we need more and different flags

Claire Barcley with one of her 40 flags in Abbeyview - March 13th 2008



Hello Nicola

Good to meet you last night at the art evening. It was very sparky, thoroughly entertaining and stimulating!

I will be in touch next week to arrange to meet and show you the print workshop. I will know my plans better and can find out what might suit you. congratulations again for a remarkable evening in Abbeyview!

Cheers Steve Ratomski





THOUGHTS OF A NOTE CATCHER
Stage one: Collecting notes in Abbeyview

Now a month into the project, I have finished collecting notes from people in Abbeyview and am busy with the second stage of the project - drawing portraits and editing the sound ready to make into a musical composition. With the valuable assistance of local resident Lynette Sneddon, we have collected musical notes from 130 different people by asking them to contribute a single note. We organised visits to the primary schools, the Beanstalk Nursery and the community centre, engaged people in their homes and met others on the streets at the local shops, bowling club and library:
it has been a busy month.

When we began the project, I was unsure how people might respond to being asked for a single sung note: even though it is something we can all do, it is not an everyday request. Singing is a very personal thing, a form of self-expression. It is difficult to sing on the spot or perform in front of others, especially when you are asked to sing just one note. However, people have been very open to the project and more often than not are willing to participate. Lynette suggested that people’s notes are either “shy” or “diva” and certainly the recordings we have gathered reflect this.

One aspect that may be hidden or forgotten in making this kind of work is the moment of personal connection that is often made with individuals. On one level, the very act of singing and sharing of something personal implies a connection with the listener, but similarly a shared emotional response to the situation, for example moments of shy awkwardness turning to fun jokes and laughter, clearly suggests some kind of connection. There have also been moments, however, where connections have been made that are more personal, where time has paused a while to share a story or listen to a song. These are the moments in particular that I have enjoyed the most and have made this project special to me. (Hanna Tuulikki, Artist)


This project has connected with the residents in a very intimate way. I caught up with Hanna and Lynette a few week's ago while in the process of catching the notes of Abbeyview and it was clear that the activity of recording them has touched them both. The essence of a public artwork like this is to connect with the residents on many levels, engaging with a wide cross section and exposing them to art practices that may fracture preconceptions of art and artists. Lynette's involvement in the process of making an artwork was seemed exhilarating for her. She loved the job of meeting people she had never spoken to before, in the place she had lived in for years, and folk saying hello as a result of her being part of the Note Catcher. And of course she now knows Hanna, whom she says she will never forget, such has been the impact of her experience.

Thursday 31st January 2008
Today the fun really started. We decided to go to the local shops and start collecting notes. It snowed... Great we thought but went for it anyway. We set ourselves a target of 8 notes. At the Tryst Centre, we collected 11 notes alone. And a young lad named Brian sang us a song he had written himself!! We then, through blizzard like conditions, went into the local bookies. 3 brave souls sang notes for us. We managed to get another note from Keri in the library and of course Hanna and myself made out contribution too.
So we were off to a great start. Lets hope it continues.
(Extract from Lynette's Diary)

They had many stories to tell of the shyness, the confidence, the rawness and the openness of the characters that they met. This is the magic of making art involving a large group of people from a specific area, the pickings are rich and untapped if you care to go looking for them. Connections with the note-givers have stood out for different reasons, Hanna and Lynette recounted a story from one of the schools where a young girl was keen and confident about singing her note but froze at the crucial point of delivery. Crushed and embarrassed, Hanna led her to a secluded area and she managed the whole song. The pride in overcoming that hurdle will stay with that girl forever and is a special thing to give to an individual. Another was with a man with whom the chance of finding a practising artist on his doorstep moved him to share his very personal creativity with them. He has created his own intimate gallery space for his own pleasure and now has become part of Hanna’s project, connecting his art to the community in which has lived in for many, many years.


Wednesday 6th February 2008
Today is totally devoted to one man. The amazing Bob Clarke. This wonderful, 83 year old man, let Hanna and myself invade his private domain for the best morning so far. Once he had heard that Hanna was not only a musician but an artist, he took us in and showed us his work. He is a very modest man, lives alone with his ex-wife just upstairs and loves to paint. His paintings are the most fantastic I have ever seen for someone so humble about them. Seascapes and landscapes adorn his whole home, all painted by himself. Considering these where painted from photographs that he had taken while on holiday, the realness of them are a joy to behold. Hanna and I both left his home an hour later not only with a Note from him but tears in our eyes for the passion this man inspired in us. We love you Bob. Thank you xXx
(Extract from Lynette’s Diary)

Projects such as this one reach an audience who may be shy or indifferent about entering a gallery to 'appreciate art' and it makes people aware that art can, and does, exist in forms other than in a gallery situation. The exposure and impact of Nicola’s work in Abbeyview is hard to measure, since it exists in memories, experiences and the occasional shift in attitude of the residents there. In terms of opening up a dialogue about public art, however, she has made her mark and laid the foundations for a continuing relationship between Abbeyview and art. (The Lamb)

Flowers vs. Portraits FREE

Flowers vs. Portraits
Fourth PUBLIC ART GATHERING
Abbeyview Community Centre, Dunfermline
Thursday March 13th 7pm
Free

Nicola Atkinson Does Fly hosts the final event. She will sing a song from the Flowers Songs of the Seasons, which is Illustrated by Cecily Barker from 1925. Cecily Barker is known for her drawings of flower fairies.

Hanna Tuulikki, artist & musician, will present her new work Note Catcher. Working with Lynette Sneddon from Abbeyview, Hanna and Lynette travelled around Abbeyview together, from the bowling club to homes to local shops to community centre to street to engaging with 130 people. People were asked to sing a single note of their choice, which was recorded and Hanna has created a beautiful composition using their notes.

Gerald Love has created a piece of music called ‘ all I have to do is sit and wait ‘ inspired by the bus route from Dunfermline center to Abbeyview. The duration is 18 min. the same length as the journey. Gerald is a member of the Teenage Fanclub a music band.


Daniel Jewesbury presents a talk exploring ideas public art. Daniel is an artist & writer based in Belfast.

Claire Barclay, visual artist, has created a temporary artwork in open-air locations inspired by Abbeyview. Her artwork ‘we need more and different flags’ can be seen during the event.

NADFLY Presents - PUBLIC ART GATHERING - Permanent vs. Temporary - Thurs 28th Feb 2008 7.00pm - Abbeyview Community Centre Dunfermline

Nicola Atkinson Does Fly will discuss the concept of Permanent vs. Temporary.

As part of the unforeseen happenings and inspiration in Abbeyview.
R.A.D.A.R. Random And Dynamic Art Risks.

Peter Nicholson a cellist will perform a composition in reaction to the notion of Permanent vs. Temporary.

Luke Fowler has created a film in Abbeyview His film looks into the particularities of the environment of Abbeyview and its current regeneration process. This will be the first showing of his film.

Artists profile:

Nicola Atkinson Does Fly is the Artist in Abbeyview from January 2007 until March 2008. Nicola has undertaken artworks in Scotland, England, New York, Los Angeles, Karachi, Dublin, Havana, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Germany and across the UK. Each of her art works aims to be innovative, ambitious and meaningful for the participants and the public.

Peter Nicholson is a member the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and One Ensemble. Combining a classical training with his experience as an improviser.

Luke Fowler is a visual artist who makes experimental films, which interrogate the documentary as an art form. As a musician he collaborates in the bands Lied Music and Rude Pravo, he also runs the record label "Shadazz".

ALL WELCOME

Investigating the Unexpected

I have been working on the drawings for the second book of Nicola’s residency that gathers all of the projects together of 'Part Two: Art as Evidence'. I want to present drawings with typical silhouettes but intriguing detail and have been studying objects to incorporate into the Abbeyview landscape, in order to let them infiltrate and nestle in the familiar.

The mechanics of a convection heater, for example, have a surprisingly strong structural quality. By manipulating scale and environment, can I fool the eye into reading it as building? If one dissects the drawing above into a collection of lines then the linear components need only be read with a different emphasis to recognise a tower block rather than the element of a heater. If we do not look properly when presented with an image that seems familiar, the brain tends to fill in detail from its bank of pictures. Conversely, if it is unrecognisable it will search for, and decide on, the familiar. This helps it cope with the bombardment of information that reaches it via the eye every second, but the downside of this is missing the unexpected. If you skim through the pages of ‘Art as Evidence’ you may miss them, but take your time and something may catch your eye long enough to investigate and find the unexpected. (The Lamb)

Daniel Jewesbury visits Abbeyview

As we stand waiting for the bus to Dunfermline the snow is getting heavier. We are caught in a pretty hefty moment of indecision as to whether to chance the roads - Nicola's heard that the motorway was blocked with an overturned truck - or to play it safe and take the train. We deliberate.

Hanna arrives. She is running and out of breath. This is a good way to meet someone for the first time, in a bus station in the snow when they're out of breath and you don't know whether to get the bus or the train. It stops you from standing on ceremony.

The bus is now late. We decide to get the train and cut our losses.

Then the bus arrives. We get the bus.

I'm fairly ignorant of the east coast of Scotland and the flames atop the refineries are pretty interesting to me, very dramatic, dark and satanic, but understandably not especially wonderful once you've seen them once, twice or ten thousand times, so i'm the only one staring at them. I tell Nicola that apparently the suspension cables on the Forth road bridge are starting to break. That's my store of local knowledge exhausted.

Nicola calls Dunfermline 'Dunfernland' and one of the things I hope to discover, during the course of my explorations of Abbeyview, is whether anyone else says this or whether she has a particular reason for pronouncing it that way. This I intend to find out indirectly. Perhaps I will start using it myself when i'm over next, and see if people start staring at me, or maybe treating me like one of their own (unlikely).

First impressions of Abbeyview are mingled in with the feeling of an initiation, or the conferring of membership in a society. I'm introduced to a number of people quite quickly and before I know it I'm having lunch in the bowling club and holding forth on public art, and community, and commitment and involvement, and trying to find out where everybody stands.

My own position on public art is that there are many people and interest groups who misuse it. Governments and local authorities have instrumentalised 'culture' to the extent that they often only see an appropriate use for it, in public contexts, in achieving specific policy goals (under the broad heading of social inclusion). This means that 'culture' as something that doesn't have definite, measurable 'outcomes' is seen as a bad thing, or even as elitist. Meanwhile, libraries are closed down and access to galleries, theatres and so on is ever more restricted. Where I live, in Belfast, public art is usually of the classic 'sticking plaster' type - intended to distract attention away from the terrible conditions that continue to blight everyday life here. There are lots of sticking plasters being put up in Belfast right now. They're all pretty ugly.

I know that Nicola's approach to public art, and to working with artists, is very subtle and that it avoids at all cost patronising those who might see it. All the same, at this stage, I know very little about Abbeyview, and I'm meeting the funders of the project for the first time. Are they sympathetic to her way of working? Are they in on it?

Nicola seems to have won them round fairly early on. In fact she seems to have given them something that they could never have asked for, which they could never really have known was exactly what they wanted. I guess this is because it's not a project 'aimed' at anyone, certainly not at some sort of half-imagined 'community'. It doesn't presume that art has to be compromised or reduced when you present it outside of a gallery, in the places where people actually live. Over several years of living in Belfast I've become very wary of that idea of 'community'. More often than not it's a handly way of keeping people in their place, and I really hate the idea of people having a 'place' that they're not expected to move beyond, whether that's a real place, where you live or work, or a place that you go to in your head. I've never really had a place myself so I tend to keep on the move.

By the end of the afternoon I've been given the guided tour and left to have a wander on my own. I come across a large main road just beyond the high school, and I realise that the estate has very clear boundaries. I wonder how much people respect, or observe these boundaries and what they really mean to anyone. A couple of desolate pieces of street furniture appear to be attempts to make the dead space somehow meaningful but i can't imagine anyone ventures down here for any reason, except perhaps to walk the dog late at night.

After only a little while I've left Abbeyview again, and as we pass the refinery flames I'm wondering what I might find out about it over the next couple of months.

by Daniel Jewesbury, 24 Jan 2008

Photographs © Nicola Atkinson Does Fly

NOTE CATCHER OF ABBEYVIEW

Hanna Tuulikki an artist and musician. Over the next month she will be looking for people in Abbeyview to sing to her a single note of their choice and used in a composition. The finished piece of music will be premiered:

March 13th @ 7pm
Public Art Gathering:
Flowers vs Portraits
Abbeyview Community Centre Dunfermline.

If you want to get in touch please contact the Eco House on 01383 632314.

Putting locals at the heart of public art

Art Feature in the HERALD by Jack Mottram. 18 Jan 2008



Last night, inside Abbeyview Community Centre, Dunfermline, resident community artist Nicola Atkinson Does Fly channelled the spirit of ballerina Moira Shearer, tapping out a rhythm with her feet to accompany viola player Aby Vulliamy, performing her score based on Shearer's finest hour, when she played Vicky in the Powell and Pressburger masterpiece of cinema, The Red Shoes.

The evening also saw attendees biting into oranges as they watched a slideshow by "cultural broker" Ben Spencer, whose installment as part of an ongoing series of public art gatherings, dubbed Clock People, was entitled What Is Beautiful?

Not, you might think, typical entertainment offerings on a rainy Thursday in Fife, but almost run-of-the-mill for the residents of Abbeyview, who, since last March, have been working with the artist who goes by the nom de guerre Nicola Atkinson Does Fly (adopted after she made a video about a fly, chosen because it is "irritating and essential") and also with a brace of invited artists.

"I almost see it as like working in a band of musicians," Atkinson says, explaining her collaborations with artists and community alike. "We all have our instruments - our artistic forms - and we're working together as a collective, but still distinct."

It's this sort of approach that marks out Atkinson as a sensitive, engaged practitioner of public art, a mode of working that can all-too-often see an artist descending on a community with a set project in mind.

"My approach is always very gentle," she agrees. "There might be a lot of work going on, but I'm not interested in just parachuting in. For a piece called Dwellings, I had the idea of making little cardboard houses, based on the houses that are going to be knocked down in Abbeyview. I presented them to the school so the students could put them together, but they did everything you could imagine with them. I ended up with hundreds of different crazy houses.

"That was interesting. I'd presented them with something that was complete to me, this really beautiful aesthetic piece, and they really matched it. Another example would be Belle & Sebastian guitarist Stevie Jackson's songs - he wrote two inspired by Abbeyview - and the school music department said, We can do this song', so they took it away, worked on it, and presented it back to him."

Such easy interactions are matched by the use of happy coincidences and a free-wheeling approach to fresh ideas, tactics that Atkinson has developed under the banner of Random And Dynamic Art Risks - or Radar.

"The Radar project is about doing something slightly mad, and about taking risks," Atkinson says. "With public art, there is an unpredictable aspect, and that's exciting. You really get into a zone, and begin to have an intuitive trust in what you are doing."

That intuition binds together the wide array of events taking place at Abbeyview. Clock People earned its title when a clock was suggested as a useful piece of public art, and Atkinson joked that residents should just ask other people for the time. That simple concept - of people as the focus of projects - now informs the regular gatherings, which seek to define the future of public art in the area by discussing allied ideas - from last night's meditation on beauty, to November's edition, The Importance of Time.

Atkinson's performance in the guise of Shearer grew in a similarly organic fashion.

"I was researching Moira Shearer for another piece," Atkinson explains. "I knew that she was born in Dunfermline, but when I saw that the event, What Is Beautiful?, was planned for her birthday, I just had to do something involving her. These sort of serendipitous things just seem to happen."

And they keep happening, spreading Abbeyview art around the world. For instance, a project that saw Atkinson drawing the stock of a local hardware store, selling her efforts for the price of the goods drawn, was mirrored in New York by artist Sophia Pankenier, and Stevie Jackson performed his Abbeyview songs earlier this month at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles.

"Things can reside here and start here," Atkinson says. "But the work has to have a life outwith the place. I like the idea of it being a worldwide thing - but an intimate worldwide thing.' In its quiet way then, Abbeyview is making its mark on the wider art world, and looks set to continue to do so with Atkinson's light hand on the tiller, generating oblique strategies and working towards, ultimately, a public sculpture in the area.

Before the Abbeyview artist enterprise draws to a close in March, though, there is much to be done. For instance, artist Luke Fowler is preparing a film for a Clock People event entitled Permanent vs Temporary, a Cabinet of Curiosities, which is touring the country.

It seems safe to say, the public art scene in Abbeyview will remain in rude health, long after Atkinson flies on to her next project.

The Cabinet of Curiosities is at Fife Contemporary Art & Craft, St Andrews, until Jan 30. For information on past and future events in Abbeyview, visit www.nadfly.com.