2019 has been…busy. Seriously – I can’t believe March is already running out (I bet Theresa May is also… – no. Nope. Let’s leave that to other blogs and outlets shall we…)
So, in brief…
Things kicked off even before the long Scottish Hogmanay had really wound up, as I appeared in the Guardian’s ongoing Illustrated City series. This gave me a chance to present a dialectogram, but also shape another type of narrative through cartooning and my sketchbooks. I’m pretty pleased with how the team at the Guardian presented it, I am in some AUGUST company cartooning/illustration-wise, and I hope it’s not the last time I work with Tash Reith-Banks and the rest at the Cities section. Click the pic to read it for yourself…
Funny thing about appearing under the auspices of a national media outlet – others also take notice. February began with this rather nice small feature on my work by BBC Scotland online, put together by Tamsin Selbie. You can tell she did a nice job, because even my mother was moderately impressed.
It was nice to give a shout out in the film to my work at Kirkintilloch Town Hall, where my dialectogram of it is still on display in it’s co-curated space. I’ll put a viewable image up on the site once I get the original scanned at the end of the show.
I’ve been working hard to finish off current projects to make way for new ones. On and off my drawing board at the moment are my dialectogram of Easterhouse, and of the Barrowland – click Chris Leslie’s rather excellent pic of me in action below to read an extended whinge about how terribly ‘hard’ it is to live my ridiculous life (please also check out the other, better posts on the Barrowland Ballads site!)
There’s a lot of other things cooking. I’m finishing off my Associate Artist work with the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art (which deserves a post of its own), and shorter collaborations with Edinburgh Book Festival, West Dunbartonshire Booked! festival, Architecture Fringe, some interesting ethnographic projects and two big complex projects we’re working on setting up that are too exciting to mention right now. I’ll update as details get firmed up.
But I can confirm two new dialectogram projects that will soon be added to the Dialectolocation map. Both have a distinctly aquatic feel to them. First of these is the West Boathouse refurbishment on Glasgow Green. I’ll be working with the two rowing clubs who use this distinctive – yet mysterious – facility to document not just the building, but the Clyde herself.
The other project takes me up to Glasgow’s other critical body of water, its canal. It’s just been confirmed that I will be on of the 23 Artists in Residence under Glasgow’s Creative Communities – Artist in Residence scheme. This places an artist in every ward in the city, and I will be the artist for Canal. My collaborators at the Glasgow Sculpture Studio and organiser Reuben Aspden assure me I won’t actually have to be drawing on the actual canal itself, but can mostly work on dry land. In fact, we’ll be focusing on the Claypits in Hamiltonhill, a former quarry that is now being transformed into a nature reserve. It’s going to be interesting…
Finally, another update from Dialectograms around the world. I’ve already established some really great links in Portugal – I went to Porto a couple of years ago to talk about my methods in relation to Drawing Research (just for 2 days, sadly), was fortunate enough to host the legendary artist and anthropologist Manuel Joao Ramos in Glasgow for the Sketchday event I helped organise and recently appeared in the Portugese journal Psiax. This all makes me think I really need to go back and visit Portugal again, and for longer. The latest connection between matters dialectographic and (Western) Iberian is given below – a lovely adaption of the dialectogram idea by Jose Carlos Mota and his colleagues at the Instituto Participativo, drawn by architect Gil Moreira.
Until next time…