A new exhibition opens next week at the Iota Gallery on Hyndland Street in the heart of Partick, Glasgow, that turns back the pages on the neighbourhood.

Points Of Reference comprises oil paintings and mixed media art works by David Campbell who takes a section of Partick demolished in the 1970s as his inspiration, if that is the right word. The works are stunning: abstract but hauntingly 'architectural' pieces that recall the vanished townscape without in any sense depicting it. Campbell grew up in the area but moved to London in the 1970s and now lives in Edinburgh. However, like many Partickonians he has never quite left. He's a very successful designer who has made art works for many years but until now has not produced a show on this impressive scale.

In the mid-1850s the newly created Police Burgh of Partick was still little more than a village. A hundred years later, however, when Campbell was born there, it had become a densely packed urban ensemble of tenements, terraces, shipyards, cattle yards, graving docks, slaughter houses, flour mills, granaries, pubs, shops and warehouses, along with all the ancillary activity required to keep all of this going: the coal yards, blacksmiths, tram depot, railway stations, bowling greens, bakers and butchers - all crammed into a few square miles of monumental Glasgow.

Many of Partick's residents had witnessed this amazing late burst of development and lived to see it swept away again in the 1970s by the Partick South Comprehensive Development Area and the Clydeside Expressway. That redevelopment did little more than break a frayed edge from Glasgow's urban grid, but it had contained a whole connected, overlapping world of complex relationships. Most of the population had arrived as 'economic migrants' from Ireland, the Highlands, Italy, Poland and elsewhere to become instant Glaswegians. Many had already been subjected to 'clearance' in the name of improvement.

The postwar period in Scotland was a new age of improvement and the Clydeside Expressway was built in this final, closing phase of reconstruction. It was a high-speed dual carriageway built between 1971-73 that fed into the ambitious but incomplete 'Highway Plan for Glasgow' (1965). A hundred years earlier, the City had been inspired by Haussmann's Paris to create a stylish, sanitised grandeur, but the 1965 Plan took as its model the urban motorways of US cities like New Haven and Chicago. New super-arteries would oxygenate the thrombotic post-industrial body of Glasgow, creating a futuristic new motopia. The Corporation would clear the slums and use the space created to thread an Inner Ring Road around the city with radial offshoots.

The route of the Expressway - through Campbell's home - represented a line of minimal resistance through a decaying industrial zone of failing enterprises and low rent tenements, mostly room and kitchens and single ends with outside lavatories. By the time it was decided to demolish, the area had been in existence for little more than 50 years. Partick itself had only been part of Glasgow since 1912. In the grand scheme of things, the loss of parts of Partick Bridge Street, Castlebank Street, Crawford Street, Beith Street and Sandy Road was not controversial. Most of those displaced, including Campbell's family, were re-housed for the better in Knightswood or Drumchapel.

Controversy only arose where the Expressway swung north to connect with the recently opened Clyde Tunnel, taking with it a swathe of the Corporation's showpiece Victoria Park, a church, a douce middle-class terrace and a tree-lined boulevard. But as the last of the tenements were torn down, they began to be missed and to be mythologised. In this respect, Campbell's art is something of a corrective. Much of the grim social and economic reality of life in 'Partick South' is all too clear in his work.

What does it mean to create an art inspired by the 'architecture' of the past: architecture in the broadest sense of an imaginative frame of reference? In our minds we travel back to the places we have lived but that dreaming place is not there, even if it has survived physically. The evidence of an actual place we might revisit can be pleasant, painful or neutral but if there is nothing left at all, the will to create places of imagination can be strong.

We expect towns and cities to change but the area of Partick South has not just changed, it has gone completely: there is nowhere there. Surviving landmarks only add to the confusion. The area around the beautiful little thriving church of St Simon's has been rebuilt but the place gets many visitors seeking out the long-since demolished school and the nearby municipal play park. In this situation the memory of place takes on a certain purity, an abstraction related to atmosphere, colour, light, sound, texture and space.

How is it that the artist's inspiration - which arises from actual experiences of real, tangible things - can lead to the creation of an art that we think of as 'abstract'? Could it be that Campbell's art reflects a more fundamentally 'real' account of memory in all its complexity? Early psychiatrists and social theorists, including Freud and Walter Benjamin, were fascinated by the metaphor of archaeology: memory was 'buried' under layers of experience and could be 'excavated' through psychoanalysis. Still today 'the archaeology of memory' is a common enough phrase. But memory is not an exhibit nor a collection we can bring out and look through like a treasured photograph album. On the contrary, memory is in permanent flux, going in and out of focus, interacting with experience. Archaeology itself now accepts that the past is a creation of the present. Points Of Reference is art that celebrates this ambiguous, dynamic interaction of self and place.

As a society we have probably underestimated the psychological effects of translocation and destruction of place. But a place like Partick had no fixed reality. Monumental stone architecture offered the illusion of permanence but many of the area's early suburban villas were torn down and replaced by three-storey tenements which themselves were replaced by five- and six-storey buildings. Open spaces were mercilessly developed. In the 1890s the railway smashed its brutal but surgically precise way through with minimum land take. This was an area in a constant state of transition towards an unknown future of completedness.

Rightly, we have a lot to say about the beneficial effects of place but we know much less about the loss of place. In terms of the improvement narrative, areas earmarked for 'clearance' have failed to deliver wellbeing. Many people living today have been re-housed twice, three times even, and whole districts demolished. We could wonder what the effect of this might be on the human psyche and whether the process of coming to terms with loss of place may lead us, at last, to the celebration of impermanence that is the main theme of Points Of Reference.

Points Of Reference by David Campbell is at the Iota Gallery from March 5-21.

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