ARTSITe

Gillian McIver

video and installation art

On site-specificity in art.

I am interested in the artistic, social and cultural issues surrounding the "reclamation" of public space through art. I am concerned with how the city becomes a zone of experimentation and perspective shift, encouraging the artist and the audience to see the landscape and objects within it in a new way. Questions about time, impermanence, memory, artifice and locality arise, providing raw materials for the artist and points of access for the audience.

For me history is not so much about facts as about perceptions of the world around us, and a sense that we belong to something that has existed before we did. That is why these forgotten places hold such resonance for me. I think that interest in working site-specifically within disused or misused urban spaces reflects a sense of rootlessness and a dislocation shared by the community at large. Landscapes and cityscapes change constantly. Our orientation is dislocated, and we feel we have no control over it.

I have been using both video and installation art as a way of engaging with these issues. The space I inhabit inspires, defines and in some cases creates the work. In the case of the type of projects I have been doing, the works last for a defined period of time, then are removed from the space, thus decontextualising them. The result is that many of the works, as they are conceived, exist only in representation, as photographs or videos.

In each case, I have been concerned with the experience of being in those spaces, in the inter-relationship of the past and present, imprints of history and current activity, the physical feel and texture of the space and with bringing those experiences out to the public. My objective as an artist is to create a strong impression, to make the audience think about where they are, to reintegrate the lost fragmented forgotten place back into their consciousness.

Anselm Kiefer has said that no empty place is really empty: everywhere is filled up, “almost claustrophobically” with all the traces of the past. The past is always there in the present. I am working with these traces or “ghosts” as raw material, aware that whatever I put into a place will be mingled with whatever was there before.
A consciousness not only of time but of change or flux is at the very foundation. Different experiences of time and change intersect: historical time (the lived experience of the site); material time (the materials used); experiential time (the actual period of the intervention).

I recntly completed "ART / SITE," a multimedia book which offers documentation and critical texts by different practitioners about site-specificity in contemporary art. [more info]