Another artist, Kenny Hunter told me about it. He had been invited by The Scottish Executive to pull together a short-list of artists that might be interested in the subject and or site. I was sent information to do with what The Executive were looking at, where the project was coming from and information on the history of it – I think it had been 2 or 3 years of talking and thinking about this before it got to the point of going about commissioning the artwork.

Shauna

It was the place, where it was going to be and the subject that drew me to it – it was about women in Scotland and so was an opportunity to actually think about making a work about a subject I felt I knew a wee bit about. My first thoughts were connected to mapping and recording, looking at something that wasn’t clearly visible. So it was both the subject and the context – it was a really interesting site to think about having the work located.

Shauna

There were 2 stages. The first stage was sending to The Executive images of work and a statement on how I approached making work in the past. Then from these applications of interest, they drew up a short list of I think 5 artists and gave us a more detailed brief of what it was they were actually looking for. The time frame for stage 2 was approx 2 months – this was to do the research, to demonstrate how we interpreted the brief and to come up with concrete ideas of how we would approach making a work for the parliament. So over those 2 months the idea was formed and through the research made more concrete. It’s a short length of time to put something together, during that time I did a lot of research in Glasgow Women’s Library, talked to people about the commission and what it could be, played with materials in the studio and began to give form to ideas. All of the short listed artists then came back to the parliament with whatever proposals they had been developing.

Shauna

Yes, we had to give a 15 minute visual presentation on the research we’d done and how we would propose making a work and actually what that work might look like, so you had to have a really substantial idea at that stage

Shauna

This was one of the drawings Fiona, that I developed for the interview stage – basically the idea that I had worked out was that I wanted the work to be text based; I wanted to travel throughout Scotland meeting with and talking to women, and that the medium for the work would be handwriting – so all of the testing of the materials and coming up with the plan was worked out over those 2 months.

Shauna

Yes. That was the time frame. The Executive wanted a really clear idea at that stage of exactly what was going to happen. The next stage after the interview was making the work and developing what you had proposed.

The interview was in January and because it was the Centenary year of The Suffragette movement it was important that the work was installed before the end of the year to coincide with the anniversary. So the overall time from interview to installation was 11 months.

I was thinking about this in advance of our meeting Fiona, trying to remember what was the very first point where I knew what I wanted to do and I realized that from very early on the work was going to deal with mark making and in particular focusing on the point where the pen hits the paper. Something that kept coming up throughout my research was a lack of evidence of the marks made by women in how they had contributed towards the creation and development of Scotland, or certainly an imbalance in their visibility compared to the writing on and by men about their roles. Once I knew I was going to use mark-making as a process, specifically handwriting, I then had to find ways of turning the mark into a material form, giving it weight and mass and making it permanent. So I tested and played with lots of materials and processes in the studio. One of the materials I worked with was paper clay porcelain – I’d read about it but never used it and really liked the idea that I might be able to turn the handwriting into a material that was essentially made from paper, the substance and surface that the words would be written on initially. I worked with Wendy Kershaw in the ceramics department at the Glasgow School of Art doing lots of tests looking at the strength, fluidity, and flexibility of paper clay porcelain. It turned out that it was going to be too brittle to work with and wouldn’t give me the flexibility I needed but we realized that porcelain itself without the paper content would. It was a substance that retained its strength even at the finest points and this was going to be important when the line within the handwriting would be so faint it almost disappeared. I was also thinking about a material that could live easily alongside the matt fabric of the Parliament Building at the same time as asserting its autonomy from it. Porcelain seemed perfect.

I love the quality of the line here in the writing. I see it as drawing, so as much as it’s text and you can read it, the abstract nature of the line itself also really interests me; its fluidity, movement and how it changes. Sometimes it’s deep and broad and at other times fine and delicate. That fact that different people would write in many different ways was exciting and my challenge was to bring this difference together creating one line with many variations in tone, weight, depth, scale and control.

I was gathering and re looking at things I had around me. Images I was interested in because of what they make me think about and how they related to previous work. Part of my process of working means that I go back and reflect on what has gone before and think about what connections can be made to new work -carrying and developing a train of thought. This image of Cattelan’s is an image I return to a lot and was a crucial image within the early development of this commission. The space between the end of the pen and the page is so full of potential – it talks about what hasn’t been documented or recorded at the same time as allowing you to imagine what might be described in the future – I love the ambiguity of it, hovering between these two positions, and so it became a significant starting point for Travelling the Distance.

The work for the parliament was really a continuation of my green dot work – ‘Via’, in that the green dot project was about traveling, mapping and drawing, making a series of connections between places. I wanted to extend this in the parliament work by making connections between places and people, however, it actually became much more about making connections between people and less to do with place.

It was a very organic thought process. I realized that I couldn’t do this work by myself. I was limited by what I knew about the subject and realized how important it was that the work would build a collective narrative where it would be possible to hear many voices coming from different perspectives. I had to meet people and make connections between people. So I asked myself what do I need to do? I need to move around Scotland, meeting people – so that means it will involve some kind of map. How do I generate a map and a process of making that will allow me to meet people? That was a first concern. How do I get to meet enough people, from different places, bring them together under one project? I didn’t really know how to do that, so that was a first question – how will I go about meeting people?

I realised that a map could be a really simple thing which got drawn and developed as you asked one person to pass you on to another person thereby getting those involved to make the points of connection. I didn’t have to know everyone. It was at this point I realized that it might be easier to do than I originally thought – I could start with one person who’d send me on and you’d get one continuous line, from one to another to another to another. I liked the fact that I was receiving my direction from each woman I met, not knowing where I would be sent, with whom I would be passed onto or what stories we would exchange. Six weeks into the process I realized I’d only met with 17 women and if I wanted to meet 100 within the time I would have to find ways of speeding the process up. So, I went back to the beginning, to the first woman in the chain and asked her to give me another 2 points of contact broadening and splitting the line.

Yes after 2 months I went back and asked for her help in thinking about how to make this a broader process, so she suggested Sian Reynolds, the co-editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women and Elspeth King, writer and museum curator. Just to explain, the process, which could take a couple of weeks, involved a series of telephone conversations with each woman followed by a meeting. If I had 3 routes/lines going at the same time it allowed me to move faster and while I was waiting to meet with one person I could be having introductory conversations with another two.

A few women couldn’t make a decision about naming only one person to send me onto. They maybe had a list of about 5 to begin with and were able to narrow it down to two but in the end couldn’t make a decision between one and the other, so in some cases, like here, the net got wider and wider as it moved along.

Shauna

I asked for 2 things:

The first thing was to write me a sentence about a woman who they thought had made or was making a significant contribution to Scotland in whatever small or big way imaginable. As each woman handwrote their sentence I photographed it and took the sentence and photograph away with me to work with.

The second thing was to send me on this chain to another person. I explained my need to move around Scotland meeting with as many people from as many different situations, backgrounds and generations as possible. I would also take this hand drawn map with me and explain where I’d come from, so that they could see the journey I’d already made. The map became a really important tool because although people understood the project when I explained it over the telephone, whenever I presented this piece of paper with this map that resembled a family tree drawn on it, suddenly everyone really understood what was happening, the connections that where being made and how they connected and related to everybody else in the work.

The map resembles a family tree in its structure – visually how it looks on the page, but you are right the connections are not to do with genealogy or geography but something else. Ultimately it’s to do with being women – to do with being open and sharing a desire to make connections. Each women’s world was opened up to me and I was invited to share it with them for a short while, so the connections are basic – it’s to do with a desire to include, to be included and to recognize one another. Tanya Eccleston in her essay for the book ‘Travelling the Distance’ says that the work expresses ‘a tangible expression of women’s belief in the value of relationship and community’ maybe this is what is being drawn out within the map.

I’d go to what was missing – I look at this and I think about what’s not there and that is the story that goes with each of the names. You see a series of names on a page and what’s absent is the conversations and stories that sits underneath, why each of these women are involved and why I was sent onto them. Making ‘Travelling the Distance’ the book was a way of trying to address this – the storytelling, the place, the time and context. The book brings some of these things together.

Small fragments – it shows each women’s hand written sentence along with details about who it was written by, who it was written about, what they do and other information that the authors felt was necessary to include. It’ll also have the place where I met each of the women and the date, the map and images of the work in progress. So the information in the book is focused but limited. To be able to address some of the other things that came up through the meetings is a much bigger project and is something that will maybe come at another time in another work.

Yes, as a process for making work, it provided me with a fantastic mechanism to engage with people and places. So I will definitely use it again as a way of developing relationships and making connections. There are also a few women from this project that I’d love to go back and talk with more. However at the minute, this map is resolved.

Shauna

When I started I thought it would be much more difficult to ask people to be involved. So the first surprise was the realization that people would be so willing and excited about being involved. It was also really interesting to be able to walk into someone’s life and exchange important stories with them – because of the nature of who they were writing about, they had to be someone significant in their lives, the stories were poignant. I was hearing about individuals, situations, stories and events that were sincere, intense, funny and emotional. They might be talking about their mother, their best friend, the person they grew up admiring telling a sad or a happy story, a difficult story – a whole set of emotions were brought up that I hadn’t been prepared for when I first set out on this journey. So I had to learn how to listen very carefully and find ways to allow the work to communicate some of these emotions that were being brought up.

Shauna

The conversation would begin broadly and then get edited down into something that was really significant for each person and then it would have to be edited further – for practical reasons – as the sentence had to be a certain length to fit into the space that I had. So the process of the conversation was editing it down until the author was happy that those 15 words in some way communicated as much about the sentiment of the story as possible. So editing, editing, editing to try and bring out the essence of the story they were telling. In some cases the sentences are factual, about dates and times as they were remembering specific facts. For others, it was more poetic, for others it was humorous, so you can read and feel that kind of difference in how the sentences finally appear.

Shauna

I’d calculated what space there was on the wall where the work would be situated and once I’d worked out that there was to be 100 sentences in total the next thing was to think about how the space could be broken down to allow 100 sentences to fit in. I also had to think about the dimension of each sentence so that they could be read in the space. The final calculation was roughly 15 words per sentence.

Shauna

Well actually no! I’d thought in the beginning that the text would occupy one column in the space and that I’d be able to fit 100 sentences into this one column – this was my proposal at the beginning. A similar thing happened with the time – I thought that I’d be able to meet all 100 women in 3-4months when in reality it took 10months. When I started, I soon realized that everybody wanted to write a lot more, because the first couple of sentences were always the longest and it was after I realized how much each person wanted to write that I had to go back to the space and really consider what I could fit in. So two months into the project it became clear I wouldn’t be able to fit all of the sentences in, unless I made them much shorter or got more space. I went back to the parliament and asked if I could have more space – could I take the entire wall, which would allow 3 columns of text rather than one and I also asked if they would give me another 6 months to make the work (and they said yes to the space and no to the added time).

Shauna

Well in the beginning they said ‘you tell us where you want the work to be’ and offered a few ideas for the siting. I then had to think about what kind of work I was making and where would be the best location, so I guess if I had said at the beginning ‘I want the entire wall’, it probably would have been fine, so going back and saying ‘look, this is growing’, they said ’that’s fine – use the extra space but you need to do this within the budget and time frame’.

Shauna

I have worked on similar sized commissions to this in the past where you’ve got a middle person, like a public art agency between you and the person commissioning the work, mediating the relationship between you and those commissioning work for the space. With this commission it was quite different. It was the Scottish Executive and me and they hadn’t – as far as I know -been involved in something like this before. So I had one point of contact in the Equalities Unit and she was fantastic.

Shauna

I think this was all completely new to them as a process and they were willing to go along with it and learn as they went along. As long as I kept communicating with them every 2-3 weeks, updating them on the development of the work and assuring them that the process was moving they were open to allowing things just to happen. They helped me negotiate any difficulties that I might have had in terms of contacts, space, time, administration and as a result the whole process went really smoothly. In a way it was great not having a middle infrastructure to negotiate and instead having one single point of contact.

Shauna

I think this might have been different and not typical of other commissions as my contact within the Executive, Christine Reid, had been involved in the commissioning steering group for the artwork for approximately 4 years. She knew the history of the project and had followed it right through its development. She was completely invested in it and knew where it was coming from.

I think in the past that middle person has really helped ‘broker’ conversations. So for example with the Met Office in Exeter, the ‘middle person’ helped broker the relationship between me and a massive infrastructure of the Met office, putting you in contact with relevant people. The parliament was different because of the contact person’s involvement in the project – I didn’t need anyone else. But it’d be interesting to speak with them about this.

Shauna

I think they were surprised at how open they became and this happened for them when we had the series of presentations from the 5 short-listed artists. I think that was when they realized they had to open up their understanding of what the possibilities of this artwork might be. I think in the beginning their expectation of what they would get was narrow – a figurative sculpture that would sit in the parliament – so they came a long way. I haven’t spoken to Christine Reid about this – they were so fantastically organized at administration and really helped me with that side of things but it would be interesting to talk with them about what their idea was at the beginning and where it ended up and how they felt about their own changing ideas and expectations.

Shauna

One thing I have been thinking about for the future, say in 10 years time, is how interesting it would be to revisit this, go back and look at the map and try to retrace my steps and have another series of conversations with those involved. I don’t know what they’d be about, whether it would be about the work or their relationship to the work after that period of time or about something completely different but somehow going back and revisiting everyone involved and telling and sharing another story is really interesting for me. Maybe it would be a book, or map, or film but this idea of meeting again and reflecting together, is something that has been on my mind.

Shauna

I took along these small samples of the cut text, which I realized early
on was a fantastic way to be able to communicate what this project was and why it was important to turn the text and mark into an object with volume that occupied three dimensional space; something that could be physically felt as well as read. So when I handed over this object made in porcelain they could feel it and understand it and get excited about it. So this wee sample allowed me to open up the work and talk about it in terms of process, form, translation of materials, and art.

Shauna

No I didn’t because I thought that I might be trying to do to many things at the one time. The most important thing was to try and create a situation where I’d be able to build trust and have an intimate conversation. I also wanted to take photographs of each woman’s hand as they wrote the sentence, so I had a camera and tripod there. I thought it might be too much to have this other thing recording at the same time. – In hindsight though, it would have been an interesting thing to do because although I remember a lot I don’t remember everything and am already beginning to forget bits and pieces. If I had thought that I was going to collect material that could be used in future work I might have done this – I wasn’t really thinking that at the time. I was thinking about the process for this commission.

Yes, I really like the abstractness of them in this form. I love these ‘things’, as ‘objects’ and especially when they don’t make sense and you can’t read them. I love the fragmentation of the words and letters and think that you could put these together in another way, where the sentences don’t make sense and it’s more to do with the form of the objects’ and their relation to the space and less to do with communicating in a rational sense. That would have taken me in another direction entirely, coming up with something very different that maybe this work wasn’t or couldn’t be about.

Part of the reason that I was interested in handwriting is that it could be viewed abstractly. You might not be able to read some of the handwriting and that didn’t matter because instead you could follow the line and get a sense of the movement of the authors hand across the wall and know that it had come from a relationship between their hand and the pen and the paper. So this allowed me to be think about it in different ways, as drawing, as writing, as sculpture and as formal pillars of text. I had to think hard about whether it mattered if you could read every sentence or every word, especially as the text moves higher up the space and out of reach. And actually in the end it didn’t bother me because as I said it was as much to do with the quality of the line and form, with the density and complexity of these small bits and pieces and their placement in the space.

This question came up as I started to work with the porcelain. I was thinking about my two roles within the work one as a facilitator and the other as an artist. One role meant I had a responsibility to the women involved to make their sentences legible to ensure that what they had written was communicated clearly. My other role as an artist really enjoyed the abstract form of the sentences, the quality of the line and the materiality of the porcelain words. I had to negotiate a balance between my sensitivity towards material and form and my responsibility to those involved in the creating the content of the work. So as I got closer to the end of the project and started having to make decisions about whether this sentence was difficult to read, was too small, or high up in the space I stopped thinking about it as a facilitator and thought about it as an artist giving myself the freedom to let it be read in multiple ways.

This is the brief! It tells you all about the tendering process – it’s quite lengthy, 11 pages…but the part where they say what they want is open, it’s ‘intention is to act as a permanent tribute to the achievements and ongoing contributions of Scottish women of all backgrounds with different abilities in improving women’s lives and advancing democracy’. The location was up to the artist to select and that it would ‘be unveiled in the centenary year of the suffragette movement with a small section talking about the background to the commission.

They communicated to me that there were 2 things that helped them make their decision. One was that my suggestion of traveling to meet people- to engage a lot of people in the making of the work – this was something that was exciting for them, because that was what they were asking for even if they didn’t know that this was a possible way of making work. And the other thing was that by bringing samples of the porcelain text they didn’t have to imagine the work it was there for them to see.

Yes completely. I can’t think about making work without thinking about politics. I think all work engages with politics to a lesser or greater extent but yes, because this was going to be in the Scottish parliament it was an opportunity to draw on that even more. I was interested in bringing my interest in this absence of women’s voices into this location, making something visible that wasn’t already, directly into the heart of the main political institution within Scotland.

The process really came about through a recognition of my own limitations – the only way to have a meaningful relationship to the place and to the subject was by including and involving a lot of people’s thoughts in it and my voice would be one of many.

Yes, whenever the women were writing their sentences I would become obsessed by details like how they leaned on the page and the way the pen moved on the page and whether that would be a hard one to work with, too many wee loops or if someone’s handwriting was joined up I knew that would be fantastic and I would watch them making joined up sentences and think ‘oh that’ll be a lovely one to make’. Whereas if someone wrote in capitals it was much harder to work with because there would be 100’s of wee pieces to construct into a sentence, I knew it would be much more difficult, so as I was working in the studio I would know how these sentences would develop in a material way.

Yes, whenever the women were writing their sentences I would become obsessed by details like how they leaned on the page and the way the pen moved on the page and whether that would be a hard one to work with, too many wee loops or if someone’s handwriting was joined up I knew that would be fantastic and I would watch them making joined up sentences and think ‘oh that’ll be a lovely one to make’. Whereas if someone wrote in capitals it was much harder to work with because there would be 100’s of wee pieces to construct into a sentence, I knew it would be much more difficult, so as I was working in the studio I would know how these sentences would develop in a material way.

It’s also that as well as a conversation with people, the work developed through a conversation with materials. I need that balance of being in the studio, working with and building things at the same time as these others things such as writing, listening, talking, travelling. I can’t do one without the other. I have to make space in the process of making work to play and explore alongside the conceptualizing.

Yes… working with people and realizing that part of what was missing for me in my process of making work in the past was to do with missing an engagement with people and this work allowed me to do this, to work with a lot of people in making a piece of work – which I’d never done before. I’d had conversations but not used this as a source for the work and that happened here and is something that I really want to work with again, knowing now that you can ask someone to work with you and its easy to make happen.

Shauna

I think it’s experience, having confidence. With each commission I have more confidence to give myself the freedom to make it an extension of my own studio practice to connect it to wider interests. That’s only happened as a process of learning and reflection. In the past I might have done things where I wasn’t so interested in some parts as I was in others and with more confidence, more experience I would have concentrated only on what I was really interested in. The other thing comes out of frustrations with previous commissions and trying hard to not to let that happen again. Importantly working with a commissioner who was open, supportive and responsive to any changes or developments that came up during the process of making the work was really important. They trusted me to let the work grow and develop in what ever way it went.

Shauna

I think we quickly learnt to trust each other. Practically, they could see from previous commissions that I could produce within a given time frame. I could work with a budget and in that sense they trusted me. Importantly, from very early on I developed a strong and honest relationship with Christine Reid, my contact within the Executive. We spoke every two weeks and I learned that her role was as much about sharing the journey of making this work as it was overseeing it. In this respect I didn’t feel that she was someone I had to report back to but instead was someone I could bounce ideas and possibilities with. This was really important and gave me a new way of understanding the relationship between the commissioner and the artist.

Shauna

I know as soon as I read a brief or invitation whether there’s space in it for me to be able to develop work. If the commissioner already knows what they want and this comes across in the brief then it’s usually too prescriptive. I think it’s really important that there is space within a brief for the artist to develop their own practice and to direct the form that the artwork might take – room for both the artist and the commissioner to be surprised and to learn. If the brief is too directive in my opinion, there is no room for growth for the artist.

My experience with this commission means that I would be able to talk to future commissioners more clearly about what their role was within the development of the work. How do they see their relationship with the artist and how much room is there within the process for change or developments from the original idea to be accommodated are questions I would have.

Shauna

It’s a really difficult question because every commissioning process is so different and my experience is limited. However I think the times when I have seen commissions that work really well its when the public work is an organic extension of the artists own practice. I think there can be a division often between the work that artists do for galleries and that done for public commissions, two hats, one worn for one job and the other worn for the other. When the commissioner trusts the artist enough to allow us to extend our interests and processes into the public space without compromising our ideas and methods of working then exciting things happen. That takes a certain amount of risk, chance and belief on both parts. It also means that the commissioner has to be prepared to accept that the work may only take shape during the process of making it and not before – that takes trust. I’m not sure I can say exactly how you foster this although ultimately it’s the most important ingredient.