ART&RESEARCH

Shauna McMullan: When Ross Birrell asked me to do this to begin with I thought ‘oh, that’ll be interesting’ and then I went home and I came out in this rash and I think it’s the idea of thinking about anything that has to do with politics and I was trying to think about whenever David was talking and I think it’s to do with growing up in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s where the way you pronounce your letter ‘H’, or the length you wore your skirt, or the side of the road that you walked on, was all completely couched and political; you were saying something by something as simple as that. So I had this really kind of odd relationship to what politics is and what it means and what my relationship is to it. So I guess the work, and the way that I make work, has always been an attempt to understand what my relationship is to politics. Maybe that will come through in the work that I’m going to talk about, that I’m going to show you.

Same as David, I’ve just put in a couple of images of previous work just to show a wee bit of contrast of the different kinds of work that I make but also to talk about the idea of it being about objects that relate to place and about journeys to places in particular. So the first images that you seen were maps, road maps that were cut out and kind of re-presented in a different way. And this is a series of works that I made in the border between England and Scotland; this is a series of photographs called England in Situ and it was just looking at the signposts and these objects which were signs in these locations and photographing them; it was a series of photographs where the image was mounted onto the back of glass, the glass was sandblasted and the only wee bit that was kind of really visible properly were the road signs and the photo. So this is just a series of all the road signs at that border, and it was kind of going to a place that I had a question about; it was like, well what is a border? what happens there? And trying to find out that, kind of, asking questions and going to the place and trying to find something out. It is as much about a curiosity about it as anything. And then on the other side there was this other series of works which was called Scotland Welcomes Who? and it was just all these signs in the Scottish border. This was made at the same time as David Blunkett was kind of going through all this chat about immigration and about the immigrants into the country having to understand, you know, have a grasp of the English language and what it really meant to invite people into your country when there was all these conditions that applied to it and I was thinking about that, just the same time as I was taking these photographs it was like, well who really is it that you’re welcoming in and what does that mean? And it was just observations in these locations… and journey.

So kind of looking at objects in terms of the maps and newspapers, going to places in particular and also then making journeys. This was a work that I made for an exhibition in Japan two years ago and it was called Via. I wanted to not use the map directly or a representation of a place but to try and think about some notion of geography in real time. So if I took a symbol from the map and I took it with me on this journey could I come up with some other kind of map that wasn’t so easily read? So it was just a green dot and it reads stop at every point where I kind of touched land on that journey from Glasgow to Japan the dot was photographed. And when I came back home or when I got to the exhibition it was just a series of these images being shown of where the dot kind of jumped about all over the place and it was travelling through eleven countries and travelling over borders and through places, just trying to come up with some other alternative notion of what a map could be, I guess, and looking at the representation of the place through the photograph alongside this kind of much more illustrative thing which was the dot.

I’m always really in awe of people who can refer to things that they’ve read and articles that they’ve read, I can’t do that so through these slides I just put in these things that for me help situate what I’m thinking about when I’m making the work:

The distances we travel are physical and psychic, emotional and mental.  The others we meet en route take the form of places, objects or people. Most often the distant other we encounter in our travels is what we thought to be a familiar part of ourselves.[1]

And I guess that’s kind of thinking about how I make work with objects and materials, engage with places; and importantly the work that I’m going to talk about now was very much about a conversation with people. And all of that is to do with some idea of understanding what it means to encounter the other, another.

The Scottish Parliament commissioned me to make an art work, a sculpture in particular that celebrated and documented women’s contribution towards Scottish life, culture, democracy and I ended up getting the commission, for whatever reasons I ended up getting the job of doing it. It started in December 2005 and it was a year-long project from when I began thinking about it to when it got installed into the parliament. And this was going to be a permanent work that was going to be there forever, although half way through I realised that forever meant until the end of this parliamentary term, so it meant that actually in April or May, they would have to renegotiate whether it was actually gonna be for the next four years, so really it’s a conversation about the idea of permanence. So I had this job and it was to make a work of art that dealt with women’s contributions towards Scottish life and culture and I have these two images that I’ve had in my studio for ages and I just I love them and for lots of different reasons and mostly because they just kind of bring me back to something I think of as being fundamental to things that I’m interested in. This is a photograph of Terry Sherringham: she’s a sculptor and a member of the Independent Labour party and was one of the first women who was in the Labour party. And I guess it’s just kind of the strength of her doing that, of that woman in that photograph at that time has always been really significant and it’s kind of about her relationship to a place as well, you get a real sense of her identity but also how she negotiates her place, whether that’s a land, or geographic place, or whatever, wherever that is. So this is an image that I kept coming back to at the beginning of the research and right through the whole of the research. And this was the other one, which is an image by Maurizio Cattalan and I guess it’s the space between where that line finishes and where the pen starts is what makes me really curious about this image. I just wonder, it’s like space of wonder, what kind of happens there? what didn’t get written? or what could have been drawn? You know the ink’s run out of the pen and your left with this mark, there’s an indentation where the pen’s made a kind of groove in the paper, but it’s not a very visible mark. And this helped me think about a lot, whenever I started doing research for the project, about the lack of visibility of the historicization of women within Scottish culture and life that there was such an absence of information and writing and documentation about it, that it just wasn’t there and what was there was so kind of minimal that that space actually became really important because whatever I was going to do was an attempt to try and fill the gap or address an absence. And also, I guess, it was to do with drawing and with writing and with mark making and with lines. Those are the things that come up through a lot of the work I’ve done. And so the pen and the paper and the mark were also kind of important in thinking about where I was gonna go with this.

So the early research was meeting people, talking to them, visiting museums, meeting people, kind of reading, trying to find out as much information as I could about what the subject was or what it was I was being asked to do. And the People’s Palace in Glasgow which is supposed to have the most extensive collection of Scottish Suffragette memorabilia and I was really excited about going to see this massive collection of stuff and it was a book and some crockery and a couple of banners. And it was that kind of continual disappointment about what there was there to be able to refer to, that was a real impetus for what I was gonna do. This was a list of people who had given up their time and services for a Labour party conference in 1938. And when I did kind of find out bits and pieces there were women involved in the Labour party for a long time, but again it was all male voices, it was men’s signature and there was no women in that, there was no identification or record of that. So, that was a quick run through some of the things that came up through the research. Again part of what I do or what I enjoy doing is actually engaging with place physically, the process that I have of making work is about a physical engagement either with an object or with people or with the place so that means that it’s about being there, it’s about moving, it’s about physically engaging with things. And again back to two images that I have, this one’s a drawing of a tiny man, or there’s a man up in the very top of the mountain with a flag and he’s kind of got a wee ladder that takes him right up and somebody’s at the bottom waving to him about having gone there and this other photograph of consuming the place through a much more passive engagement with it through looking, through being a voyeur, and I always kind of think of my way of making work as being much more akin to the previous one which is about climbing or walking or going to a place to find things out. So in terms of thinking about how I could work through the process of making this work, it was going to involve some engagement with Scotland, with women in Scotland and that had to be done through meeting people and travelling. And also through the research the things that did keep coming up were about women who had moved around. This first quote is from an article:

Jane Taylor from Stranraer traveled all over Scotland from Selkirk in the borders to as far north as Orkney and Shetland, to speak on the reasons why women should be granted the parliamentary vote. (Leah Leneman, Force Feeding & The Vote).

And second one is Jane Rendell:

Postmodern feminism is full of stories of travel. Women who have moved out of their place. Much of their written work speaks of their displacement. There is much at stake in constantly moving out of your place.[2]

These were just a couple of the things that got thrown up as I was reading and the things that I have kind of got drawn to because it was about movement, it was about travel, it was about leaving the familiar and engaging with another, or with others. So I decided that if I was gonna really deal with the responsibility of making this work it meant that I was gonna have to try and engage with Scotland. And I put this in because it reminds me of the some of the things I think are important:

If the artist begins the creative process with an informed awareness of his/her identity and relationship to her surroundings the critical content of the work will not be in contradiction to it.[3]

And that was really important and it was kind of interesting I guess in relation to what was being talked about this morning. I’m 34, from Northern Ireland, living in Scotland for 12 years, how could I deal with what this commission was asking me to do? How could I ever understand what it meant to, you know, what a women engaging in Scotland was about? I couldn’t ever do that and didn’t pretend that I could, but I did think that what I could do was engage a lot of people in the making of the work and extend a conversation about what this work could be. And try and deal with not making something that was about a national identity but was about trying to engage and negotiate multiple identities, which is part of the Scotland I understand and know. So that became important, thinking about who I was and I guess something else that you were saying David about not being interested in the politics of the self, I guess I kind of come at it from the opposite which is, that’s where I start, I’ve got to start from the idea of who I am and the politics of who I am, where I’m from and where I’m at, and that was kind of central to developing this.

One of the things that was significant about the Scottish Executive Commissioning this artwork was that it was the 100^th year anniversary of the Scottish Suffragette movement and they wanted to have something that highlighted that and drew attention to it. What I decided to do was to try and speak with a hundred women based all over Scotland and the reason was to try and include as many people in it, have conversations, move over Scotland, travel in the edges of it, at the centre of it, speak to as many people as I could about what the content of this work would be and the form that it might take. So I started with one woman in Edinburgh who was part of the panel that set up the commission in the first place and who had gone through the trade unions in Scotland and was kind of fundamental in negotiating the gender balance in the Scottish parliament. And I asked her if she could send me on to somebody, I asked her two things: I asked every woman that I spoke to two things; first one was that they would write me a sentence maximum, in their own handwriting, at maximum fourteen words, because I’d worked out that that if I was going to fit a hundred sentences into this work in the space that I had, the maximum size it could be was fourteen words long.

And so I asked them to write me a sentence about someone who they thought had made an important contribution towards Scotland, their understanding of Scotland, and that could be in whatever kind of local or national or international level that could be. It was up to them to find someone significant for themselves. And also then that they would pass me on to somebody else who could take me on this journey around Scotland. And I also asked them to think about helping me make it as broad as possible; broad in terms of geographically, in terms of background and cultures and professions and occupations of all the women that I wanted to try and reach, I guess trying to be as diverse as possible. So that was the two things they had to do; write a sentence and also pass me on to someone else, it was this kind of daisy-chain process. So, this is some of the examples of the sentences that I got back:

From scary, to friendly old but bold…. fun

Nadine Harrison was a doctor and she was talking about a friend of hers who she wanted to acknowledge and write about because obviously she’d had a significant role in her life.

Anne Lorne Gillies who’s a singer and a writer er, she wrote a sentence

Strong hands, soothing pain, making music working night and day.

And through the conversation with Anne, that I had when I visited Anne it kind of caught, keep something that kept coming up as I visited everybody er, was that quite a few people wanted to acknowledge er, someone who wasn’t necessarily at the very forefront of whatever field they were working in but they were just sitting behind at the aid of somebody else and becoming really prominent at whatever they were doing and this was, Anne Lorne Gillies talking about her mother who had kind of helped her get to where Anne had got to in terms of her profession… Chrissie Dicks the teacher, writer and farmer’s wife and she wrote about Marion Oran who’s a writer and poet and an activist: ‘She fought for rights and justice for the Gaels.’

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