Exhibition profile:
Morven Gregor, Gerry Loose, Ian Stephen, Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Collins Gallery
University of Strathclyde
0141 548 2558
www.strath.ac.uk/collinsgallery
Until September 18
It is often said that it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters. For evidence, one might look no further than the recent travels of Ian Stephen, Gerry Loose, Morven Gregor and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, whose water-borne trips across Scotland form the basis for the latest exhibition at Strathclyde University’s Collins Gallery.
One pair (Stephen and Waeckerlé) travelled from Stromness to Stornoway in a wooden clinker-built yacht, while the other simultaneously went down the Forth and Clyde Canal from Grangemouth to Bowling in a wooden rowing boat. The results are realised in poetry, film made en-route, textiles and photography.
Plans for the trip were first laid nine years ago, when three of the artists approached Collins Gallery curator Laura Hamilton.
“Originally, Ian Stephen, Gerry Loose and Morven Gregor were going to journey together on the canal but, as it developed, it was decided that Ian would sail across the top,” says Hamilton.
After meeting up at Grangemouth to share stories of legendary sea voyages, the artists set off. The northern journey, through some of the heaviest seas in Scotland, was due to take nine hours; the southern, along the calmer canal, nine days. But, as with all the best-laid plans, things did not go entirely as envisaged.
“The northern journey took 42 hours, not nine,” says Hamilton, forwarding me Stephen’s blog of the journey which details the choppy conditions the two artists -- and Stephen’s son Sean -- battled in the cold, claustrophobic and increasingly wet confines of their wooden yacht. “We hear the wind rise steadily. It’s nothing like a gale -- just a bit of a bounce,” records Stephen somewhat ominously at the beginning of a trip which costs heavy in fuel and socks.
Waeckerlé, a performance artist, film-maker and near-novice sailor, managed, beyond sea-sickness, to film the journey. Stephen, a poet and former coastguard, sent text message poems to photographer Gregor a few hundred miles south as she rowed along the canal.
Gregor and Loose’s longer, more sedate trip enabled them to concentrate on the journey. Gregor made portraits of all the people they met, whilst poet and horticulturalist Loose wrote poems which he put in bottles or inscribed on oars, and both carried out pre-arranged tasks, including the daily release of a small toy boat.
“One journey is a bit more slow movement, the other more derring-do,” says Hamilton, “50% of the creativity is in the exhibition, but 50% is in the artists’ heads, as they travelled. Anyone who likes the countryside of Scotland will enjoy this exhibition.”
