It’s been a busy 6 months down at Westthorn Allotments!

Since the beginning of 2011, CCA have been working on developing and continuing the work at the site at Westthorn, to transform it from an empty lot ridden with brambles and worst of all – Giant Japanese Hogweed – into a site that can be used by a wide range of community and educational activities.

In JANUARY, we worked with a group of BTCV volunteers, building a fence from natural materials on site, clearing rubbish, and using the remnants of Tatham and O’Sullivan’s sculpture to suppress weeds!

In FEBRUARY, we hosted a residency “Growing Exchange”(click for more information) with artists Alex Wilde (Glasgow) and Annechien Meier (The Hague, Netherlands). Alex and Annechien spent one month researching, interviewing and working with garden projects around the city. They also hosted an event at the CCA’s sites Westthorn and in Drumchapel with an amazing temporary shelter they constructed. They worked with Dutch filmmakers who produced a short video about their project you can view here. Although the first part of the residency is finished, Alex and Annechien are continuing to work together at Stroom Gallery in The Hague, and will hopefully continue their project with CCA in the months to come!

In MARCH, the ground finally defrosted, and we hosted a Tree Planting Workshop with John Hancox from Commonwealth Orchards and the Playbusters’ Environment Group as part of their Grow Green with Glasgow’s East End program.

In APRIL we hosted our very first volunteer day, with artist Joshua Duncan hosting a compost-bin making workshop. We also had a visit from the young Backcourt Gardeners who helped us plants herbs and cabbages!

With MAY sunshine came the blooming of plants – including our veg from the previous year, rhubarb, kale, and chives YUM YUM!   Unfortunately this also meant the return of the dangerous Hogweed! However, our new resident gardener Mark Hesling has done a great job removing the Hogweed from the main section of the site!

So this brings us to JUNE, and summer is officially here (despite the rain)! This summer, we have three more Saturday volunteer days with workshops, and we’d love your help and involvement!! Our volunteer days will run from 12-4 pm with a focus on a different topic and activities each month. For more information, email education@cca-glasgow.com

JUNE 25TH WEEDS AND INVASIVE SPECIES WORKSHOP with Mark Hesling

JULY 23RD TEMPORARY SHELTER WORKSHOP with Alex Wilde and James McLardy

AUGUST 20TH BIODIVERSITY AND PERMACULTURE WORKSHOP with Lusi Alderslowe

Keep an eye on these projects and other strands that may be blooming in the year to come!

Thanks for reading and looking forward to digging with you!!

Emilia, Education/Outreach Intern

education@cca-glasgow.com

Whose political agenda says artists have to be at the end of the sentence?

I have been thinking about the context of this post for a while now but decided to leave its destination up to recent travels and encounters. New contexts as it were. So, here I sit on my Virgin Train journey returning from Somerset back to Scotland; on Facebook I chat to an old friend and avid art writer. She sends me a link to the following text:

“Has it ever occurred to you that most contemporary art galleries are asking us to rewind? “Look back”, they seem to say, “take a look at all the art that shook the world during the twentieth century! Look at its political agendas, its dense conceptualisation, its experimentalism, its radicalism, its craziness, and its out-of-this-worldliness! Can any of you struggling artists create anything better, potent, or more profound? We think not!””

On Saturday the 23rd of October I was asked to accompany my friends on a sight seeing tour of Bristol with, “many a photographic opportunity” – little did I know this was to be a protest march through the city reacting to the spending review. I chose not to go. Why? Let me explain:

A recent push from AIR: Artists Interaction and Representation introduces, on a national scale, a growing list of ‘AIR Activists’ exposing artists who are also activists within their artist communities. The list is growing but where do these people function – where do they hold their meetings and where do they rally? Just as I decided not to march with the rest of Bristol, other artists may decide their own purpose would be just as diluted by such an amass of reaction – so in what context do they campaign?

In my mind, as new rotations around the cultural sphere begin, we are about to hit an important wave of creativity gestured by shifting times. Funding will come by way of decisions made and new definitions accrued – individual artists must still have a voice though and we’re not all accustomed to activist marches. So how can local “open source” institutions respond and advocate these forms of regional and national artistic engagement?

Do we have to rewind now to realise that we’re possibly facing government cuts as harsh as ones experienced post-war? And does this mean we need to get all down and dirty with historical context once again in forecasting the definition of an artist in our contemporary era?

“…let us ‘rewind’ to Duchamp, to whom, granted, we do owe something. In 1957, he spoke of the artist as a medium…. a part of the sentence rather than the full-stop. He said that the meaning of a work of art would accrue in the course of its existence. This implies that an artwork is not determined by the initial creative gesture as much as in the realm of the spectator, and ultimately in the work’s historical reception. Surely the task of all these retrospectives at contemporary art museums is to help us look forward by looking back; to provoke new ways of perceiving political situations and so highlighting what’s going on in our own dreadful present? Obliquely it might be possible for us to study our own ‘realm’ by focussing on realms of the past…”

Important figures can be quoted as often as anyone attends a library, and theory may rule (as well as be ignored considerably) until the ‘theorists’ then reach office. So now theory really is reality let us study our own realm and realise how we can act to save the arts, not react or indeed re-enact.

Excerpts from Sophie Frost’s blog, ‘The Plight of the British Arts Post-grad’

Find AIR: Artist Interaction and Representation on Facebook and join in with the tide of activity: www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=373432691345&v=wall

Arts Council press release October 26th