Nick Miller talks about Abbeyview

I enjoyed the experience of working in Abbeyview immensely. I was especially drawn to the idea of an artist-led project marking this great change in the built environment of Abbeyview and responding not just to the physical environment but also to the changing social environment. I found Abbeyview interesting in that it is similar to many housing schemes all over Scotland - a place built in the 1950s for people moving out of the cities and towns to "nicer”, “cleaner” areas with improved facilities and better housing. Curiously now, with the regeneration, the area is being made even more suburban, replacing flats with small semi-detached and detached houses because this is what people want to live in now. These buildings of the ‘50s seemed to mark a new cycle of impermanency both architecturally and culturally. By only lasting a few decades they sit in marked contrast to the presumed permanency of architecture and social engineering of the ever dominant Victorian era.

My aim with the Curiosity Cabinet was to highlight this sense of change by using old, discarded furniture, from the decades when the flats had stood. And with the furniture to create a new object which seemed to lack a single defining form, instead offering many different perspectives and space to engage the viewer’s imagination. For me, my brief time working in Abbeyview was extremely rewarding, especially in the connections I made with other artists as we found ways of incorporating their work into the cabinet.

NICK MILLAR

The Fly and the Lamb have started working on the concept for the book that marks the final series of collaborative projects. It will be contained within lovingly hand-knitted book covers created by the congregation of St Ninian’s Church and available in the Autumn.

In my drawings I wanted to play about with the scale of the urban and natural landscape. The simple dandelion struck me as an irrepressible shaft of green and yellow that manages to spring up no matter how urban, how concrete the landscape is. That is why we term it a weed, a plant that we do not want growing in the prolific manner it does, in the random way it does, but this weed seems to captures time and regeneration beautifully. The aging process of the dandelion follows the set pattern of a vibrant yellow flower appearing, closing and opening once more to reveal a wispy globe of seed heads, waiting for a gust of wind to send them to new cracks in the concrete landscape. As Nicola and I talked about it, we saw that it symbolised man’s stucggle to control his environment, and particularily nature, in his quest for progress and refining his domain.

While I am studying and drawing the nature of the dandelion, Nicola is responding to these images with drawings based on the workings of manmade construction. Construction that is used in the regeneration of the area to build upon the newly created wasteland, obliterating any naturalisation that swiftly takes place when ground is left bare. And so they co-exist, each an unhalting process of establishment, maturation and termination with man living amongst it.

Meanwhile, Nicola and I have also been busy putting together the document archiving the Nicola’s residency in Abbeyview. I have been interviewing artists on their experience working in or responding to Abbeyview and will be putting a new featured artist on the blog each week. (The Lamb)

Drawing © Carol Lambie.