New Work Scotland: Group Effort

Begun by the Collective gallery in 1999, New Work Scotland evolves year upon year but is as common a feature of the Scottish art scene as shows in tenement flats and rancid opening night wine.

This year Collective signalled a change to the programme with the introduction of a theme – Mining the Horizon – and the promise of more group dialogue and critical discourse. To find out what this new approach means for the artists, we spoke to Gordon Schmidt and Rhianna Turnbull, who are first to show this October.

“From what I can tell, the exhibition end game will be similar to previous NWSP years in that the same space is being used for solo shows with a single publication about all the participants. Business as usual.” Indeed. The residency at Studio Voltaire in London is once again part of the support offered, but while in the past just one artist was given an eight-week residency, this year the opportunity has been extended to all of the participants, each spending a fortnight there with their exhibition partner.

Schmidt and Turnbull have just returned from their slot, where they took turns to use the studio a day at a time. “Just being in London with someone who’s doing the same things as you is quite a nice buffer,” says Turnbull, who used the residency to shoot footage for a video work. “In the past I think people have found it difficult because Studio Voltaire is essentially a studio space, and you can try to contact people and things, but essentially you were there on your own.”

There was also a group weekend retreat to Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, which was attended by the NWSP panel and mentors. But, says Turnbull, the group focus hasn’t been forced on them. “It’s fallen more to us now to organise meeting up. Collective are trying this new thing out and they’ve changed the programme slightly, but we’re all still having solo shows so we’re not working together as such. The best part is that you get to understand better what everyone else does.”

What exactly the artists will be showing, however, is something even Collective’s director Kate Gray will have to wait to see. Schmidt is working on a three-projection synced video and sound installation, to show alongside prints based on research from The Mitchell Library’s microfilm archive. Taking as his starting point a Stone Roses gig held on Glasgow Green in 1990 – the year Glasgow was named European City of Culture – he is making a series of interviews to camera to create an oral history of the event.

“This approach fits well with the epoch of this particular event, as in 1990 video cameras and phone cameras weren't accessible to most people, therefore personal footage does not exist for this event in the way that it has done from the mid 90s onwards,” he explains in his NWSP statement.

Turnbull will be showing a collection of collages assembled from magazine cuttings, moving between the generic and the very specific. They often feature banal situations that are nevertheless infused with glamour – a perceived attitude on behalf of the imagined protagonists that everything is “cool”. One is titled Rich Arabs have got the builders in; another is Early 90s, West End at Night.

“In the beginning, I was making collages of ideal situations,” she explains. “Then they became less generic and I wanted to make them more like real life, which is often less than amazing.” She also plans to show a video work that muses on the sensibility of certain women when they drive – a casual attitude and confidence of being in their own domain. Despite life’s palpable lack of glamour for emerging artists, both Schmidt and Turnbull seem to occupy this very attitude: clearly NWSP is very much their domain.