Imagining The City

EVI WESTMORE is the Public Arts Coordinator for Inverness City Partnership, and heads the team which will mount the Public Art Day in the city this month, as well as several other major art-inspired contributions to the regeneration project.

EVI STUDIED painting in her native USA before spending time travelling and working at a variety of jobs, including high-end Venetian plastering in New York. She attended Glasgow School of Art for two years as a post-graduate student, and worked on public art projects at a gallery in Sweden before successfully applying for the three-year post of Public Art Coordinator with Inverness City Partnership. She took up her position in October last year.

NORTHINGS: Evi, how did you come across this job in the first place? I wouldn’t imagine it was widely advertised in Sweden.

EVI WESTMORE: I found it on the Scottish Arts Council website. I had decided it was time I found a real job, and I think I just did a search on the internet for Public Art Jobs, and found this one. I was either right on deadline or a little bit late for it, and I wrote to them and said that I thought no one person could do this job, so I’d be interested if you needed a little extra help! They asked me to come for an interview, which was very exciting. I had been to Inverness once before as a tourist, and I loved the Highlands, so I had an idea of what I was getting into.

N: What is your remit as Public Art Coordinator?

EW: My remit is to deliver public arts projects within the wider regeneration scheme throughout the city, and also in other private developments as well.

I’m hoping people will see their city in a different way, and engage with it in a different way, and it may encourage them to think more about what they see through the artist’s work

N: ‘Imagining the Centre’, the Public Art Day in Church Street, is going to be the first major public manifestation of the project. How did it come about?

EW: The regeneration project for the old town is a £6 million project, and about £240,000 was originally set aside for the provision of gateway features, but City Partnership and others decided that was maybe not the best way to go about it. We might end up with some gateway features around the old town, but they might not be all that interesting, and wouldn’t do much in terms of drawing out an identity for the area, so we came up with the Public Art Day instead.

N: Who is running the project?

EW: The team is myself; Matt Baker, who is the lead artist; and Susan Christie, who is a very experienced arts coordinator and project manager. She has been going non-stop since she came in a couple of months ago to get all the permissions signed off and everything else. The artists themselves have been working on quite a short time-scale as well. They only began working on it in March.

N: What is Matt Baker’s role?

EW: He is the curator, or the director might be more accurate. He has creative control over what happens on the project, although we all discuss it – it’s important that the three of us are in accord with what we want to do. Before I arrived an art consultant was hired, and she created the idea and an application to the Arts Council for funding to employ a lead artist for the project, so when I came into post we had funding in place towards that, and I pursued getting an artist.

N: What was the brief for that post?

EW: We wrote a brief that was deliberately very broad. We included just about every possibility – permanent public art, temporary artworks, ephemeral works, just plain research and getting people together, encouraging socially engaged practices – we basically left it open for whoever rose to the top of this process.

N: And that was Matt?

EW: We selected Matt from a really impressive short list of genuinely world class artists who were interested in this project. That was fantastic, given that Inverness doesn’t have any real reputation for this kind of art project, and doesn’t even have a proper gallery. They saw the potential for the city and for what they could do for it. This was a city in a moment of transition, and for an artist with the right kind of practice, it was a great opportunity.

N: Why was Matt the right man?

EW: Matt ticked all the boxes. He is comfortable making or commissioning permanent work, he is very committed to socially engaged work, and he has run big projects. He can do it all, basically, and he is very interested in seeing people come together and do it in an inspired way, and one that will genuinely reflect this city and its people. So we knew that he had this need as an artist to work on public art and to work with groups of people.

N: Tell us a bit about ‘Imagining the City’, the event on 9 September.

EW: The original plan was quite modest. We sent out a call for artists on a fairly local basis, and were amazed at the number and quality of responses we got. We originally envisaged six, but we ended up with fourteen, and what we did was to pair them off into two-person teams.

N: Even if they hadn’t worked together before?

EW: Often the artists didn’t actually know each other before they were paired off, never mind worked together. I think one perhaps unintended but excellent outcome of that has been that it has taken some of the artists out of their own established practice and allowed them to focus on Inverness and the specific project itself. They have looked deeply into it, and I think we’ll find they have drawn out material from the city in their own way, and some of it will be very surprising, I think.
 
N: Did you lay down specifications for them or were they given freedom to come up with whatever they wanted?

EW: We gave them carte blanche to do what they wanted, although we obviously knew what kind of work they did, so we had some preconceptions or expectations along those lines.

N: Artists can be perverse, though.

EW: They can! We gave them as much freedom as we could, and a miniscule budget for their fee and for materials, and they had to work within that. That was very much part of the challenge, to see what they could do on pretty much pure energy and enthusiasm alone, and I think they have all pushed it to the limits of what they could achieve.

N: Do you think the project might act as a seeding agent for more work?

EW: I think it already has. Even the fact that we have brought these artists together has been a big step towards that aim. Bringing them together alone has been valuable, and it will be fascinating to see how this project influences what the artists go on to do, whether in collaborations or on their own. I feel it is a great opportunity for all of them to develop their work as artists.

N: So what will be happening on the day?

EW: There will be a series of works in Church Street, some of which will be quite large and in-your-face, and others much smaller – in fact, you may actually have to find them. It will run all day, and some of the works will change as we move into the evening. There is one that will evolve at 8pm when the church bells ring, for example. By the time it is dark we will have big projections by Gavin Lockhart on to buildings, and there will be an event in the old churchyard that will also involve projections, and another at Abertarff House.

N: Were all the proposals viable – nobody wanted to dig up Church Street or knock down the church or anything?

EW: It’s interesting you should say that, because we did have a proposal to dig up Church Street. And hey, we looked into it, but we couldn’t do it within our budget. We could have if we had had the money, though – nothing is impossible!

N: But otherwise they were all manageable?

EW: I’d say that we managed to make everything work, and we had to give and take a bit along the way, so some of the projects had to be tweaked a little. No one has really tried to prevent us from doing this work – on the contrary, everyone has been as helpful as they could be, and when we did get a ‘no’ on something, we knew it really was no, because everyone had been so behind it. There can be resistance to public money being spent on art, but we haven’t had that here. I think it helped that the artists involved brought a real sense of integrity to it.

N: Are they all Highland-based?

EW: Yes, but that wasn’t a formal prerequisite. We didn’t advertise it widely, but we got around 40 serious proposals with project outlines, which was amazing. Just under half of the artists are based in or around Inverness itself, and others across the Highlands, including Thurso and Skye. (See below for full list of artists and projects).

N: What do you hope that Invernessians will get from this project?

EW: I’m hoping they will see their city in a different way, and engage with it in a different way, and it may encourage them to think more about what they see through the artist’s work. A city, especially in a rural area, is a really vital thing, but it is easy to take it for granted.

N: Especially a city where the visual arts infrastructure is very incomplete.

EW: That is an ongoing problem, but it’s a huge one to fix. Building a major gallery needs a huge amount of public funding and backing, you can’t just decide to do it. There is a lot of work going on toward that objective, but it’s not going to happen overnight. A city of this size needs one, but it needs to evolve in its own way and be suitable for this city, because it’s not just like everywhere else..

N: You made the point earlier that the day is part of the bigger Public Art project – what else is going on?

EW: Lots! We’ve been working on the Centre for Health Science at Raigmore, where Jacqui Donnachie has been working as a lead artist since last year. She has a very socially engaged practice in the past, and has been interested in how people will interact in this building, and has been working with them to maximise the possibilities, so she is working in a integrated way on key decisions within the design of the actual building itself, rather than just putting artwork into the building, but she has also commissioned a work by Christine Borland for it. It is going to be an iconic, important building, and she wants important work in it. The Ness Islands project is well underway at this stage, and we are working on a community garden at UHI’s administrative building in Ness Bank. And Matt is still working on permanent artworks as well.

N: What is the time-scale for those?

EW: He has about another six months or so to get the permanent artworks project completed. He is making at least one, with probably another two commissions. A lot of the research that has been done for ‘Imagining the Centre’ is going to feed into the permanent works.

IMAGINING THE CENTRE takes place from 11am-11pm on 9 September in Church Street, Inverness. 

Projects planned for the day are:-

Cape Reality by Graeme Roger and Jeep Solid: A Multi-media performance featuring one of the city’s prodigal musician sons. Cape Reality draws on a personal Highland genealogy within the highly charged historical context of the Old Kirkyard. Performance at 10pm

Lorg by Caroline Dear and Rosie Newman: Installation featuring materials from the landscape surrounding Inverness, and featuring the songs of birds that would have lived in the Old Town when it was simply the bank of the River Ness.

Sea Eagle-Prey-Pray by Sam Barlow and John McGeoch: A giant steel Sea Eagle dives on Church St. During the day a hidden camera gathers images that are combined with footage from the natural landscape for an evening projection work with live music accompaniment. Performance at 9pm.

One Day Revolution by Dufi and Sophie McCook: The streets of the Old Town are infused with radical messages from the past and future of Inverness. Look out for giant banners, wall paintings and the reincarnation of the city’s lost Victorian statues ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’

Our Hidden Heroes by Dean Melville and Evelyn Pottie with First Impressions: Contemporary portraits of local personalities accumulate in the weeks preceding ‘Imagining the Centre’, resulting in a unique interpretation of the city as a whole.

to the power of by Gavin Lockhart: Powerful projection work showing the generation of power as one facet of the complex relationship between an urban centre to the landscape surrounding it.

I Built This City by Gordon Urquhart: A sound collage of local voices, opinions and memories about Inverness.

What’s Pants About Inverness? by Sarah Barnes: Your opportunity to air your opinions and ideas about your city through the unlikely medium of artistic underwear.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2006