Grab your calendar and take notes as we bring you our Top 5 Central Station during GI2012:

Everything Flows
Patricial Fleming Projects
Patricia Fleming Projects presents ‘Everything Flows‘ Glasgow Artists/Musicians. Their Art and Recordings 1990 – 2010. This limited edition EP will comprise a selection of the outstanding ‘experimental art into music and performance’ scene growing from the Glasgow visual art sector over the last twenty years. The EP will present artists, their music and musical influences together for the first time.
20 Apr – 5 May | Tue – Sun, 2.30 – 6.30pm | Queens Park Railway Club

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The Mutual Charter
A campaign-style build up of events and online content as marked the progress of 14 simultaneous international projects created by members of The Mutual: an artists’ co-operative comprised of more than 150 early career creative practitioners. These projects will surface throughout the festival at various public and private venues and will be united in a publication launched at the end of the festival.
20 Apr – 7 May | see site for details

Keep an eye out for Packing And Mourning, a project by Penny Anderson, Eija Hirvonen, Shelton Walker and Youngjoo Yoo, previously featured on the site. You can see it at St Judes Hotel. Here’s the listing.

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RECORD STORE
For World Record Store Day 2012 (21st April) and to coincide with GI (Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts), Monorail Records will be hosting an exhibition curated by visual artists Chris Biddlecombe and Janie Nicoll. This installation is the result of a collaborative project involving the creation of approximately twenty record cover artworks created by a wide range of Scottish artists, each of whom have a strong interest in or connection to music making; artists who have been in bands, who DJ, or who use music as a theme in their art making practice.
20 Apr -  May | Monorail Records
[Preview: 19 April | 6 - 8pm | Monorail Records]

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Field Office
An exhibition by first year Masters students from Valand School of Fine Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden. Field Office combines a space for showing work and a place for doing work. With an understanding of a field office functioning as an outpost for a series of explorations, conducted as fieldwork within the city, it serves as platform for a series of individual and collaborative art works and events, surveying, passing through and engaging with Glasgow. Coinciding with the Glasgow International Festival, the project connects with this event while also extending into Glasgow’s local art scene.
26th Apr – 7 May | see site for times | Repositioned
[Opening night 25 April - DJ set from Belle and Sebastian]

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Nothing About Us Without Us Is For Us
A public art event using obsolete technology to hurl language across Glasgow’s river Clyde. Led by Matt Baker & t s Beall, as part of Glasgow International Festival Visual Art 2012. It’s described as a sort of action / happening / community celebration / anti-festival. It is preceded by lots of workshops and tours that involve different groups of folk and institutions in and around Govan. There are around 20 workshops and events in total – some of which are organised for specific groups, and others which are open to the public. See the individual event listings here.
20 Apr – 1 May | See site for specific events | Around Govan

Tell us about any shows, exhibitions, gigs, things of interest that you have on during GI 2012. It doesn’t have to be on the “official” GI2012 programme to grab our attention.

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See more Top 5′s selected from the network here.

Hidden Spaces – what do they mean and how do they affect us? Each person carries with them their own sense of home, tied to their sense of belonging, their past and their wished-of future. From this conception of home we construct the world around us – places we feel safe in, drawn to, wary of, excluded from and intrigued by.  Our idea of these places might change as we grow familiar with them, as personal and emotional associations fluctuate, as our bodies move through space and as others enter or leave that space – constructing spaces of migration, dislocation, settlement and even bereavement, each with conceptually structured layers of surface, accessibility and invisibility overlaying the physical construct of our environment.

With such a subjectively-framed starting point, not only will personal interpretations of hidden spaces vary, but these will be carried into the cultural and professional production of spaces, so an architect’s perception of Hidden Space might be very different from a public artist’s, an anarchist’s or a film location scout’s, and each of these professionals will in turn come to influence how we navigate the space around us.

From this broad and permeable conception of space we’ve drawn a few more concrete examples, and we’ll be featuring differing approaches to the theme of Hidden Spaces. From Curator to Artist to Poet, we’ve invited some guest bloggers to write about their relationships with spaces, here are some of the contributors we’ve got lined up to kick things off:

Matt Baker, in the past Lead Artist for both Inverness and the Gorbals, writing on hidden space from the perspective of someone who makes public art. Read his blogs: hiding, finding and the search, space hidden in things, looking for unconformity… & seasoning time.

Sarah Butler, author and head of the UrbanWords consultancy, developing projects which explore regeneration and place through creative writing. Read her blog here.

Richard Taylor, freelance artist & writer, talks about his collaboration on a project focused on abandoned spaces. Read his blogs: ArtEvict – hidden space and revealing performance, SPLICING HORRISONS, Hidden space – tent as a transitory studio, THE CUMBRIA ENERGY CENTRE & getting lost remaining hidden

Collaborative collective, Sans Facon, gave us a continued visual dairy of hidden spaces being enjoyed in everyday life. See their observations here.

We also had contributions from:
Arika – Shadowed Spaces
Johanna Basford – hidden (work) spaces
Neil McGuire – Hidden Spaces: Supreme Social Networks
Erin McElhinney – What’s in a name?
Susan Castillo – Hidden Space
Fraser Denholm – Tracing Places

Tell us about your hidden spaces - add a link to a blog, a video or photographs from the overlooked or concealed spaces of your city in the comments below.

Monkey puzzle tree in the garden

Rusted railing

The house is abandoned and boarded up. I found a hole broken through the boarding on an outbuilding – usually I am interested in who would have made the hole and what they were doing in the building, but on this occasion when I pulled the camera back out into the day light I was looking for the original inhabitants in the image.

This is what the camera recorded:

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

On a Spring day in 1788 James Hutton and his companion John Playfair landed a small boat at Siccar Point on the Berwickshire coast of Scotland. Here they saw something that Hutton had been searching for in excess of 25 years – an irrefutable example of an Unconformity.

Theoretical Unconformity published in Hutton’s ‘Theorey of the Earth’ 1795

in Hutton’s time, all areas of what we now call science was challenging a mythic understanding of the world. The Judaeo-Christian creation myth stated that the Earth that we all live on and experience as our physical reality was created in a single day and that day could be dated as approximately BC 6000.
What Hutton found at Siccar Point was a visible example of two contrasting geological processes, one laid directly above the other – thus demonstrating that the rock strata had not all been laid down in one day but over a much longer period during which different actions had been at work.

‘Hutton’s Unconformity’ Siccar Point, Berwickshire, Scotland

Standing at Siccar Point today is slightly mystical – I felt very close to an inconceivable amount of time. Hutton’s companion Playfair described the experience that day as “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.

I am certainly no Creationist, rather I do subscribe to the Laws of Thermodynamics that state for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – in gaining our new understanding of natural processes I imagine that we also lost a mythic or poetic understanding of our relationship to the material of our world.

Siccar Point

In our fascination for the poetic understanding of their environment shown in ‘Indigenous’ cultures (eg Australian ‘songlines’) we often forget that our versions of such myths are really not so far removed. When we tore ourselves away from our creation stories what was the consequence for our human ‘being in the world’ ? All of a sudden we were faced with a radically depersonalised version of our environment. Reviewing Playfair’s statement in this light makes for interesting interpretation of the giddiness he felt.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

Spiral Jetty 1970

Spiral Jetty is a spit of land made by unloading rocks into the Great Salt Lake, Utah.

It was constructed by Smithson in 1970. Shortly after it was completed the level of the lake rose and the work was submerged for many years, before emerging again in the last decade encrusted in salt.

Spiral Jetty 2002

What is usually omitted from any discussion of Spiral Jetty is that the work is a a very carefully constrcted response to the cultural context of the site and presents a beautifully elegant alternative to the idea of historical time that is the significant feature of that context.

The Great Salt Lake is adjacent to the Golden Spike Monument – this commemorates the place where the railways of Eastern and Western United State finally joined in 1869 to make a continuous coast to coast route. The Golden Spike was the last pin securing the last rail that linked the two lines.

‘East meets West’ 1869

‘Golden Spike Centenary Re-enactment’ 1969

There is a monument at Golden Spike and the joining ceremony is re-enacted hourly at the visitor centre.

It is the idea of history as a  set of distinct moments that can be preserved through documentation, re-enactment and physical memorial that Spiral Jetty questions. The form is spiral (not a line) and it appears to go nowhere. But, it is in the materiality that the true interest in Smithson’s position appears – the key is SALT. It is a preservative,for sure, but salt grows in a spiral crystalline manner – continually adding to its own history intial deposit in a perfect fractal pattern based on its intial formation.

Robert Smithson – study of crystal growth

When Spiral Jetty emerged from the Great Salt lake it’s history had literally grown, was literally seasoned and enhanced…this standing in marked contrast to the way in which Golden spike clings to the inviolate perfection of one momentin ‘history’.

Jennifer Roberts is my favourite writer on Spiral Jetty – she defines Smithsons artwork as – ‘…a different form of historical moment – one that does not compulsively attempt to return to a single privileged moment in a perspectivally organised historical past, but rather, one that acknowledges the materiality, specificity and opacity of history even as it redeems and preserves it’ 

(from ‘Mirror Travels- Robert Smithson and History’ Jennifer L. Roberts. Yale University Press 2004)

I think that to conceive of something that brings together place, materials and historical context in a relationship that continues to play and evolve over 40 years is a work of genius

Find out more about Matt Baker here.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

When you start to read into these lovely objects the first thing you find is that they are ‘current maps’ ie that they are a literal picture of the different movements of water around island groups. I suppose that interpretation of any object like this is akin to archaeology…a creative choice. I like the version laid out in Varieties of Unreligious Experience

Here is a long and convoluted tale about the search for the truth of these charts. The interpretation that emerges is that these are not conventional charts in the sense of being ‘pictures’ of anything, rather they are family mnemomics that are passed down through generations and incomprehensible to anyone outside the clan. The only clue to how they work that could be uncovered was that they relate to the way that ocean waves bounce back off particular pieces of land and the way those wave mix with others to create complex patterns – reading these patterns is the key to finding your position at sea.

The way we understand space and place is intensely personal – it makes sense to me that this understanding be passed down by and to those closet to us – after all these are the people we experience things with and share an individual descriptive language with. I love the idea that this shared language can be distilled into a tactile object that can be carried and held.

Find out more about Matt Baker here.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

So far – so good, but for me the territory becomes more problematic when the concept of ‘finding’ is introduced…..for artwork built around the hidden quite often means that the art causes the hidden to be found. While the act of revealing can deliver an initial high, this is often followed by the drive to possess or capture. While David Nash’s influence on me has waned I still hold precious James Joyce’s statement in ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ that the true work of art is defined as one that does not excite a desire of any kind (I’m still looking for the actual quote…see below).

Some of my practice is very ‘quiet’ and ‘unannounced’ – I am often asked ‘what if people do not see it, or cannot find it?’. I am interested in the act of seeking  ….it  is not overly important for me whether someone finds the initial object of their search…..rather their experience of the process and the unexpected things that might be discovered on the journey.

Erratic Cairnsmore of Fleet National Nature Reserve – permanent installation 2009. On finding Erratic you are invited to draw out the pulling handle and drag the sculpture to a new location – Erratic is in remote and open landscape…it’s position is not defined.

When the Rothko series for the Seagram Buildingwas still in what is now Tate Britain, I had a very deep relationship with the room in which they were hung – I could never guarantee finding it – for me, it was a secret or hidden room. I was not interested in getting a map, rather the finding or not finding was in some way ‘meant to be’ I gave over my destiny to the search and what I found on the way and/or the finding of the Rothkos (cf also the Joyce and Nash quotes… though Google has spoiled that game somewhat).

A good recent example of working with the hidden was a work by Ginny Hutchison in a project I curated in public space in Inverness. Ginny marked the path of the sun over a series of consciously unremarkable spaces

In going looking for the Seven Sunsets people made their own unique discovery of the city even if very few ever found all of the ‘work’.

Find out more about Matt Baker here.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.