Contemporary Scottish Art and the Landscape of Abandonment

Translating Space: the Politics of Ruins, the Remote and Peripheral Places

“…Later, once their original purpose had been rendered redundant, these relics of a past industry were a source of fascination for conceptual artist John Latham, who was commissioned by the Scottish authorities responsible for their management in the 1970s to advise on their cultural value. Latham considered this landscape as an unintentional but compelling sculptural form, arguing for the preservation and celebration of the bings, ruins as they were (Richardson, : 395). Today, the bings attract people from local towns who use them for walking and other leisure activities such as climbing and skateboarding; moreover, they are a hospitable environment for diverse species of animal and plant life, threatened elsewhere by urban sprawl and the intensification of agriculture (Harvie, ).…”