WHAT does it take to make a work of art?
"A lot more work than I thought," Fiona Howland, an 18-year-old from Falkirk, laughs as she sits in Callendar Park. "There are a lot of different things to take into account," adds Rachel Gilmour, 17.
Howland and Gilmour have some idea of the effort involved because, along with 17-year-olds Lauren Bishop and Jonathan Wilson, they have spent a week trying to do just that with a team of professional artists led by Alec Finlay.
They have been researching the history and botany of the park and have come up with a project that riffs off the landscape, the Antonine wall that runs along the edge of Callendar Park, and the plants the Romans brought with them.
Now, as the Antonine wall is a world heritage site, all they need is Unesco approval of their plan for inserting architectural survey polls containing Roman floral names and they can call themselves artists.
The project is an offshoot of the latest Artist Rooms exhibition visiting the Park Gallery in Callendar House.
The exhibition is a presentation of photographs of another landscape, Little Sparta, by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was educated across the Forth in Dollar and who died in 2006. He also happens to be Alec Finlay's father.
The link wasn't one Finlay was sure he wanted to pursue in an empty room in the 19th-century splendour of Callendar House.
"I had very mixed feelings," he says. He is nervous that it might lead to "son of" articles, like, well, like this. "I don't mind son of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Sue Finlay," he says. "I don't shy away from the idea of a tradition. There can be an honour in a tradition."
Finlay is now well established as an artist in his own right, but he has long played his part in his father's work, whether it was as a ten-year-old pulling a tree from the burn at Stoneypath - where Hamilton Finlay's famous garden Little Sparta was made - or editing a recent book of his father's work.
Like his parents he has an interest in the landscape, but he has found his own artistic solutions for the problems of making art in public spaces.
This project with the teenage youth ambassadors is the latest example. He says: "This is probably a conscious attempt to do something akin to my father's work without referring to it. My father might refer to the historical aura of the Romans. This is more literal and more content to celebrate planting a tree."
Finlay's involvement is also a coup for the Park Gallery which is excited at the prospect of the upcoming exhibition of Hamilton Finlay's work. The gallery was under serious threat of closure only four years ago.
"It's really a fantastic opportunity," says Gillian Smith, Arts Development Officer at Falkirk Community Trust. "If this goes well it would be fantastic to think we would have opportunities to bring other great artists to the area. There's every chance we could have Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst."
What does it take to make a work of art? A lot of history. And hope for the future.
Artist Rooms: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Nature Over Again after Poussin 1979 -1980 opens on Friday.
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