Making Space for Women

Towards a new public artwork for Glasgow

Where are all the statues of women in Scotland? Why are there no street-names commemorating great Scottish heroines?  Why are the landmarks of women’s achievements ‘invisible’ in our civic landscape?

Inspired by Glasgow Women’s Library’s (GWL) planned move to the prestigious Mitchell Library, funding from the Scottish Arts Council’s Public Art Fund has enabled the appointment of three new team members to GWL, to begin work on the Making Space project.  The team comprises internationally renowned artists, Nicky Bird and Shauna McMullan, and Project Co-ordinator and Adviser Fiona Dean. Over the next 6 months, these women will work with GWL staff, volunteers, Library users and learners to research the possibilities of a new public artwork.

More information in the Making Space Press Release

Introducing the new Making Space team:

Fiona Dean

Fiona joins GWL as Co-ordinator/Adviser to the Making Space project with specific focus on working with the artists to develop the public art brief and identify opportunities for learning in relation to the artists’ processes of investigation.

Fiona studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art. She completed her PhD at Stirling University’s Institute of Education, where she looked at issues of social class and inclusion to visual arts practice. Before crossing into research and development, Fiona worked for a number of years as an artist exhibiting widely in the UK and internationally, as well as undertaking national and international residencies and public art commissions.

She has received a number of awards to support research into public art and learning, including a Churchill Fellowship to allow travel to the USA, visiting a range of programmes that use the city or specific locality as a learning context for art and education development. Fiona led on the initial development of the Scottish Arts Council’s Public Art Resource+Research Scotland (PAR+RS), and was involved with the associated Working in Public seminars with Grays school of art and artist/educator Suzanne Lacy.

She has participated in conferences on art and education and widening participation, including the International Society for Education through Art (INSEA) World Congress in New York and the European Access Network (EAN) annual conference in Vienna, and has published a number of research reports and articles on the learning potential of artists’ strategies of interaction. Most recently these include Cultural, transitions, which tracked the experiences of a group of 16-18 year olds as they developed self-directed learning through visual arts as a means of investigating their ideas of culture in relation to self and their communities.

Fiona has worked in a range of community and higher education contexts, and currently works freelance as fugitivespaces, from where she has developed a range of artist-led research and development projects.

Nicky Bird

Nicky’s work investigates the contemporary relevance of found photographs, the hidden histories of archives and specific sites. She is interested in a key question: what is our relationship to the past, and what is the value we ascribe to it? Since her practice-led PhD at Leeds University (1994-99) she has explored this through photography, bookworks, the Internet and New Media. In 2008 Nicky received a major Stills photographic commission for the project Beneath the surface / Hidden Place, which is currently touring across Scotland.

Nicky is delighted to have been selected to be one of the artists in residence at the Glasgow Women’s Library. Residencies have been pivotal to earlier works such as Dimbola Lodge, home of Julia Margaret Cameron (2000), Rhode Island’s Arcade, the oldest Indoor Shopping Mall in the USA (2000/1), and the Scottish historic house of Hospitalfield (2003). Publications and artist books include Tracing Echoes (2001), Question for Seller (2006) and – now in the collection of the International Center of Photography, New York – Gay Interest Beefcake (2008). In varying ways, she is interested in creating artworks that make visible an art process, which incorporates collaborations with people who have significant connections to artefacts found in the archive.

Alongside residencies, exhibitions, and contributions to arts journalism, Nicky has lectured at both undergraduate and PhD levels.  She is currently a part-time PhD Co-Coordinator at Glasgow School of Art. Her website is: www.nickybird.com.

Shauna McMullan

Shauna’s main areas of interest move around and in-between landscape, mapping and place. The places that interest her most are fractured, contested or overlooked and it’s how we, individually, collectively and culturally define and mediate them that underpins her research.  She is interested in the relationship between geography and art and wonders if it’s possible as an artist to employ the language of cartography to create alternative mappings or counter cartographies.  At its core the work attempts to deal with the collision of these two fields, cartography and fine art. Recent projects, for example, Travelling the Distance, commissioned by The Scottish Executive (and permanently sited in The Scottish Parliament), and Via, a photographic, travelogue, commissioned by the Toyota Museum of Modern Art, Japan explore this relationship.

The significance of unofficial histories and oral traditions in defining and redefining identity and place is core to current work and is something that Shauna is keen to extend during this residency at Glasgow Women’s Library.

The form that the work takes varies from sculpture, installation, drawing, text and photography and this is ultimately determined by the context.

Shauna studied Fine Art in Cheltenham, England followed by a Masters Degree at Glasgow School of Art and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received a number of awards including a Scottish Arts Council Scholarship at the British School at Rome and residencies at the NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art) in the Faroe Islands and Triangle Artist Workshop in Karachi, Pakistan.  Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at major museums and permanent public commissions include ‘Windborne’ for The Meteorological Office, Exeter and ‘Travelling the Distance’ for The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, Scotland. Shauna currently works as a part time lecturer in the Dept. of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art.

We would love to know what you think about our Making Space project. Please feel free to leave comments below, or you can contact us by phone or email. This project is by, for, and about women in Scotland, so we need you to get involved!