Voyage to Portobello

The launch of the Garden Gallery, the latest initiative from the ambitious community-based public art trust Big Things on the Beach, was an afternoon that delightfully mixed performance and site-specific artwork. For the month of August, 26 residents of Portobello have offered their front gardens to host a unique and varied event. The artworks are a mixture of painting, sculpture and other media, and are just as varied in their themes and styles. The exhibition was launched on the second of August with an event on the promenade in Portobello. The launch was a combination of performances and tours that were designed to offer the audience a ‘taster’ of the exhibition as a whole. Despite the gloomy start to the afternoon, the event drew a large crowd of young and old, with residents and familiar faces from Edinburgh’s art community alike.

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The Power of Three

The afternoon began with a performance from the San Franciscan physical theatre group The Carpetbag Brigade. This saw four performers from the company perform part of their show Volcano, a mix of physical theatrics and dance on stilts. The performers instantly grabbed the attention of the audience – as well as anyone innocently passing by – as all were drawn to these apparently mythical creatures dancing on the grass down by the beach. This offered the organisers a captivated audience to whom they could introduce and launch the Garden Gallery project. The performance was divided into three acts, in between which Big Things on the Beach introduced the trust and the project, while the chairperson from The Power of Three introduced their commissioned works in order to increase the public’s awareness.

The Power of Three, as was explained, is the title of three works commissioned by participants of the Public Art Commissioning Course. These are local residents and members from Big Things on the Beach who have a vested interest in the commissioning of public art in their community, whose works are intended to encourage interaction and engagement with the promenade and beachfront. Angela Beardly’s Land Stream, is a colourful representation of the gorse flower that once covered the land in Portobello but is now rarely seen. Emma Herman- Smith’s Hives represents the decline of the honeybee, while Amy Copeman’s What are you looking at? is a series of hanging vinyl photographs using images from the beach. Each of the three pieces successfully engages with and blends into their environment but without becoming submerged. All three works engage and represent their surroundings and gently prompt the viewer to consider what is beyond the surface of what they see, relating to the beach and promenade in alternative way.

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Tours and Their Insights

Next on the day’s agenda were the tours, designed to offer the audience a ‘taster’ of the exhibition. These tours were a unique way to experience the project as they offered the audience an insight into the reasons why the artworks were placed in a particular garden. In some cases the artists were present to talk about their work and their individual experiences of working with each host and their personal space. The artworks themselves include new site-specific works as well as pre-existing pieces that have been re-contextualised by the Garden Gallery structure. In Scott Laverie’s sculpture Things to Come the process of building his imposing, yet gracefully arching, timber construction will continue throughout the month to eventually result in the two arches joining together, thus joining the two spaces together. Andrea Geile’s work Petalostia gigantea ‘Rostbraun’ is, as the artist explains, a project that she has been working on for a few years. Geile has created large imposing yet beautiful cast iron flowers, which she has placed in a graveled front garden. The work challenges the notions of garden art that is so popular in contemporary suburbia by relating it to land sculpture, as in this work the two notions seem to become blurred.

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Collaborations of the Public Eye.

The Garden Gallery is a uniquely curated ‘exhibition’ of public art. This initiative by Big Things on the Beach is curated in association with Duncan Bremmer of the Amber Roome gallery. The partnership is the first of a series of different collaborations that have brought about this exhibition. Firstly, the collaboration between the artists and their hosts – as the project was not simply a matter of the artists picking a garden and placing a work of art in it but instead involved both the host and the artist going through a selection process together. Secondly, the collaboration of the different themes addressed in the exhibition, with the mixture of private spaces inviting the public eye to look in.

The project again addresses issues surrounding the blurring of public and private space, and how we as the audience might interact with that. The Garden Gallery must be commended on the unique type of private spaces they have been able to access, and the way they are using them. This is most obviously addressed in the use of private gardens as the exhibition space, but also in the mixed themes of the work that the gardens themselves are hosting. One example is the site-specific work by Holger Mohaupt A Sketch on History, inspired by a combination of Portobello’s history and past, and the specific history of the house and garden the work is placed in. In the work, Mohaupt represents Portobello’s lost industry and pier, and relates this to past resident Ned Barnie’s own personal history of being the first Scot to swim the channel. In other work such as Jessica Harrison’s Floral Displays, we see the artist addressing her own private obsession with fear, and placing that in a public space. The structure of the project as a whole invites the viewer into the private physical space of the residents, with the artists’ personal reactions to these spaces on display.

The afternoon’s events finished with the final two performances: Darren Frarquhar’s RRRoootless Pith, and Matt Cook’s Portobello Sound Map. The event offered an audience who would perhaps not normally be privy to performance art the opportunity to see it in their own back gardens. The afternoon’s activities were carefully planned and considered, and resulted in a successful event. The opening performance from the Carpetbag Brigade was an instant drawer of crowds, and proceeded to stimulate and inspire the viewers’ imagination and senses. With imaginations flared, the public then continued on their tour of the rest of the art.

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The Riches of an Intimate Environment

The artworks themselves do vary wildly in style, medium and form, but the exhibition is tied together by themes that either deal with Portobello’s own history and context, or the imitate environment of a garden and the senses evoked by that environment. It must also be remembered that this is a community project and the main concern for the committee is to facilitate the building of creative relationships between the residents and the wider artistic community. As ‘public art’ the Garden Gallery does manage to illustrate many of the issues and debates surrounding contemporary public practice and, while issues of private and public space are obviously raised, they are dealt with in a unique and provoking way. As a whole, the Garden Gallery is a successful example of public art engaging with both its physical environment and the public who use it everyday.

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