Garnethill, Glasgow a multi-cultural community, home to The Glasgow School of Art with Garnethill Park at its heart. Garnethill, formerly known as Summerhill but said to have been renamed for Thomas Garnett (1766-1802) an early supporter of women’s education. From the 1820s Garnethill developed into a leafy residential area, and soon became another expanding suburb of the city. More affordable housing created a grid-pattern of streets and housing that comprised terraces of sandstone tenements. This particular part of the landscape was named Albert Place and Whitehall Place; names which are now only etched on a map, as traces of colonialism and imperialism, because sometime in the 1970s the tenements on the south side of this specific grid were demolished. The tearing down of the houses created a vacant space which became Garnethill Park, firstly a football pitch in the late 1980s and then officially opened, in 1991, as a public park and art space.

Prior to the official opening a pair of murals had been created on the walls overlooking the park, including a much-loved tile mural by John Kraska, Irene Keenan and Tommy Lydon in 1979. Dieter Magnus’ public art, entitled ‘Waterworks’ formed the opening landscape intervention and took the form of a central pyramid, lighting and rock-strewn waterfall feature (now dry), built to celebrate Glasgow as the European Capital of Culture in 1990. Accompanying the work is a series of cast stepping-stones which incorporate quotations from the residents, one of which notably references the tenacity of ‘Battling’ Betty Brown, an important player in the development of the park. Subsequent artistic interventions have contributed to a stratigraphy of creative responses to the space. One of the most recent interventions is a bread oven constructed in part using reclaimed sandstone from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s famous Mackintosh building for The Glasgow School of Art. This form of art/making, created for and by the community, raises critical issues around ownership, the challenges of heritage designation and the need for an unfolding of the forms and effects of fading failure.

Our paper applies an Art/Archaeology lens to explore the unfolding, fading landscape of the park. It considers the various landscaping, artworks and on-going interventions that have been situated in the undulating space. It aims to surface a range of effects that are presented as active participants in an urban landscape archive. As we consider landscape as archive and archive as a form of unfolding presences, we will think through how the decaying artworks are transformed in the becoming archive of the park. By this we will speak to their potential as catalysts and contributors to the vibrant spaces that urban parks provide. Within and beyond the artworks are the material conditions and temporal fluctuations that contribute to a state of fading failure. Our lens applies a filter, aligned with but not situated within concepts of the Anthropocene and that recognise time, materiality and archive as interconnected planes, which perpetually define and re-define one another. As the various artistic interventions and installations arrive, endure and fade, we explore how the sensed afterlife of the artworks trace a ruination that is a continual state of becoming.

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