The work on the project is concerned with the notions of time and place. Making a single picture on each of the canonical hours, which mark the divisions of the day in terms of periods of fixed prayer at regular intervals an attempt is made to connect with a time that has passed. Each hour and each division of the day is characterised by conditions. Conditions of light and conditions of activity describe and organise each day that passed and is to come. The monks that followed this strict structure did so with the intention of allowing for themselves the opportunity to venture on devotional pilgrimages each day. The series of pictures attempts to do the same. The photographic gesture is subject to a strict schedule that occurs every three hours from the first light to the darkest hour. Light and subject matter follow the passing of the time. Each picture is made by reversing a photographic negative and backing it with a plate of solid sterling silver. Dense and heavy, each picture attempts to comment on a set of conditions that surrounds both the photographic gesture and the monastic life. Both are a pilgrimage – and as such both are acts of faith.
Bone fragments, sea shells, stones and quartz crystals were collected throughout the residency and brought back. As with every memento these too speak of an absence and a presence at the same time. Each object was selected, collected, removed and brought back to function as a relic of practices that are migratory and subject to the passage of time.
Each sundial is a marker and a descriptor at the same time. Whilst each individual sundial traces the time, all sundials together mark and describe the particular geographic characteristics of the Isle of Raasay. Longtitude, Latitude, elevation sunrise and sunset, magnetic declination and the duration of the tide are each made into a solar instrument which functions as a system of coordinates.
Emma Balkind, Susan Brind, Caroline Dear, Hardeep Pandhal, Edwin Pickstone, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Francis McKee, Michail Mersinis, Jessica Ramm, Johnny Rodger, Augustus Veinoglou.
In August 2013 a group of seventeen scholars, artists and organisers made their way to Raasay, a small island off Skye, for a short residency, responding to the legacy of 6th Century Irish monk Colm Cille. A month later the group re-gathers in Glasgow, to give their creative responses over an afternoon event on 11 Oct 2-5pm at CCA, and in an exhibition at the Mackintosh Museum. Work will then travel onto London Street Gallery, Derry~Londonderry, for an exhibition opening 30 November, showing all the presentations from the UK and Eire that make up Colm Cille's Spiral.
'Convocation' is part of the Derry~ Londonderry City of Culture project 'Colm Cille's Spiral' www.colmcillespiral.net, and is one of 6 projects across UK and EIRE that creates an artistic engagement with significant sites along once-vital perimeters and sea routes, including Lindisfarne, Derry~Londonderry and Bradwell-on-Sea.
Colm Cille's Spiral is a Difference Exchange project in partnership with The Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, at Kings College London.
Colm Cille’s Spiral is part of Creative Futures, a Creative Scotland talent development programme which aims to promote the professional development, capabilities, connectivity and ambitions of Scotland’s creative practitioners and organisations.
'Convocation' is supported by The Glasgow School of Art, CCA, ATLAS Arts and University of Glasgow.
Location:
Mackintosh Museum, The Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, G3 6RQ
Opening hours:
Mon-Sat 11am-5pm
Sun 11am-4pm
