NWSP 2013

N e w W o r k S c ot l a n d P R O gramme 2 0 1 3

New Work Scotland Programme 2013 23.02 – 24.03.2013 / p. 4

Calvin laing 23.02 – 24.03.2013 / p. 10

Conor Kelly Pentimentos and Soda 06.04 – 05.05.2013 / p. 16

Shona Macnaughton Every Translator is a Traitor 06.04 – 05.05.2013 / p. 22

Tom Varley Violence. Silence.

18.05 – 26.05.2013 / p. 28

Rachel Maclean Over The Rainbow critical Discource Intern / p. 34

James Bell

curatorial development intern / p. 44

Frances Stacey

Foreword

Since its launch in 2000 Collective’s New Work Scotland Programme (NWSP) has supported groups of creative practitioners, reflecting current movements in visual art in Scotland. NWSP is central to Collective’s programme, with five artists and two interns selected though open submission by a new panel each year.

Throughout its history, the structure of NWSP has adapted and developed to remain a relevant and productive opportunity for emergent art practitioners. In 2013 the major development was the inclusion of two six-month internships, focusing on Curatorial Practice and Critical Discourse. Both interns worked with the team at Collective and were supported to develop their own programme of exhibitions, events and texts. The internships enriched the programme and delivered exciting projects including a solo exhibition by artist Andy Holden, the event series The Sunday Driver and this annual.

Opportunities for discussion, peer support and knowledge exchange are at the heart of the NWSP programme. The selected group participated in regular discussions facilitated by writer and curator Steven Cairns, this complemented a host of other developmental opportunities including: a retreat to Hospitalfield House, Arbroath; residency at Studio Voltaire, London and studio visits with the Collective team.

Throughout NWSP 2013 Collective commited to fostering discussion and support not only within the group of selected participants but also with a wider audience 2

through a series of public events. This included two public discussion events, held at Tramway and Collective, considering how organisations support the development of new work from emergent practitioners. We were delighted to welcome a host of speakers to reflect on their experiences, including artists: Rachel Adams, Craig Coulthard, Tessa Lynch, Fiona Jardine and Sarah Tripp along with representatives from organisations: Devrim Bayar (Weils), Daniella King (MASS), Nuno Sacramento (SSW), Max Slaven (David Dale Gallery and Studios).

These discussions were incredibly useful and inspiring for all at Collective, and will help us develop the programme in the future.

In the summer of 2013 Collective moved from Cockburn Street to the Calton Hill City Observatory.

Our new venue offers us an exciting context in which to maintain and strengthen our commitment to supporting emergent artists in Scotland. We look forward to implementing changes to NWSP including a name change to Satellites Programme. Taking place throughout the year and housed in a dedicated space in our new premises the Satellites Programme will sit alongside Collective’s programme of national and international exhibitions.

Over the last thirteen years NWSP has been a pivotal opportunity for emergent artists in Scotland.

At Collective we look forward to the future of Satellites Programme to develop new art and conversations for all to participate in.

Siobhan Carroll Programme Manager, Collective 3

Foreword

Calvin Laing 23.02 – 24.03.2013

Calvin Laing’s practice considers the relationship between documentation, performance to camera and live performance. For his NWSP exhibition Calvin created a series of works in which he presented himself as the protagonist, playing an exaggerated and extended alter-ego. He carries out performances in the public realm and the interaction with the public, which often happens off-camera, is identified as an important part of the process.

In his work Calvin interrupts the mise en scène with incongruous actions, which have an anti-climactic result, as in Calvin & Drylaw, where he runs towards a roundabout near his home, and has a rather pathetic fall, surprising and confusing the co-opted lollipop lady. In the exhibition at Collective Calvin presented his performances in different formats, playing with the idea of documentation and authenticity, making the viewer an active participant in questioning the validity of what they are seeing.

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Calvin & Steph (how was your day?), 2013 Digital print and performance, developed in collaboration with Stephanie Mann

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Calvin Laing

Calvin & Drylaw, 2013 Digital print on aluminium, 41 x 63 cm

Calvin & Tube, 2013 Video still, video loop, 47 secs

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Calvin & Samuel, 2013 Performance, Tramway, Glasgow

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Calvin Laing

James & Calvin […] the feedback coil of video seems to be the instrument of a double repression: for through it consciousness of temporality and of separation between subject and object are simultaneously submerged. The result of this submergence is, for the maker and the viewer of most video-art, a kind of weightless fall through the suspended space of narcissism. ( Krauss, 1974)1 I enter the Dean (I prefer the name Modern Two but the Dean carries with it a certain colloquial currency that should suggest my familiarity with galleries in Edinburgh), with a loose sense of direction. I make my way to the first floor, briefly pausing at a sign confirming The Scottish Colourist Series: SJ Peploe exhibition is upstairs (the pause, to avoid being confused with an unfamiliarity with the Dean, is coupled with a confident stride both to and from the sign). I collect the tickets and wait on the staircase behind the glass door entrance to the exhibition. Calvin calls to say he has arrived and is going to use the toilet. A few moments later Calvin bounds up the stairs entering stage left.

We tour the exhibition, Calvin draws my attention to Peploe’s Still Life with Coffee Pot, c.1905, a work with such implied importance it is reproduced on the poster image. From poster to oil on canvas we travel from one room to the next, Calvin leads me excitedly to a fireplace adorned with the Coffee Pot (I can’t be certain it is the Coffee Pot but the surrounding glass cabinet gives 8

a fairly strong indication that this Coffee Pot has contextual importance). A validation of the real, an object that demarcates the realness of the oil on canvas – this actually happened, SJ Peploe actually painted this Coffee Pot. The experience is subjugated by my inability to have witnessed, in body, the genesis of this reality.

SJ Peploe is therefore left holding all the cards, retaining an authorship of control over any perceived reality within his works.

Calvin establishes and reigns over a discursive enquiry into the reality of his work, offering not an inanimate object up as proof of this reality but rather his body – absent or present in video, photograph and performance. The moments that populate the work, often sited in public, offer another form of validation, with contingencies of time and place: voices shouting ‘Yes!’, a lollipop lady off-camera in dismay, further reinforcing that these events happened. Even if that ‘Yes!’ is added posthumously to the moment, the means to an end are one and the same – a manufactured still life, a flattening of time that simultaneously invests in a singular moment only to undermine it through the composition and presentation of the works. The spontaneity and banality of the actions are predisposed to suggest the fleeting, easily distracted moments of modernity but are simply props used to engrain a narcissistic sense of reality.

1

Rosalind Kraus, Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism October 1 (1976): p.59.

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Calvin Laing

Conor Kelly Pentimentos and soda 23.02 – 24.03.2013

Conor Kelly works primarily with painting and sculpture. During NWSP Conor created a body of work culminating in the exhibition Pentimentos and Soda.

For the exhibition Conor created a series of paintings made by working layer upon layer of thin films of paint, each layer often negating and erasing the previous layer. The titles of the paintings reference an odd cast of natural and historical subjects, including Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Adler Christensen (lover and manservant to Irish revolutionary Roger Casement), and the extinct marsupial, the thylacine. Von Freytag-Loringhoven is referenced in the painting The Baroness! (DB). In the painting her image is replaced by that of her would-be biographer Djuna Barnes. Both the subject and the “biographer” are estranged from context and chronology and become shorthand, leading history itself to become a vehicle for a disloyal abstraction.

The paintings were exhibited alongside a sculpture La Tour du Travail (The Tower of Labour), a 'ready-made' named in tribute to Rodin’s ornate maquette for his monumental folly to labour, playing on the historicisation of labour and the relative manual ease of the ready-made. Punctuating the gallery floor were a series of Rollies; towels rolled in acrylic gesso that appeared stuck in a state of their own potential. The installation of paintings and sculptures pointed to a cathartic yet problematic treatment of history, where fact and fiction are lost to form.

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Rollies and The Baroness! (DB), 2013

Pentimentos and Soda, 2013 Installation views

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Conor Kelly

Ambulance (for Adler Christensen), 2009–2013 and Ambulance (for Thylacinus Cynocephalus), 2013 Oil on canvas, 56cm x 71cm and 130 x 97cm

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Thylacine The thylacine1, or as more commonly referred to, the Tasmanian tiger, was officially declared extinct by the IUCN2 in 1986, 50 years after the last captive specimen died, in 1936, at Hobart Zoo. As if that wasn’t enough, the poor beast’s demise into the irrefutable category of historical fact was declared in 2011, with further research by the University of Queensland concluding the thylacine is extinct3.

However, not everyone accepts this truth, and in fact, some4 suggest, the thylacine lives on, evading a certainty that has been verified, quantified and measured. For those who believe, the prospect of continued existence allows the thylacine to traverse temporal concerns and exist in only the most irrational, almost absurd, of histories.

These irrational histories are not constructed from discarded facts, they are verified, quantified and measured through personal experience. In the case of Tigerman (from this point, our author and guide) he/she has seen a thylacine and subsequently embarked on a campaign to reverse its erasure from history in the hope of renewed conservation efforts. The experiences of the author place the thylacine in a state of historical flux: last alive in 19365, erased in 1986, alive in 2002 (as witnessed

by Tigerman), published in 20046 and erased again 20117 – cited and referenced conclusively. A narrative is redacted through the slippage of time with the subject (animate or inanimate) enacted to serve as monument to a new, irrational, history.

Arguably, as the author constructs this new place, fictions emerge as historical certainties collapse and a 13

Conor Kelly

relationship between all concerned parties develops – myself, Tigerman and the thylacine convene in private complicity8. Tigerman argues for the thylacine’s continued existence with heartfelt desperation – ‘I speak to you personally, from one good soul to another’9 – citing the sudden seepage of historical fact into the footnotes10. His/her voice is authoritative and the temptation to inhabit and participate in this far more interesting history is too much. The thylacine lives.

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1 The thylacine or Thylacinus cynocephalus, also referred to as the Tasmanian tiger and Tasmanian wolf, was a marsupial indigenous to mainland Australia, Tasmania and Papua New Guinea. Resembling a large dog, with a wolf like head, stripes and a large tale, the thylacine was closely related to the smaller, Tasmanian devil. 'Tasmanian Tiger', Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, accessed 20/02/13, www.dpipwe.tas.gov.au/inter.nsf/WebPages/ BHAN-53777B?open.

2 The IUCN stands for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and maintains the IUCN Red List – a compendium of 'the taxonomic, conservation status and distribution information on plants and animals that have been globally evaluated using the IUCN Red List Categories and Criteria'. 'About', The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, accessed 19/02/13, http://www. iucnredlist.org/about.

3 Published in an article written by Dr. Diana Fisher and Dr. Simon Bloomberg, 'Inferring Extinction of Mammals from Sighting Records, Threats, and Biological Traits', Conservation Biology 26 (2011): pp.57-67, accessed 20/02/13, doi: 10.1111/j.15231739.2011.01797.x.

4 One such person, or pseudonym who believes the thylacine is alive and well is Tigerman, author of 'Magnificent Survivor – Continued Existence of the Tasmanian Tiger' a book published online in 2004 and available free from: www.naturalworlds.org/ tigerbook/.

5 The last captive thylacine, named Benjamin died in 1936 at Hobart Zoo. Frank Darby, a former zoo keeper claimed Benjamin was the animal’s pet name. The name and sex of the Hobart Zoo thylacine was never confirmed, and former zoo employees refute Darby’s claims – both the name of the thylacine and Darby having ever worked at the zoo. Historical fact in conflict in the court of democratised information. 'Thylacine', Wikipedia, accessed 17/02/13, http://

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Extinction_in_Tasmania.

6 The year Tigerman published 'Magnificent Survivor – Continued Existence of the Tasmanian Tiger'.

7 As evidenced by Dr. Diana Fisher and Dr. Simon Bloomberg.

8 [anthropological] Place is completed through the word, through the allusive exchange of a few passwords between speakers who are conniving in private complicity. Marc Augé, 'Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity', translated from French by John Howe, (London: Verso, 1995), p.77.

9 I speak to you personally, from one good soul to another. Judge the value of my comment for yourself and it shall be so, but don’t underestimate the amount of blood, sweat and tears these pages represent. Tigerman, 'Magnificent Survivor – Continued Existence of the Tasmanian Tiger', (Tasmania: self-published, 2004), accessed 05/02/13, http://www.naturalworlds.org/ tigerbook/. Please note as a self-published text this source is considered unreliable.

10 There are at least two histories (which themselves splinter ad infinitum) at issue in this book which moves from a more obvious level of history – more or less conventionally art historical – to an increasingly disintegrated narrative that overtly intertwines past and present. By the end of the book, it will be clear that the “obvious” history – like the less obvious one – has as much to do with the person telling it as with the “facts”, however those might be construed. Amelia Jones, 'Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada' (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), p.25.

Conor Kelly

Shona Macnaughton Every Translator is a Traitor 06.04 – 05.05.2013

Throughout NWSP Shona Macnaughton developed her on-going research into ideas of work, institution and labour. Using performance, film and sculpture Shona presented this new body of work in her exhibition Every Translator is a Traitor. This title is derived from an Italian proverb and provides an overarching idea about versioning and questions of authenticity of the original.

In Every Translator is a Traitor, Shona created a new fictional institution, a collage of existing educational, corporate and cultural institutions (i.e. Collective), which she herself has worked for. As the company founder Shona enacted her own process of employment which she uses to consider the role of the employee, the structures of brands and the positivistic language developed to support those structures. Shona questions the authenticity of her company within the exhibition by marking out different aesthetics and languages to represent specific elements of it including: the recruitment, training, the branding and view as an employee.

She combines footage shot on mobile phones, taken whilst working, with still images of found objects left over from functions, and highly polished, scripted films showing recruitment and training of her own employee. During the exhibition there was a weekly live performance, where an actor performed the role of the new institution's employee.

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Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013

Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013 Installation views

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Shona Macnaughton

Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013 Interview for the chance of ÂŁ8.68p/hr, Performance and digital video, 7 mins 18 secs

Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013 Conference Table, vinyl on plywood

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Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013 Conference Table, vinyl on plywood

Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013 Installation view

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Shona Macnaughton

Institution This is an inherited place. Ideology, entombed in bricks and mortar, nods to an inconceivable past, defined by a disengaged present and unable to articulate or even imagine a future. The body, subjugated and mobilised in the creation of space, complicit in the perpetuation of this fiction, this place.

A brown sign demarcates a historically significant site, crisp and white, 1.4 miles away – time and place are established whilst rushing by at 70mph. To experience this time and place, or more specifically, to go there, would be to imply a relationship, an identification with these edifices. Hairline cracks begin to appear, the foundations are weak, the body assumes a stabilising stance.

The body enters the institution and adorns a common identity of time and place.

The pillars are injected with a carbon-fibre-reinforced-polymer, repointed and repainted, crisp and white.

Steel beams support corrugated steel sheets, insulated with asbestos and clad in coloured aluminium panels of crimson and teal. Floor to ceiling glass brings into plain view a pulpit that promulgates the legitimacy of this place. I stand in the pulpit, encased in glass and aluminium, and pay homage to this space whilst rushing by at 70mph.

The language is unequivocally aspirational and claims a co-ownership, but your author is not to be trusted.

This place seems familiar. A common language is shared, one of disaggregation from the ruins of reality.

These ruins have no historical present, instead they are constitutionally bound to stagnate in a present inhabited 20

by bodies piled six deep under artificial lighting. Each body takes it in turn to change the halogen bulbs in darkness as an act of solidarity. The metaphor begins to lose meaning and I am back, standing in the pulpit, reassuring the space of our full comprehension of this place. The process repeats and continues ad infinitum.

Structural damage has overcome the institution and collapse is imminent. Luckily, forward planning has laid the groundwork for this new place, 1.4 miles away – we just need to get there. Somewhere between here and there, an atemporal schism opens. To cast light on this place I change the halogen bulb but the act is not reciprocated.

Relations have fractured and without clearly defined institution, individual identity begins to reassert itself.

Through time, or more specifically, a lack of time, common identity is found amongst the travellers – we congregate under the artificial lighting and discuss our funding application. Eventually, the ruins, crisp and white, come back into sight as I rush by at 70mph.

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Shona Macnaughton

Tom Varley Violence. Silence.

06.04 – 05.05.2013

Tom Varley developed a new film work titled Violence. Silence. during NWSP, which continues his exploration into the relationship between abstraction and language. Tom is influenced by constrained writing techniques, and the film he created playfully explored the associative and poetic possibilities of language. The work also emphasised the fact that linguistic meaning amounts to an evolving consensus over the significance of essentially meaningless bits of information – abstract sounds and signs.

The structure of Violence. Silence. is based on audio recordings of medical examinations with patients suffering from receptive aphasia; a neurological impairment characterised by superficially fluent, grammatical speech but with an inability to use or understand more than the most basic nouns and verbs. The film’s title refers to the 1981 work Violins, Violence, Silence by American artist Bruce Nauman.

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Violence. Silence., 2013 Video stills, 16mm film transferred to HD video

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Tom Varley

Violence. Silence., 2013 Video stills, 16mm film transferred to HD video

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an an ingin ane an a This is 5001 words about six ‘words’ or four interpreted words containing five syllables. Standard English phonetic transcription of the above interpreted words using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA for short) is ‘æn nj n w n lso’. Correct pronunciation requires an understanding of the IPA and its combination of letters and diacritics.2 To begin to comprehend these six words we must first differentiate between an accent, a dialect and a language. An accent (e.g. Dundonian), is a distinct way of pronouncing language that can be indicative of, amongst other things, an individual’s locality, social class, etc. A dialect (e.g. Dundonian), is a distinct form of language that can be indicative of, amongst other things, an individual’s locality, social class, etc. A language, (e.g. Dundonian), is a more abstract proposition.

A Scottish accent, when applied to Standard English can be referred to as Scottish Standard English (SSE for short). There is no such thing as Dundonian Standard English. Our concerns, therefore, are very much of a dialectal nature.

The Dundonian dialect, geographically associated with the city of Dundee, is a local variant of East Central North Scots, itself a subset of Central Scots, one of the four regional iterations of the Scots language. The word ‘eh’, generally understood to mean ‘eye’ and/or ‘I’ and/or ‘yes’, is synonymous with the city. A bridie pie (‘peh’ in Dundonian) is a meat pastry originating from the Scottish town of Forfar. Dundee is approximately 11 25

Tom Varley

miles south of Forfar. The bridie features in the Dundonian shibboleth:3 ‘Twa bridies, a plen ane in an an ingin ane an a.’4 This inextricably links both the consumption of this regional snack with the ability to interpret written dialect.

Now we have established a framework for interpretation, let us begin. Your guide and author is granted the fortune of bi-dialectal tongue, a hybrid tongue trained to navigate the slippage of the Scots language into dialect, through accent and emerging as SSE. Considering the form of the phrase as a whole, beginning ‘an an’ it is reasonable5 to assume either repetition or a Scots word beside a more recognisable English word, like so: ‘[…] and an […]’. The third ‘word’ – ‘ingin’ – is a common noun starting with a vowel, and the subject of the phrase; phonetically transcribed (using IPA) the word would read 'ı n. When we consider this from our current vantage point, a pie shop6 in Dundee, we can assume this noun is in addition to ‘[…] a plain ane […]’, so is an additional food stuff. The word ‘ane’ precedes ‘both plen’ and ‘ingin’, and as we are ordering two pies, this word can be identified as ‘one’.

The main ingredients for a bridie are usually mince meat and onions (optional) wrapped in pastry. As pastry and meat are always present, the onion appears to be added in addition to the standard composition of the bridie. Interpretation is complete, context established and the pies ordered with an onion one also.

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1 Exclusive of footnotes.

2 A diacritic is a sign such as an accent, which, when written in combination with a letter indicates a difference in pronunciation.

3 A shibboleth is a word or pronunciation that distinguishes a particular class or group of people.

4 “Jute, jam and student gibberish� The Scotsman, accessed 19/02/13, www.scotsman. com/news/education/jute-jam-and-studentgibberish-1-1421361.

5 As defined by your author and guide.

6 Dundee has a number of pie shops, including, but not limited to, Dundee Pie Shop, 247 Hilltown, Dundee, DD3 7AN. We are in a metaphorical pie shop however, so the exact location is not relevant

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Tom Varley

Rachel Maclean Over the rainbow 18.05 – 26.05.2013

Rachel Maclean produces highly detailed, fantastical films that propose a hyper- glowing, artificially saturated vision of the future. Her film’s aesthetics are influenced by a rich array of sources including: Poundland, YouTube, Manga, Hieronymus Bosch, High Renaissance painting and MTV style green screen and channel changing cuts.

For NWSP Rachel created a new film work called Over The Rainbow. In this work Rachel developed a narrative of synthetic spaces in which the enthusiastic YouTube sensation ‘Double Rainbow Guy’ sits next to an adaptation of The Black Eyed Peas’ Dirty Bit and extracts of Marnau’s Faust. All of these sources are appropriated into Rachel’s investigation of our perceptions of mass media, political shock tactics and myth.

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Over the Rainbow, 2013 Video stills

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Rachel Maclean

Over the Rainbow, 2013 Video stills

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What Does It MeaN? What does it mean?1 It means nothing. The individual posing the question is a construct of collective distractedness. A passing chance to relate with fellow travellers gawping at the spectacle offered, unable to identify and relate to the projected genuineness2 of the object. We share a commonality in our complete isolation, and for 3 minutes and 29 seconds, we perceive a reality over there. Not our reality of course, something much more distant, compressed and filtered through millions of lone travellers. The authority of the object, despite the individual’s rampant emotion and claims of a divine event, is continually undermined by the medium.3 What was perhaps genuine and a reality at some point, is now, in its current fleeting now-ness, simply fodder for a never-ending present.

I stand on the precipice, unable to comprehend this place, this space. I am exhausted, surrounded by monuments to my perpetual distractedness. The fatigue of the journey is compounded by the infiniteness of time, a present, stretched, and contained within 640 by 360.

These monuments only exist for a fleeting moment until my attention moves on, and a new monument stands in place of old. I hysterically laugh for 3 minutes and 29 seconds, compose myself and continue on my travels.

Justin Beiber continually reminds me ‘I’m alive’ 4, so I press on, reassured and hysterically laughing. There is no history here, but ‘I’m alive’, so don’t give it too much thought and take solace in the hoard as we bring down Trafigura.6 We celebrate by buying Three Wolf Moon 31

Rachel Maclean

t-shirts from Amazon. I don’t actually buy one, I simply read the reviews, and laugh hysterically for 3 minutes and 29 seconds. I am violently reminded of time by the date stamp on one of the reviews: this is 20087 – a recent past comes into focus, a history that I cannot comprehend. The notion of a place soon dissipates as a new monument appears for 6 seconds, refusing to acknowledge a consideration of time. Conscious choice and the assertion of the identity of the individual are constitutionally implied, for which we are eternally grateful, as we continue, hysterically laughing as our leader proclaims ‘[…] fantastic support over past 16 hours! Great victory for free speech. #guardian #trafigura #carterRuck.’8 We are the new gatekeepers; I am a complicit body and this is a text about a gentleman who reproduced an experience of a double rainbow, in film, and uploaded it to YouTube.

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1 ‘What does it mean?’ is an internet meme and line from Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10, a video uploaded to YouTube by user Hungrybear9562. The video depicts a double rainbow, shot from a first person vantage point by Paul Vasquez (Hungrybear9562), with his narration of the experience. Available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI 2 Walter Benjamin describes genuineness as follows: The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears. The latter (material duration and historical witness) being grounded in the former (the thing’s genuineness), what happens in the production, where the former has been removed from human perception, is that the latter also starts to wobble. Nothing else, admittedly; however, what starts to wobble thus is the authority of the thing. 5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin, 2009): pp.233–270.

3 Hans Belting defines medium as follows: Medium, here, is to be understood not in the usual sense but in the sense of the agent by which images are transmitted… Hans Belting, ‘Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology’, Critical Enquiry 31 (2005): pp.302–319, accessed 14/05/13, doi: 10.1086/430962 4 In will.i.am’s song and accompanying music video, #thatPOWER, Justin Bieber appears as a holographic projection, singing the chorus: And ooh, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive And ooh, I can fly, I can fly, I can fly And ooh, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive And I’m loving every second, minute, hour, bigger, better, stronger, power Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGIgXP9SvB8 5 In the footnote for this extract of the text Benjamin further explains ‘genuineness’ with the following example: The crummiest provincial performance of Faust nevertheless has this over a Faust film: notionally, it stands in competi-

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tion with the first Weimar performance. And what, in terms of traditional content, the audience may recall across the footlights becomes unusable in the cinema (e.g. the fact that the character of Mephisto contains elements of a friend of Goethe’s youth, Johann Heinrich Merck, and so on and so forth).

6 In 2009 the Guardian were prevented, by way of a super-injuction, from reporting a parliamentary question relating to the reporting of the Minton Report by the BBC. The report related to Trafigura’s dumping of 500 tonnes of hazardous waste in the Côte d’Ivoire. The BBC and subsequently the Guardian had been prevented through an injunction from reporting on the matter, and the super-injunction was sought to prevent the reporting that an initial junction was in effect.

The Guardian challenged the decision and the super-injunction was lifted, whilst in the interim, Twitter users quickly made a link between Trafigura and Carter-Ruck, with the Leader of the Twitter, Stephen Fry, tweeting: ‘Outrageous gagging order. It’s in reference to the Trafigura oil dumping scandal. Grotesque and squalid.’

Available at: www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1930011,00.htm 7 The review can be read here: www.amazon.com/review/R2XKMDXZHQ26YX 8 From Alan Rusbridger, Editor of The Guardian.

Rachel Maclean

James Bell

Critical Discourse intern ‘Anthropological place’ is formed by individual identities, through complicities of language, local references, the un-formulated rules of living know-how; non-place creates the shared identity of passengers, customers or Sunday drivers.

Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, 1995 James Bell’s interests are primarily concerned with an individual’s understanding and articulation of ‘place’ – with a particular focus on the authoring of place through language.

For NWSP, James considered the transitory nature of Collective as an anthropological place within the context of the organisation’s move from Cockburn Street to Calton Hill. The result of a protracted period of research was a series of programmed film works in the former Cockburn Street Project Space and Gallery 1 and a series of events titled The Sunday Driver.

Running in tandem with each NWSP artists solo presentations, the programme began with a screening of Prospect for a City, 1967, by Henry Cooper, followed by a presentation of Alan Currall’s Welcome & Apologies, 2012 and Congratulations & Goodbye, 2012 in the Project Space and Gallery 1 respectively.

The Sunday Driver was a series of events that continued James’ exploration of identity and place. The three events included a screening of Monuments, 2010 by Redmond Entwistle, a discussion event with Alan Currall and a walk from Cockburn Street to Calton Hill led by James with texts and readings.

James also produced an essay text in response to particular ideas or areas of common interest within each of the five NWSP artists’ new works. All the essay texts and a selection of accompanying texts from James’ events are re-presented in this publication.

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Alan Currall, Welcome and Apologies, 2012

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James Bell

This is a speculative space.

Before we move between here and there, there must be a point of departure. The Project Room is this point of departure. Place is established, in part, through a presentation of Alan Currall’s Congratulations and Goodbye, 2012, appropriated and employed in an act of salutation to your author.

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James Bell

Abstract II (after Congratulations and Goodbye, 2012) Sunday driving is a leisurely affair where one can survey the landscape in a manner completely devoid of any real experience of a place. Signs on the motorway demarcate a history over there, a reassurance that there is a past, if we want it, but can continue, passing by, at 70mph.

There is an implied skepticism of institution/organisation, its inexorable connection with/dependence on physical structure/infrastructure and the distracted individual. Architecture/physical structure/infrastructure implies permanence, a fixed position and often carries with it a history. Relations between the individuals who inhabit and therefore complete such places/create such spaces are complicit in the fundamental undermining of the aforementioned permanence.

Your author is alienated by the monument endowed with a history, normally over there, converging on a single moment in time, now part of his/her historical present. The use of Alan’s work is employed in the demarcation of a place, over there, a construct of your distracted author, that only ever exists as a proposition.

A utopia, if you will, that ponders our present day supermodern condition within the context of existing modes of organisation (and their dependence on monuments with histories).

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Abstract III (before Welcome and Apologies, 2012) Welcome. Take a seat. Wait here.

Let us consider this place, this space. We assume a position within the institution, inhabit its physical monument and adorn its language. Alan once again offers salutations, as we consider this abstracted proposition in text. You, me and Alan – constituents of this new place – ponder a reduction to the body; to the present and an absence of monument.

In this new place, one of constantly distracted passing by, I appropriate and reconstruct a gesture of a place. Without the monument we can consider its absence and subsequent impact on the familiarity of a place. Arguably – to appropriate a postmodern concern – the monument is relational to the metanarratives of a place, and this, this is what I cannot relate to. As we move from we to I, your author’s intent becomes clear.

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James Bell

Abstract IV (after Welcome and Apologies, 2012) Hello, I’m James Bell and I will be your author, your guide for today’s walk.

I am wearing a blue Topman hat; grey and blue Trespass cagoule with grey H&M t-shirt underneath; blue GAP trousers with black M&S boxer shorts underneath; beige Primark socks and brown, red and black Supra boots (reduced to £53 from £115 in the Cruise winter sale, 2013). Please remember this.

Today, I offer nothing more than my failure to articulate – my failure to consider place without monument. As we move from here to there, from physical to metaphysical, the monument follows as we continue to impart our histories and futures onto bricks and mortar.

Perhaps my ambiguity has led to this demise, but I maintain and defend my use of the word ‘place’ in this speculative venture.

This venture, is one of meandering and tangential dead ends, in which I, your author and guide, constantly grapple with my own identity within the framework of the institution. This is not to be regarded as defeatist, quite the contrary, it is an empowering venture that seeks to reassert the self at the centre of any given place – be that inhabited by institution or otherwise.

The self, in this instance, is your author and guide.

Your participation here today, is merely to bear witness to this failure to articulate. I hope however, we can consider place and its ambiguity, as we move from here to there, in a physical gesture – the walk – 40

employed to consider the tangible elements of place i.e. its structures. We must redefine our understanding of function beyond simple utility and consider structures/ buildings/architectures as inexorable constituents of place. We inhabit them, we work in them, we make places with them. Places however can be considered as being made up of less tangible constituents – a conversation, a thought, an idea. I contest that places exist in much more ephemeral environments, within the individual and their constant attempts to comprehend place – to identify with it, to relate to it, and conceive of being part of a history within it.

Today, we will walk from Cockburn Street to Calton Hill, and consider place within the context of this institution’s, Collective’s, move from one monument (Cockburn Street) to another (Calton Hill). Through text, we will examine how one can come to reflect on and regard place. So, we start, here and go there, Calton Hill, and work our way back to the familiar, dissecting place throughout the journey. Then, as 5pm comes, and the last exhibition in Cockburn Street comes to a close, we shall have a toast in private complicity, to a history, to a place, here.

Text extracts have been selected and appropriated to facilitate these articulations and dead ends.

To begin, let us consider Smithson in the company of Alan, followed by Ingold as we depart.

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James Bell

Alan Currall, Congratulations and Goodbye, 2012

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James Bell

Frances sTaCey

Curatorial Development intern The exhibition Folly and Landscape was initiated as a result of a conversation considering landscape-as-process. Frances undertook research around this notion of landscape shaped, and in the process of being shaped, ‘not just directly, with hands, tools, and machines, but through law, public policy, the investing and withholding of capital, and other actions undertaken hundreds of miles away.’1 Folly and Landscape – exhibited at Collective from 12 January to 10 February 2013 – brought together a collection of new and recent works by artist Andy Holden. Works on display included four new paintings, which continued the artist’s exploration of the islet of Rockall, a 20-metre tall outcrop in the Atlantic Ocean, a subject that is also the basis for the spoken word piece, Bastion of Empire / A Heap of Language / An Exercise in Simultaneity. The simultaneous telling of various aspects of the islet’s history, geology and biodiversity and the complicated politics of the contested island, embody Holden’s interest in the way an accumulation of narratives and meanings are ascribed to objects and places.

Two performances took place on the opening weekend of the exhibition, Lecture on Nesting and a sale of Beerbottle Stalagmites.

Lecture on Nesting is a joint performance lecture conducted by the artist and his father, the ornithologist, Peter Holden. The lecture is an in-depth study of bird’s nests and their material construction. Documentation of the lecture was shown in the gallery alongside the artist’s collection of nest specimens.

1 Anne Whiston Spirn in Landscape Theory, p.93, Taylor & Francis, 2007

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A Collection of Notes on Folly and Landscape (or ‘it is not nature, it is not land, it is not space’) Exhibition text by Frances Stacey and Andy Holden

Andy Holden, The Naturist (Unofficial Sculpture for the Festival of Britain), Jaywick, 2011

1.a In the opening paragraph of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape, 1973, Robert Smithson invites the reader to imagine geologic time and glacial entropy, as he pictures the landscape architects Olmsted and Vaux to have done in the 1850s when designing the Greensward Plan for Central Park: Imagine yourself in Central Park one million years ago.

You would be standing on a vast ice sheet, a 4,000mile glacier, you would not sense its slow crushing, scraping, ripping movement as it advanced south, leaving great masses of rock debris in its wake. Under the frozen depths, where the carousel now stands, you 45

Frances Stacey / Andy Holden

would not notice the effect on the bedrock as the glacier dragged itself along.

Greensward Plan is closely connected to a legacy of English landscape gardening, with Birkenhead and Sefton Parks often cited as precedents. Smithson traces a correlation to the eighteenth century Picturesque, particularly to the work of Uvedale Price and William Gilpin, who extended the writing of Edmund Burke, going beyond his ‘static formalist view of nature’. Olmstead places an emphasis on movement, attempting to ‘see’ and manifest in design ‘the magnitude of geologic change’. The landscape is viewed as a process and signifies in Smithson terms ‘the beginnings of a dialectic of the landscape’.

1.b It seems more and more possible to imagine and visualise ideas surrounding the geologic, and import them into other fields. As outlined by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, editors of the recent publication Making the Geologic: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life Now, ‘deep time is beginning to have applied material meaning for non-specialists’. They attribute this change, at least in part, to an increasing awareness of the finite mineral and fossil resources available in the world, to our capacity to visualise the earth, from the famous and widely distributed ‘blue marble’ photograph taken en route to the moon by the crew of Apollo 17, to Google Earth and imaging technologies that enhance our ability to picture vast geologic flows.

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2.

Although paintings of natural landscapes are often considered primarily as celebrations of nature being something distinct from and outside of man-made construction, they have always had another purpose or a parallel function alongside an exercise in representation.

Caspar David Friedrich, in his depictions of the German wilderness, was less concerned with accurate portrayal than he was with using the landscape as metonymic of a sense of national identity. He referred to his works as Stimmungslandschaften – landscapes conveying feeling, emotion or the Romantic sensibility.

Andy Holden, Slice, 2013 Plaster and paint

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Frances Stacey / Andy Holden

While in this case landscape serves as a vessel into which the artist may place his own meaning or agenda, in other cases the artist extrapolates meanings not immediately apparent within the landscape itself. Pissarro’s The Marne at Chennevières, 1864–5, housed in the National Galleries of Scotland, initially seems a peaceful portrayal of rural life in mid-19th century France.

Nestled on the banks of the river that dominates the scene, however, are small factories suggestive of the spread of industrialisation beyond urban confines, presaging the gradual incursion of modernity into all aspects of life over the coming decades.

3.

Rockall is an extremely small, uninhabited, remote rocky islet in the North Atlantic Ocean. It gives its name to one of the sea areas named in the shipping forecast, provided by the British Meteorological Office. In 1956 the British scientist James Fisher referred to the island as, ‘the most isolated small rock in the oceans of the world’. The origin of the name ‘Rockall’ is debatable but it has been suggested that it derives from the Gaelic ‘Sgeir Rocail’, meaning ‘skerry (or sea rock) of roaring’, although rocail can also be translated as ‘tearing’ or ‘ripping’. It has most recently been suggested that the name derives from the Icelandic word rok, meaning ‘foaming sea’, and kollr, meaning ‘bald head’. English post-punk band Gang of Four reference the rock in the 1979 song Ether (from the album Entertainment!), in the line, ‘There may be oil… under Rockall’.

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4.

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. ( Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens, 1919)

Andy Holden, Totem, 2013 Plaster and paint

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Frances Stacey / Andy Holden

5.

A folly is ambiguous in its definition, but incorporates flippancy, (treating serious things lightly), unreason, brittleness, a disquiet facade, and is generally wrong within the landscape. While normally emotion in architecture is expressed professionally only in a very distilled and controlled way, and then only upon a framework of logic and mathematics, the folly evokes the spectator’s emotions with uncivilised directness, by stating its own and nothing else… ( Barbara Jones, 1953) When looking up ‘folly’ on Wikipedia you will find a section entitled What follies are not, which attempts to define this architectural trope in relation to a series of comparable structures and buildings. It is not dissimilar to the comparative method utilised by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in Ugly and Ordinary Architecture or the Decorated Shed, 1971. The decorated shed, as the name clearly suggests, has a symbolic façade applied to a simple structure. Follies are however, not fantasy or novelty buildings, rather what defines most follies is a lack of functionality or habitable use, not novel or frivolous design.

6.

There are several different types of bowerbird. The Satin Bowerbird builds an avenue that runs north to south.

In fact when these have been studied a bower has never been found to be more than 25 degrees out from exactly running north south. These avenues have a clearing 50

around them. The birds group collected objects to place around the bower. Often these are white kangaroo bones, however they also collect coloured objects that they sort into piles and place outside, often green and dark blue petals. They will also paint the inside of the bower with berry juice mixed with saliva. One bird has even been observed to use soft bark, held in its beak, to paint the walls of the bower with the pulped berry. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, ‘the sense of beauty has been declared particular to man, however in the case of the avenues of the bowerbird we must conclude that the birds receive some kind of pleasure from the sight of such things’.

Andy Holden, Beerbottle Stalagmite Sale, 2013

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Frances Stacey / Andy Holden

James Bell James Bell is an artist based in Edinburgh. After graduating from the MFA at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, in 2011, James served on the committee of Generator until 2013.

Previous exhibitions include 24 Spaces, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, 2013 and Inertia, The Lombard Method, Birmingham and Generator Projects, Dundee, 2011.

Alan Currall Alan Currall has exhibited widely in group and solo shows at galleries including the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Hayward Gallery, London, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö and Stills Gallery, Edinburgh. In 2002 he exhibited at the Jerwood Gallery as part of the Artist Platform series and was nominated for the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2003.

Andy Holden Andy Holden lives and works in Bedford.

His practice incorporates a diverse array of outputs, often combining plaster, bronze and wooden sculpture, painting, knitted textiles, performance, recorded music and film. Recent solo exhibitions include Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013) and Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape at Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston (2012).

In 2010 he curated Be Glad For the Song Has No End ~ A Festival of Artist’s Music at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, and in 2012 he adapted David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interview’s with Hideous Men for the stage at the ICA in London.

Peter Holden Peter Holden is an ornithologist, who after a 40-year career at the RSPB was awarded an MBE for services to conser-

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vation. He regularly lectures and writes on many aspects of ornithology, and has published numerous books including the RSPB Handbook of British Birds and the RSPB Handbook of Garden Wildlife.

Conor Kelly Conor Kelly graduated in 2008 from the MFA course at Glasgow School of Art and currently lives and works in Glasgow. His recent exhibitions include: Golden Years, Glasgow Project Room 2012; The Beast That Shouted Love at The Heart of The World, +44 141 Gallery, SWG3, Glasgow 2012 and Lampara Descommunal, Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany 2011.

Conor’s primary interests lie in painting and sculpture.

Calvin Laing Calvin Laing graduated with BA (Hons) in sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art in 2011. Calvin currently lives and works in London. His recent projects include a three-month residency in Florence with the John Kinross Scholarship 2011–12. He has exhibited at The Sculpture Show, Gallery of Modern Art, as part of the John Watson Prize Edinburgh 2012 and Meet The Locals, group exhibition at Artíma gallerí, Reykjavik, Iceland 2012.

Rachel Maclean Rachel Maclean is an artist based in Glasgow. Since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009 Rachel has exhibited across the UK and internationally – including, in 2012, a solo presentation LOLCATZ, Generator Projects, Dundee. In 2010 Rachel received the World Class Visual Effects for Artists Project Grant through the Visual Effects Research Lab, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee and in 2011 went on a 6 month residency

Biographies

supported by Creative Scotland to the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Rachel recently premiered a 3 minute work, Germs, commissioned by Bold Yin Ltd, on Channel 4’s Random Acts. Rachel is the recipient of the Margaret Tait Award 2013.

Shona Macnaughton Shona Macnaughton is an artist based in Brussels. Shona completed her MFA at Edinburgh College of Art in 2009 and has served as a co-director of the Embassy Gallery. Alongside her own practice Shona is a participant in the artist group Eastern Surf. Recent exhibitions include: Legion TV online commission, London; Kernel Panic Control, Eastern Surf, Galerija Galženica, Zagreb, Croatia; Meet The Locals, group exhibition Artíma gallerí, Reykjavik, Iceland; Glasgow International Festival with The Mutual Charter; event with Eastern Surf; Built Overnight, Rhubaba, Edinburgh and Our Complex, Summer Projects Programme, Generator Projects, Dundee.

Frances Stacey Frances Stacey is an artist/curator living and working in Edinburgh. Frances was curatorial development intern at Collective from July 2012 to January 2013.

In 2009 she co-founded the project Rhubaba Gallery and Studios. Recent curatorial projects include If I know that something unknown transcends me I cease to be merely a ‘human ape’, but am also a human-extra terrestrial at The University of Edinburgh, 2013, and We are all U.F.O.nauts at Rhubaba, 2012.

Tom Varley Tom Varley is an artist based in Glasgow.

Since graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 2008 he has exhibited around

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the UK and internationally – most recently at Glasgow Project Room – as well as participating in a number of other projects, including Group Affinity, Kunstverein Munich 2011 and the Tramway/LUX Festival of Artist Moving Image, 2012. Tom served on the Transmission committee between 2009 and 2011 and was the recipient of the 2012 Drawing Room Bursary Award. Forthcoming exhibitions include: Valise, BQ, Berlin and Drawing Biennial 2013, Drawing Room, London.

CREDITS Shona Macnaughton, Every Translator is a Traitor, 2013 Demi Sutherland, Lise Morel, David Albury, Gary Quinn, Stephanie Mann, Elspeth Turner, Stephanie Daughtry, Shirley Pettigrew.

Camera: Ryan Kernaghan.

Co-produced with Tramway, Glasgow.

Tom Varley, Violence. Silence., 2013 Vocals: Mhari McMullan and Hannes Hellström Eyeball: Jack McConville Sign Language: Sophie Mackfall Drums: Colin Kearney.

Special thanks to: Chris Nelms, Jody Henderson, Rebecca Wilcox.

Rachel Maclean, Over The Rainbow, 2013 Director of Photography: Aubrey Fernandez Assistant Director of Photography: Craig Hall Post Production and Visual Effects: Matt Cameron, Jeremy Dabrowski, Tyler Jordan, Price Morgan, Rachel Maclean and Sash Stanojevic Soundtrack: Julian Corrie Co-comissioned by The Banff Centre.

Biographies/Credits

New Work Scotland programme 2013 Edited by James Bell and Frances Stacey Exhibition texts by James Bell Printed on demand with blurb.co.uk All images courtesy the artists Designed by An Endless Supply Typefaces: Euclid Flex, Albertus, Š Collective, the artists and authors.

ISBN: 978-1-873653-14-2 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. The published has made every effort to contact all copyright holders.

If proper acknowledgement has not been made, we ask copyright holders to contact the publisher.

Collective City Observatory & City Dome 38 Calton Hill Edinburgh EH7 5AA Tel. +44 (0)131 556 1264 www.collectivegallery.net

With thanks to the Elephant Trust