The old Academy in Stromness used to serve as studios, but that arrangement came to an end some years ago. Commercial rates for studio rental are high and artists who need that kind of space are generally not sufficiently well off to be able to afford the cost.

I remember, to give one example, that the Sails in St Magnus, which will be hung in the Cathedral again next year during the Festival, were painted in the old school at that time. The space was useful in a general way too, in fostering a sense of community and purpose amongst the artists who worked there. I’ve just had a quick look at the Strategy recommendations, and there do seem to be a few hints of that kind there, for example in recommendations 40 and 78. Maybe the artists should band together and press the case, if they’re not happy working on the kitchen table. A gallery for Kirkwall, much talked about, would be very welcome whatever else happens, but maybe a need more urgent for some artists – and more easily achieved – is work space at a low rent. Nothing fancy. Then as in New York, the galleries, the shops, the beautiful people would follow their trail…

Anyway, to return to what you were saying, I do agree with you about the usefulness of a “fresh pair of eyes”, and I suppose that’s implied in what I was saying about the origins of the Pier and the St Magnus Festival (and the cathedral itself, come to that – not to put you under any pressure…). One of the arts activities that I’ve had a lot to do with is the Writing Fellowship. Apart from their broad and very cost-effective value in education and the wider community, projects such as Poetry in Place (1999) and the Skald festivals (2001 and 2003) happened only because those writers – Janet MacInnes and George Gunn in particular, with Struan Sinclair giving the second Skald a more international flavour – brought the ideas here with them.

Of course their ideas only flourished because of the interest and commitment of local people, but once again they’d never have happened otherwise. There must be many other examples, from the many other festivals that occur in Orkney, that might be quoted as well. That’s not to ignore the enterprise and imagination shown, for example, in the wide commitment to local drama, in the Orkney Traditional Music Project, and in the vitality of the music scene generally. But artists of all kinds love coming to Orkney: they get a lot out of their time here, and they give a lot in return. It’s a great place.

So I think it is excellent that your remit is partly to facilitate those kinds of interventions and awakenings, and I have every hope that what you bring with you to Orkney will find a receptive and supportive public.

The second part of this Conversation will appear in September.

© Clare Gee and Alistair Peebles, 2004