Claims to Place: The public art of Sue Jane Taylor

Abstract

This paper explores the ways through which the public art of Scots artist Sue Jane Taylor and the practices associated with it both unsettle narratives of globalisation and conjure in their stead new narratives of place. With reference to the stories of five works/workings of art-Glencalvie and Borgie in the Highlands, Aberdeen (the onshore site for the North Sea oil industry) and Clydebank, and Lower Pultneytown, Wick-I show how the art, as evidence of a deeply politicised aesthetics, makes visible not only the specificities of historical and contemporary struggle, but is also bound up with creating and imagining new political possibilities. Art and artistic practices are understood not simply in terms of shaping meanings but as constitutive of processes of subject formation and of the 'becoming' of place.

Geography and art. An expanding field

“…Moving forward some decades, we find geographers revelling in the fruits of art's expanded field, producing a vibrant body of research that enrolls a wide variety of artistic media: painting (Colls, 2011;Crouch, 2010); installation (Hawkins, 2010a); sculpture (Gandy, 1997); social sculpture (Cook, 2000); participatory work (Parr, 2007;Tolia-Kelly, 2007a); new genre public art; (Mackenzie, 2006a;Pollock and Sharp, 2007); photography (Vasudevan, 2007); sound art (Butler, 2006); bio art (Dixon, 2008); Surrealist and Situationist inspired works, and other urban practices (Bonnett, 1992(Bonnett, , 2009Pinder, 2005). 3 Matching this range is a display of thematic profusion that wholeheartedly embraces art's location within political and sociological fields, including themes as diverse as touch, the body, landscape, rubbish, nature, commodities, activism, mental health, identity, space, home, memory, urban politics, posthumanism and postcolonialism, to name but a few.…”

Dialogues and Doings: Sketching the Relationships Between Geography and Art

“…the sound of the sea, the feel of the wind on the side of your face) move away the symbolic to draw attention to the experiential, thinking about culture and landscape as more than ‘mapped objects’ (see also Causey 2006). Weaving together the artist’s bodily practices and experiences of walking and gliding with explorations of his ‘Cornishness’, Crouch and Toogood develop the potential of art as constitutive of dynamic processes of belonging and experiencing place, landscape and subjectivity (see also Mackenzie 2006a,b; Rogoff 2000).…”

“…Through his analysis Sacks’ work constitutes a radical and accessible politics, unveiling the hidden work that goes into bringing our commodities to us, a form of ‘creative’ public geographies. In a rather different vein Mackenzie explores selected examples and exhibitions of visual art and community arts projects in the Highlands and Islands in Scotland (Mackenzie 2002, 2006a,b). In these works, she explores ‘“place as a political project”… re‐constituted through visual art as part of a culture of resistance’ (Mackenzie 2006a, 966, 968).…”

Theatre as safe space? Performing intergenerational narratives with men of Irish descent

“…While creative geographies focus us, in part, on questions of method there are much wider engagements with theatre and performance. In recent review articles investigating geography's relationship with the arts (Hawkins, 2011(Hawkins, , 2012, different ventures have been noted ranging from: painting (Colls, 2011;Crouch, 2010), sculpture and social sculpture (Cook, 2000;Gandy, 1997), participatory arts practice (Parr, 2007;Tolia-Kelly, 2007), new genre public art (Mackenzie, 2006;Pollock & Sharp, 2007), photography (Vasudevan, 2007), sound art (Butler, 2006), bio art (Dixon, 2008), dance (Nash, 2000;Rose, 1999;Thrift, 1997) and Situationist inspired, psychogeographical practice (Bonnett, 1992(Bonnett, , 2009Pinder, 2005). In this latter sphere (of psycho-geographies, particularly involving memory and nostalgia; see Bonnett & Alexander, 2013), these urban engagements offer space for 'a sensuous realm that is imagined, lived, performed and contested' (Pinder, 2005, p. 285).…”