Where We Stand

By Greg Thomas, 15.08.2024

The Traveling Gallery, image courtesy of the Traveling Gallery

Stepping onboard the Travelling Gallery is a bit like walking inside a scale-model. Within the converted double-decker bus are all the essential features of the contemporary art gallery: foyer, shop, information point, and pristinely painted central space featuring caption boards, headphones hanging from pegs, and a TV screen playing artists’ films on repeat. But with these elements comes all the satisfaction of exploring a doll’s house or ship in a bottle: that grounding feeling of order and harmony that miniaturisation afford.

 

This article is not about scale models (try Susan Stewart’s On Longing). But, suffice to say, the Travelling-Gallery approach is ideal for giving visitors a quickfire introduction to a particular theme or topic, in the time it takes to circle a 12-metre space. In the case of the current show, Where We Stand, we’re learning about communal land-use in Scotland, the history of which is defined by stories of collective heroism offset against a picture of long-term inequity. The show is a collaboration with Community Land Scotland, an organisation that helps people buy and develop their own plots, formed in 2010 following the Scottish Land Reform Act of 2003.

 

The historical backdrop to such modern events is central to this exhibition. Indeed, we are offered a whistlestop tour on a waist-height information board running around the edge of the gallery. The story begins with the clearances of the 1700s and 1800s, when swathes of tenant farmers were evicted from Lowland and then Highland Scotland to make way for profitable sheep flocks. The Crofters Holdings Scotland Act of 1886 granted formal rights to these vulnerable landholders, paving the way for community land buyouts across the early 20th century, starting with Glendale in northern Skye in 1908. Further impetus was provided by the 1919 Land Settlement Act, which allowed government to gift small-holdings to returning veterans (the hutting communities that sprang up around this time are curiously omitted from the show).

 

A slew of buyouts followed across the twentieth century, from Stornoway in 1923 to the famous community purchases in Assynt and the Isle of Eigg seven decades later (in 1993 and 1997). In some cases, as in the Seven Men of Knoydart case of 1948, plots were forcibly extracted through land raids and defended by legal appeal once the area had been staked out. The aforementioned Land Reform Act was one of a number of Holyrood reforms that formalised the right for Scots to buy their own “wee bit hill and glen” (as the national anthem has it)—in some cases on land from which their ancestors had been forcibly removed. The Scottish Land Fund, launched in 2000, supports communities to make purchases from landowners, while in 2015 and 2016 the Community Empowerment Act and Land Reform Act, respectively, extended buyout rights to urban areas and strengthened obligations to sustainable development on purchased land.

In spite of all this, Scotland’s pattern of land ownership remains grossly uneven, with 432 owners claiming half of the country’s private land. Efforts to raise ongoing awareness of land- ownership rights and mechanisms to realise them thus seem highly worthwhile. In furthering that aim, and by virtue of its connection to a charity whose role is partly advocacy-based, this exhibition from guest curator Iain Craig, seems closer in some respects to a museum exhibit or community art project than to the contemporary-art fayre in which the gallery often specialises. In other words, the socio-cultural stories the works tell, and the evidence of locally- rooted, collective involvement in their creation, seem more significant at times than the work’s formal and intertextual qualities. A lot of relevant material is also intended to be accessed in Mp3 form through QR codes affixed to artworks or captions, so the viewer gets the sense that they are encountering a few talismanic objects inviting further research and engagement.

 

That said, there are some beautiful works in this show, in particular Richard Bracken’s collection of shepherds’ sticks, whose laser-etched text reflects conversations with members of the Abriachan Forest Trust. A poem of homage is incised across the rough or smooth, mottled or knobbly surfaces: “for the Timber Harvesters,” “for Growth in the Forest,” “for the Makers,” “for the Heavy Lifters,” “for the Gardeners,” etcetera. Virginia Hutcheson’s cast bronze replicas of peat squares have a beguiling roughness and density to them. Francia Boayke’s baskets of Jute, hemp, cotton, linen, and tartan, weave together narratives of hybrid identity, incorporating pieces of writing in the 47 languages spoken at an Edinburgh high school, such that fragments of letters impinge here and there on the baskets’ patterned surfaces.

 

That last creative gesture indicates the ways in which community involvement is prioritised in Where We Stand. Ann Smith and Hellen Little’s Tarras Valley Textile incorporates elements woven by a wide group of contributors from the local area. Kate O’Shea’s photo-collaged hanging silks relay stories of urban land-buyout, including the ongoing project to re-open Govanhill Baths in south Glasgow. A film by Saskia Coulson and Colin Tennant invites interviewees to muse on what collective ownership means to them. Underpinning these artworks is a series of fascinating and inspiring stories that deserve to be better known, and should encourage more people in Scotland to consider how they might make their own stakes on the land. After all, it’s ours for the taking.

 

To find out if the Travelling Gallery is visiting a site near you visit: https://travellinggallery.com/tour-dates/