A major commission exploring the physical and emotional effects of economic change and regeneration in Scotland.
Gathering together family snaps, historical records and oral accounts, Nicky Bird collaborated with individuals and groups from communities across Scotland to unearth personal histories whose physical traces are on the brink of erasure. Presented for the first time in Stills, this new body of photographic works investigates the simultaneously precarious and powerful nature of memory while exploring how photography and archaeology can be incorporated in both literal and metaphorical ways to speak of ‘history’.
Family snaps in hand, the collaborators took the artist to the spot where the original image was taken, helping Nicky Bird to re-photograph the place as it stands today. The importance of an insider’s memory, knowledge and experience, when looking at a location where all previous reference points have gone, was paramount. Sometimes the collaborator could orientate themselves through remnants – a drying post, the foundations of a house – at other times the direction would simply be ‘yes, it was here’ with (seemingly) no physical evidence at all. Maps were referred to when a collaborator expressed uncertainty on the exact location: these proved they were unerringly right.
Nicky Bird then worked closely with her collaborators to carefully place the older image inside the new, creating digital montages which at once trace the inevitable erosion of past realities while achieving an unnerving conflation of time and space. Through the slippages and tensions created in this process, Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place powerfully revealed something of these elusive personal histories which have been ambiguously caught in the spaces between the sites, memories and images.
Collaborators: Alexander Brown, Karen Hamilton, Drew Johnstone, Mary Kennedy, Jan McTaggart & George McTaggart, Martin Peter, Mark Scott and Lesley Weir.
Sites: Ardler (Dundee), Craigmillar (Edinburgh), Doon Valley (East Ayrshire), Paisley (Renfrewshire) and Prestongrange (East Lothian).
The exhibition toured to the Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, alongside an offsite venue at Doon Valley Museum from 26 September – 9 December 2009, and to Ninewells Hospital, Dundee from 27 February – 27 August 2009.
Producer: Cheryl Connell
See the artist’s website here for more information.
Use the arrow keys below to scroll through the slideshow of selected documentation images:
