'Rumours of a New Planet' was produced during Collective’s relocation to the City Observatory on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, and was structured around people and narratives that are generally not included in the dominant histories of the site. Calton Hill is a destination that one generally looks from, rather than at, whether one is looking up at the stars through a telescope, down into the ground via the deep-earth thermometer that was also present in the observatory, or out across the city to produce a panorama. I refer to this as an "astronomical approach to site-specificity", a form of constellational activity that draws attention to a site through the phenomena visible from it. 'Rumours of a New Planet' consisted of three intertwining project elements that was based on people who lived or worked on or around Calton Hill during its scientific heyday. Each of the projects were initiated separately but developed alongside each other, such that each element reflected, contained and revealed aspects of the other two elements:
'One Drop of Water Contains as Much Electricity as Would Make a Thunderstorm' was based on the travel journals of Jessica Duncan who moved from rural Aberdeenshire to Edinburgh to study geology in 1847. Her notebooks contain transcriptions of lectures, diagrams of strata and fossils, translations of essays by European geologists, fieldwork schematics, and notes on local and national excursions. The final entry documents an ambitious excursion from Dieppe to Florence that she undertook over several weeks in 1854. I undertook the same excursion over ten days in 2016, but instead of thinking about the sites geologically, I focussed on incidents from art and cultural history that had occurred in the interim 164 years. I produced a book of essays based on the places on her route which, taken as a set, draw parallels between undertaking an excursion and visiting an exhibition.
'The Manenberg Tornado' was based on a set of botanical paintings made by Margaret Stewart while she was in South Africa from 1834 to 1838. Stewart lived in a suburb of Cape Town, where her astronomer husband, John Herschel, was building a telescope. The couple undertook a number of excursions around the colonised surrounds, collecting botanical samples from which Stewart produced her portfolio, the 132 images forming a concentrated representation of the Cape’s native species. I re-enacted one of Stewart’s excursions in 2017, a route which in the 1830s was sparsely populated and traversed by rough tracks, but today is a densely populated region consisting of wealthy suburbs, formal and informal townships, small industry, urban farms, conservation areas and tourist sites. I met a number of people who live and work on the route – including residents, conservationists, activists, academics, amateur botanists, and farmers – and talked to them about their relationship with the land. In 'The Manenberg Tornado', each encounter was represented by a drawing of whatever was growing on the site it took place, whether that be a rare native species, a weed, a vegetable, or a pot plant from a garden centre. The work sought to represent a subjective experience of the spaces and politics of post-apartheid Cape Town through an engagement with how land is organised, occupied and articulated.
'The Sightseers' was based on the fact that many members of Edinburgh’s nineteenth-century astronomical research community were producing resources for blind people, or had significant problems with their own eyesight. Through the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB), I worked with The Lothian Blind Ramblers to produce an audio guide to Calton Hill. I ran a workshop session with the group which involved storytelling and guided walks around the site, and used the results to produce a script for an audio-play that was then performed by two actors. The audio guide / play can be accessed through Collective’s website, and not only functions as a guide to the site, but also as a guide to the other two works in the exhibition.
