The Other Side of Air

GEORGINA COBURN speaks to DEL WHITTICASE, the first artist in residence as part of The Other Side of Air – Arts & Spirituality project, about his work in the Merkinch community and the installation of his work ‘System’ at Trinity Church in Inverness

GEORGINA COBURN: Can you explain a bit about the project for the uninitiated?

DEL WHITTICASE: ‘The Other Side of Air’ is a series of three 3 month artist residencies based in different churches along the river front in Inverness. The Riverside Churches Committee have got together and organised this as a way of addressing the theme of spirituality within a contemporary cultural and social context.

They advertised for three different artists to come to the city and spend three months here working with different community groups but also creating a piece of work or series of works of their own that address the theme. Each artist will exhibit their work at the end of the three months and there are also plans to exhibit all three works together in January at the end of the initial pilot project.

GC: What initially attracted you to apply for the residency?

DW: I think there has always been an element of spirituality in my work, so I was interested in the theme but I was also interested in working in different spaces. The way I like to work is to be given a set of different criteria to address, to figure out and explore and from that build a project from the ground up.

It shapes the materials I use, it gives me the aesthetic and the way of working and I explore that and develop a piece of work from that inspiration. I was interested in doing that and working with interesting spaces like the inside of a church.

GC: Quite a loaded space for a lot of people.

DW: I was going to say loaded but I was also going to say charged, it has different connotations for different people. I like the idea of using space in a different way, in a related way, but in a very different way as well. At the start of the project I spent a lot of time in Inverness Cathedral and St Mary’s to experience the space.

I think that the process or search for spirituality and the creative process are very closely related and I wanted to put those two elements together in the context of the project. I also thought that the project is a different approach to contemporary art – art these days is quite consumer orientated. It struck me as a very valid approach to making contemporary art and having it shown.

GC: It also feels quite apt at this stage of development in Inverness to have a pilot project of this kind taking place, that tests the boundaries. What were your first impressions when you arrived in Inverness?

DW: I thought it was a really interesting city, there’s a feel- like something is just about to happen here. There’s a real will, a real push and a momentum to make things happen here culturally as well as in terms of the streetscapes and environmentally. There are a lot of artists in the area who want this to happen. It is a really interesting time to be here working on a project like this.

GC: You have been working with a number of individuals and community groups including the Merkinch Art Group and Inverness Sowing Group during your residency. What has the process of working in the Merkinch community been like so far?

DW: It’s been great. At the beginning of my residency I came to the opening of the McCreadie Suite at the Merkinch Community Centre and I was absolutely bowled over, firstly by the facilities they have but also by the momentum of work that people do in the community, the goodwill to make things happen for the community, from the community.

On that night there were different performances and there was a great willingness to participate, so I thought that was great and I was really looking forward to working with the people there. Going into a community cold is a difficult experience, because it is cohesive and established and possibly closed to a certain extent.

I could have done with more time to ease my way in to the community for them to get used to me, to build up a rapport and a relationship so that we can begin to trust each other in order to explore the trickier aspects of the project’s them. There are some great people in Merkinch, great characters and it would be great to have more time to spend with them.

GC: What has your contact with the church been like at Trinity?

DW: I have had quite a lot of contact with the minister there, Alistair Murray, who is on the steering group. Alistair is fantastic – he has been amazing and very supportive. He is allowing us to use the actual church space for the installation. When I was developing the idea for the “System” installation I wanted to contextualise it within a faith space, a spiritual space or environment.

It made sense to place the work within a church so people who may not necessarily go into a church may go in, experience the peace and quiet of the church but also help people to make the connection between the work, the imagery I’m using and the context and theme of the project. Placing the piece in the church means altering the space quite radically. Tricky logistically but also a sensitive issue in terms of people who use the church on a regular basis. It’s their space and a sanctuary for a lot of people.
 
GC: How has this project compared to other public works that you have undertaken?

DW: It has been demanding in terms of the timescale. To devise, develop and deliver two different projects from scratch, three months full time (50% work in the community and 50% creating a new piece of work) is demanding, quite tough at times. Finding a way of talking about spirituality and dealing with the theme has been interesting as well. The work I have done previously has been large public commissions so by their nature they have to be strong and durable, a lot of the work I have been making over the last couple of years has been quite physical.

GC: So has this been more of an interior process on various levels for you?

DW: It has been a very interior process in terms of developing the work and in terms of developing the community side, in a way that was relevant to people and gave people an in road to get a handle on the project and start to explore it physically rather than start by asking the bigger questions which can scare a lot of people off!

I needed to find a way of gently and visually exploring that and then exploring the theme more broadly. The installation piece that I’m making is quite introspective and I hope it will encourage the people who experience it to be introspective. The piece is reflective and experiential, not just something you look at but a new experience, so you can go inside it and experience it both inside and out.

That experience of inside and outside is definitely an element to this and possibly a lot of my other work. I wanted to use the weather to talk about spirituality. I wanted to bring the weather inside the church, but also enable people to go inside the piece, so you have almost a kind of Russian doll effect.

This was deliberate, connecting us to a macrocosmic and microcosmic element and exploring our place within that. This is the first time I have used projection in my work. The images I’m using are satellite images that come from outside beamed back inside the church and then we are able to go inside the piece as well and experience it individually as an internal journey too.

GC: Interesting that you chose the weather as an element in the work – in Scotland it’s something we all talk about endlessly, but we are less likely to openly discuss the bigger questions day to day. It’s an interesting way in.

DW: That’s exactly why I chose it. The aspect of interconnection, that we are part of nature, part of a bigger global picture. I chose the weather because it’s universal, we can all relate to it, it is usually the first port of call when we meet someone, it’s something we all experience, it is all about us on an everyday level.

GC: And we don’t have control over it either.

DW: We try to predict it which is an interesting prospect, a very human need to predict and control things – that link between the everyday world and another world or another level of ourselves.

GC: How have people responded to the idea of spirituality during the project?

DW: On the whole very positively. A lot of people have picked it up and really gone with it and have started to explore their own relationship to spirituality or their own religion, so I think that it has touched quite a lot of people in a way that I wasn’t expecting.

GC: Has the baseline been religion or has it been individual responses to ideas of faith or spirituality?

DW: Spirituality. Some people have contextualised the project within their own faith or religion but for most people it seems to have been expansive, looking at wider issues of spirituality. In the context of Inverness I think the churches have been very brave in asking people to come and do this, holding a mirror up to themselves to some degree and looking at spirituality in ways they may not have thought about previously.

It is a brave, very relevant and valid thing for them to do. I think they are all aware of dwindling congregations. By approaching the church from a cultural angle it can perhaps open that door a little bit more.
 
GC: How do you see the project developing, what do you think its legacy might be?

DW: Possibly an opening up of the congregations and the community. If you look along the river there are a lot of churches. It would be interesting to work out how much spiritual space there is, it is a lot of space that people could be accessing for their well being and good. On the whole they’re not.

I would like to think that the project would help open up those spaces but also people perhaps going in and experiencing them. They don’t have to be religious. To have a church or chapel open and to be able to go into it, to sit quietly, think, to just slow down – that was another point that interested me about this project, the element of slowing people down.

GC: Which is part of creative process as well, to focus in a way that you don’t get the opportunity to as part of modern everyday life.

DW: I think people have forgotten how to and yet there are these spaces that people can access to help reinstate that, allow people to experience peace, quiet and reflection. Having done a number of large scale permanent works in the past I really feel that this is the way to go with temporary public installation.

GC: Why is that?

DW: A number of reasons really, from an artistic point of view there’s more freedom and you can address more complex issues.

GC: With permanent public works engagement with materials, engineering and structural concerns are central and take a lot of time and energy.

DW: Those things also dictate what you can do to some extent. There are tighter parameters, and not only that but I think that there is a civic responsibility in putting a work out there that people have to live with. When you’re dealing with temporary installation you can deal with more contentious issues, people don’t have to live with it. They can go to it and they either like it or don’t like it.

GC: But they have been exposed to a different point of view. It also breaks down barriers to contemporary art that may be challenging to an audience.

DW: Absolutely. The more you do that the more people are exposed to different ways of working, aspects of art or thinking that makes it easier to put more challenging work out in the public domain. Having art accepted in a public context is an important aspect of my practice. That element of addressing different issues in a temporary context and in a site specific way is very important to me.

‘System’, an art installation by Del Whitticase in Trinity Church, Inverness, will be open to the public from 1-6 October. An exhibition of community work as part of The Other Side of Air project will take place in the Methodist Church Hall (upstairs), Huntly Street on 2 and 3 October.

For more information about the project contact: Susan Christie, Project Manager, susechristie@gmail.com

© Georgina Coburn, 2007

Links

• Del Whitticase at Axisweb