‘On Our Toes’: Grassroots Connections Between Scottish and Japanese Visual Artists
Su Grierson
スー・グリア−ソン： 私たちの身近なところでースコットランドと日本のアーチストが結ぶきずな 現代の日本とスコットランドを行き来する、ビジュアル・アーティストたちの草の根的な交流がもたらしたもの を、制作過程や作品を通して紹介します。これは20年前から今日まで継続的してスコットランドと日本の4人 のアーチストの交流から育まれました。Confluence of North: Spirit of Northと名づけられていますが、 近年のコロナによる影響で制作や取り組み方が変化していきました。ふつうこのような交流は、アーチストの 個人体験に基づくのですが、今回のコロナのように何か社会生活の根本を覆すようなことがあると、コミュニ ティのなかで広く人々のつながりが生まれていくのがわかります。
This paper is very much about process, and about grassroots connections between Scottish and Japanese artists. ‘Grassroots’ is taken to refer to projects that have been instigated and carried right through by artists themselves.
The great advantage of this way of operating is that artists are not beholden to any organisation or institution or political body. They can respond
to their own ideas and concerns. Of course it also means that artists themselves must organise everything that is needed, from administration to funding. The workload is greater but so is the freedom.
As artists, we are in a position to develop ideas that are generated from within our own art practice or community, directly with people from another place
or another country. It also gives us access to their connections and friends, and enables us to work within groups of people in a personal and arguably more meaningful way than if organised through the interface of organisations. It is not automatically a better way but it offers different outcomes.
The title On our toes refers to one particular project at grassroots level that has been happening over the last two years during lockdown and Covid restrictions titled Confluence of North: Spirit of North. 1
We knew from the start we had to be light on our toes because no one had any idea what was ahead, and we had to be ready to change directions wherever and whenever that became necessary. Like everyone else at that time we were walking into a wall of uncertainty.
My grassroots connections with Japan originally began quite unexpectedly through a visit to Lithuania in 1999. Graduating as a very mature student in Glasgow at the heady times of the Young British Art (YBA) movement, where everything was ‘Young’, was difficult; even at graduation I was no longer eligible for any awards or residencies through being over 40. Discovering that other countries were not encumbered by this obsession with youth, I found that it was easier to get
opportunities elsewhere and I undertook a residency in Lithuania. Being invited back the following year to attend an East-West symposium I met a group of Japanese artists, which was the start of my ongoing connections with Japan.
Coincidentally I met four new Lithuanian textile graduates in Vilnius who were desperately keen to come to Scotland, and as I live in the country and have space, I was able to offer beds and introductions and sightseeing if they could just raise their own airfares. It took them about three weeks to raise the money to get here and their highly successful visit became a project called LookLook2 in which over 70 international artists have now visited rural Perthshire. In doing so they have made where I am a centre of arts activity, rather than a rural periphery to a largely urban arts scene in Scotland. And this was also how I began connecting with Japanese artists. I invited the one Japanese artist I kept in touch with from the East-West symposium and we decided we would each make something happen for the other in our own country. I organised an exhibition for the two of us in St Andrews in Scotland and other further events, and she organised an exhibition for me in Tokyo and later Yokohama. As a result of connections made during those events more than 20 Japanese artists have now visited me, and I have
been to Japan seven times. On each visit to Japan I met more Japanese artists, staying with them and making friends and colleagues. This is how grassroots projects can develop.
Following directly from these visits, in 2013 I had an unexpected email inviting me to take part in a fully funded residency in Japan, adding at the end ‘and by the way it’s in Fukushima but not in a hotspot’. This was about 18 months after the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disasters and at a time when the word Fukushima struck horror into our hearts. I would not have thought of going there. But I was there for 12 weeks at a time of heavy snow and on the second anniversary of the disaster. Meeting many refugees I also visited the tsunami disaster coastlines and was driven into the no-go nuclear zone. The people we met kept saying ‘thank you artists for coming, because nobody else will’. Our project was funded as a way of regenerating the culture of the area.
The Japanese leader of that residency was the artist Maruyama Yoshiko, and partly through our conversations about LookLook she started a project called Spirit of North in which she began inviting artists from other ‘northern’ countries to visit Japan. She was investigating the culture of Tohoku that had been so badly affected by the disaster, and looking for a common spirit in their cultural life.
Yoshiko-san and I began talking about how we might organise a joint project in Scotland, and while she did a number of other projects with other countries, we kept on talking and eventually got to the point of organising a group of Japanese artists to come to Scotland for a face-to-face symposium and exhibition. We were going to bring Scottish and Japanese artists together.
This came to an abrupt halt when lockdown happened and I also suffered a bereavement. But eventually we began to question whether we might do it differently. Could we make something happen in a way that would give us the same benefits of face-to-face encounters, but which would happen digitally during our Covid lockdown?
Asking that question made us re-evaluate ‘process’ completely. We found it also made us start considering the environmental impact of artists flying round the world.
We also asked questions about finding another way of doing things, rather than just following the accepted pattern of residencies and exchanges. Out of this came the Scottish project that I started with Gillian McFarland which we named
Confluence of North. Confluence, as in two cultural rivers coming together, Scotland and Japan. The linked projects Confluence of North: Spirit of North concluded in October 2021 with the printed publication that can be viewed online.3
Through very many online discussions, we agreed to have four participating artists in each country.4 Online discussion is difficult, because although our Japanese friends do speak some English this is limited, and we do not speak any Japanese. We are immensely grateful to them for their English, but there is a level at which we each lose depth of meaning and cultural understanding. It requires patience and sometimes many emails to clarify simple points.
We tried various online translation techniques which were sometimes more hilarious or confusing than helpful. The eventual decision was to create pairs between the four artists in each country, to connect personally by email and Zoom, as well as having full eight-person Zoom calls. We each made our own work but also had the opportunity to develop collaborative work and an exchange of ideas and thoughts with our partner.
It could be said that this process actually allowed connections that were more meaningful than anything that would have happened on a
face-to-face level. If the Japanese artists had come here for two to three weeks, we would have been busy creating an exhibition, organising a symposium, taking them on visits and meeting people. But I think we would not have had the same in-depth personal connection that we did through connecting digitally.
We also agreed to have exhibitions in each country showing work from all eight artists. Small works and some digital works were sent or printed in the other country, and video files were sent and shown on screens. We tried very hard to reduce both the cost of sending artworks and the ecological footprint of our work, issues that we probably would not have thought about previously.
Our theme within the project was ‘north’. North is not a place; it is always conditional. North is always north of somewhere. North is dependent on where you are. I think that in the northern hemisphere every country has a certain perception about its own ‘north’, that people perceive life in the north of any country to be different.
We could see that communities living in more remote places – by which I mean remote from industrialised cities – will produce artists with a stronger connection to the land and environment. We realised that by working digitally we could also connect with artists living in those places more easily than we could in face-to-face events. For example we could not afford to fly speakers from Shetland or Skye or Orkney to come to a
conference in Perth, but digitally we could include these artists and we could encourage them to do a pre-recorded talk about their work and about what they perceive as their connection to north.5 Basically we have been finding benefits from re-assessing our processes and thinking, and can see distinct benefits for grassroots projects going forward.
Because north was a dominant feature of our project, we felt we needed to try and take our exhibition to the more northerly parts of Scotland. In Japan their exhibitions were being planned to take place in the province of Fukushima, which for those living in the densely populated areas around Tokyo is seen as being both remote and northerly (Figs 1, 2).
We began by utilising our existing contacts and connections to see what was possible in terms of exhibitions. Believe me, when I say that Covid threw a lot at us one way and another. Galleries were closed, staff on furlough, agreed dates cancelled, you probably all know exactly what I mean! It was difficult and frustrating, but at least we could ‘work from home’. And this was happening in Japan as well. But we said we would be light on our toes and we kept going.
In June 2021 we had an exhibition in Perth in Scotland at the new WASPS (Workshop & Artists Studio Provision Scotland) Creative Exchange, which has 39 artist studios and creative spaces and a gallery (Fig.3).
Vol.27, 2022-2023
It was a newly repurposed building, a converted school that had to close shortly after it opened at the start of lockdown. Ours was the first exhibition on its re-opening in June 2021, so the audience was relatively small and had to book in advance. But, foreseeing such eventualities, we had built into our funding application some support with press and publicity. I created my first-ever website and we used social media a great deal, so we were able to find and connect with a new and different audience.
Initially we had hoped to have an exhibition in Shetland, but when that was proving very difficult, we realised that we actually needed to go there and find out how ‘different’ life was for artists living in such a ‘remote’ place. We converted it into a research visit. Then literally two days before we were due to travel, two of our number had children with Covid and could not come. But again we managed to keep in touch by regular Zoom calls. While there we organised a Zoom call to Japan with artists from the UK’s most northerly gallery The Shetland Gallery on the island of Yell (Fig.4).
Our second exhibition was at An Lanntair in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides (Fig.5). Again, dates were changing, and we did not know until the last minute if we would get there at all, due to Covid restrictions or to the ferries not running, or so on.
It was interesting that when we came to put the first exhibition together in Perth, we realised that we had not actually curated any of the work; we had simply curated the people and the process and somehow the artwork was the product of that arrangement.
In Japan there is a very different provision of gallery spaces (Fig.6). Things work on a different system: the amazing historic and atmospheric rice barns and heritage school that were used there created a completely different experience, despite showing more or less the same work as in Scotland.
Again, what was possible was determined in many ways by the Covid restrictions in each country at the time, affecting visitor attendance, children’s workshops, gathering for talks or discussion, and so on. But in finding ways to deal with each of these issues, we have learned that systems can be changed and made more flexible. Ways of thinking are often more entrenched than we think but can be opened up to new ways if we are willing to let go and stay ‘light on our toes’.
1 https://confluenceofnorth.co.uk: http://spirit-of-north.net/en/about_e/ 2 https://www.sugrierson.com/project/looklook/
3 https://issuu.com/tiscali582/docs/confluence_combined
4 https://confluenceofnorth.co.uk/about/
5 https://confluenceofnorth.co.uk/invited-artists/