Satellite @ East Kilbride Arts Centre

Satellite is an artist collective that includes Margaret McCormick, Kevin Malcolm, Audrey O'Brien, Neville Rae and Sam Stead. They came together in 2006 over a common interest in how art is made and received in Scotland, outwith the major cities. Highly aware of the Glasgow/Edinburgh-centrism of contemporary art in Scotland, Satellite looks to branch out and take art beyond its comfort zone. This month they venture as far as East Kilbride, where they will show new work inspired by the nearby Daer Reservoir.

In 2007 they completed a project in the satellite town of Cumbernauld. A post Second World War new town, Cumbernauld was originally designed to house the newborn baby boomers straining the seams of Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was a utopian vision that saw social and private housing existing side by side, based on one single, modernist vision, antithetical to the medieval confusion of, say, Edinburgh’s Old Town. It is commonly regarded as something of a disaster and Cumbernauld has unfairly become the scapegoat for generations of city dwellers, smug in their righteous cosmopolitanism.

East Kilbride, designated the first new town in Scotland, is a Glasgow suburb in South Lanarkshire, also prone to derision. Here, Satellite will exhibit at the town’s Art Centre, showing five works made during a period of research leading up to the exhibition.

The artists will take it in turn to make their individual contributions. The first spends two days camping near the Daer Resrevoir, an archeologically significant site, making a new work. The subsequent artist will use this piece as a launching board for their contribution… and so on until all five have completed their work and the exhibition opens.

A unique and dynamic method of making work, Satellite exists on the outskirts of the Scottish art scene. They bravely venture beyond the hermetic circles of the big cities’ art arenas, exposing the methods of their practice to a perhaps uninitiated audience. Unpretentious in every way, they are true collaborators, de-mystifying the art making process, affirming its social and communal roots.

Read our review of the Satellite collective's exhibition here.