Writers’ Shift at The Fruitmarket Gallery
Gutter speaks to Janette Ayachi, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, Iain Morrison and Tom Pow of Writers’ Shift at The Fruitmarket Gallery
Editor’s note: Just before issue #24 went to print, Gutter received the terrible news that one of the poets featured in this interview, Callie Gardner, died on the 8th of July following an accident near their home in Glasgow. We are huge admirers of all that Callie achieved in their work as poet, scholar, educator and publisher. Their loss at such a young age is a devastating blow to the literary and queer communities of Scotland and beyond. Our thoughts are with their family, friends and qomrades at this difficult time.
As part of its redevelopment and expansion The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh invited five poets—Janette Ayachi, Callie Gardner, Jane Goldman, Tom Pow and Iain Morrison—to respond to the Gallery’s history and archive as part of the Writer’s Shift project. Our Poetry Reviews Editor Shehzar Doja met with the poets on Zoom to discuss the project.
Shehzar writes: The Fruitmarket Gallery was one of the first galleries I visited when I arrived in Scotland in 2018. I was immediately fascinated and intrigued by the decades of overlapping history that preceded this space. The simple allure of a place where poetry and art converged and were so intrinsically linked and synergetic that when I learnt about a project that investigated this very history through a poetic lens, I had to sit down and learn more.
SHEHZAR DOJA: First off, I was just wondering what your relationship or interaction with the Fruitmarket was before coming on to this particular project.
IAIN MORRISON: I’ve worked there for 10 years in a mixture of roles like a lot of people who work in small organisations, especially in the arts. But recently, I’ve been really supported by colleagues as I’ve had a bit more momentum around some of my writing activities. I did a writing residency at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton a couple of years ago, which saw me going up and down the country to Southampton to write poems while they were moving from a campus site into the city centre. Fiona Bradley, the director of the Fruitmarket Gallery was keen for me to do something similar because she thought that the model had worked well. I was also keen, because it’s quite tricky to be a member of staff and also a writer about a place, to bring in more voices and to see what would happen if there was a chorus coming from different angles or experiences, creating a body of writing that would surprise us.
CALLIE GARDNER: I didn’t have any kind of formal relationship with the Fruitmarket before this. I had been there a couple of times and I knew Iain. Iain very kindly asked me to be involved. I think when we started talking about it, it was spring 2019, and that wasn’t that long after I moved back to Glasgow after having lived in Leeds and then before that in Cardiff. When I lived in Cardiff, I did some stuff with a gallery there called G39, which also had a library—Iain was telling us about how the Fruitmarket is going to have a library—where you could have meetings and workshops. It seems like some art institutions that want to widen their access, that are outward looking and want to bring people in and engage people in different ways are interested in bringing in writers. So yeah, that’s really good, I’m all for it and I think the projects that are like this that I’ve seen have generated really interesting writing. There is often not really a physical place that is just there all the time when you’re a writer other than the library, but that’s for lots of people. So it’s really interesting how there is a gallery we get to sneak in and use for our own purposes, which is great.
JANE GOLDMAN: I spent time in Edinburgh art galleries from a young age, because my parents were artists and whenever we visited Edinburgh, we got taken. I have memories of the 70s, when I was a teenager, the one that I remember seeing was the Allen Jones exhibition, which was in the summer of 1975, looking at the archive list. I don’t really remember regularly going until the late 70s, when I came to Edinburgh as a student, and then in the 80s. We just went to every private viewing of course, so as part of my social life I sort of grew up going to Fruitmarket openings, amongst many others. I saw loads of fantastic shows, some of them by people I knew personally. One of the ones that made the biggest impact on me, that were kind of formative in my development as a thinker, I would have to say, was the Nancy Spero exhibition in the 1980s. I’d started my PhD and it was on visual art and literature in the period of what they call Modernism. I was very interested in feminist understandings of the visual arts. And Nancy Spero’s exhibition just blew me away. These sort of running goddesses figures, they were all about running women and women breaking through, breaking free of the symbolic order and all this stuff. I was lucky enough that by chance, I met my friend in the street, Caroline McNairn, and she said, ‘Oh, come with me, I’m just about to hear Marina Warner speaking at the Fruitmarket.’ The wonderful art critic and mythographer, Marina Warner was speaking about Nancy Spero’s work. I read her book, Monuments and Maidens, and it just made me rethink so much. So I have those kind of moments where something happened in the Fruitmarket that really was formative. As well as lots of kind of fun events where I was just in revelries with my friends and happened to see art on the walls as well.
JANETTE AYACHI: I write ekphrastic poetry and would often attend exhibitions at the gallery for inspiration. I also performed at evening events in the space and I admit to taking a lot of dates there as a part of a pre-night out agenda!
TOM POW: I grew up in Edinburgh. My dad was a painter so I was used to going to galleries and I maybe am at my happiest at a gallery really. And so travel, for me, was always about going to galleries and museums. But one of the things I like about the Fruitmarket, about a place that you go to often, is in the same way as when you go to football matches often, you might just get one in four matches that could convince somebody else that football is exciting. When you’re interested in the form, they’re all interesting. Plus, I’ve been living down in the southwest of Scotland for a long time and so I use the train station a lot. I come out at Waverley a lot, or I’m waiting in Waverley. And the Fruitmarket has always been a wonderful point of arrival and a point of departure for me.
SD: So how did this project assemble? Iain, what all were you looking at when putting this project together?
IM: I think, for me, I knew that Callie could write a cracking long poem, because I just read naturally it is not and I loved the sustaining of different modes of poetry over four long letters, and I felt like length was going to be an important possibility of how to respond to something that was as long as the Fruitmarket’s history and archive and someone who could hold that sort of conception of time and chronology across seasons in their head. That turned out to be even more important, because of the interruption of the seasons, which is something that Callie’s work also troubles. And then Tom has done amazing work in archives, not least at the National Library of Scotland, but also there’s a great book called Dear Alice, which is writing from the records of, what it was called, Crichton Lunatic Asylum, and it now has become a part of the University of Glasgow’s campus. I was thinking I know that Tom makes amazing books that work with either found voices or are reconstructed or imagined voices. And I thought there would be something really exciting about seeing how his work would engage with the archive. And Jane, it’s interesting that she said earlier that she doesn’t make a difference between writing an academic work and writing a poem. And I knew that ability to really follow clues with rigour would lead the work to some interesting places. And so it’s been: everything from the ownership structure of the Waverley Mall where we had our temporary shop to rediscovering women that had been hidden in the earlier programme of the Fruitmarket gallery came out of that. I’d been aware that Janette had been working as a gallery invigilator at the National Galleries in the past. And she also wrote these intensely personal and often erotic poems that really brought the body into the gallery, and I knew that she would be able to do something that was quite fantasy like. Like how we project our fantasies into the spaces of the art exhibitions in the gallery, and perhaps in ways that resonate with all of us, like where the exhibitions then sit interleaved with our personal memories.
TP: We’re all interested in the idea of the gallery as a social infrastructure. We’re interested in the idea that it wasn’t just a gallery: it was the café, it was the bookshop, it was the ambience, it was the whole package—the gallery in the neighbourhood. That idea of where it sits in the neighbourhood, the elements that it offers in terms of social structure, and then the idea of the fact that it’s borderless. And I think that’s where Callie’s looking at borders and these huge shifts. And I was very interested when the project started, that I just happened to be going to Venice, and these connections between the art world in Venice and Venice itself, and the Fruitmarket, and particularly the refurbished Fruitmarket. So I just wanted to bring in something of the perspectives, with which we’re looking at things. And your perspective is very close, Iain, but I think we’re all always looking both close-in and wide-angle.
JG: It’s interesting that the usual way of working in galleries when you’re a poet is to be physically in the presence of these works of art, and to make poetry that responds to the place. But here, we’ve just got the ghosts of decades of exhibitions. There is no physical exhibition on during the whole time that we’ve been doing this project. We’ve got access to the archive. So a lot of it has been very much as Tom was saying about the social space, the civic space, pondering about what its physical location is in the city, as well as its ideological, its political functions. But then we’ve had this strange eerie business of, in some cases, using the archive material to think back to a particular exhibition, and write poetry to that. But in a way that was quite kind of inauthentic, because you have to acknowledge its absence too, that that exhibition is no longer there. Iain sent us on this educational mission, to the film festival down in Berwick in order to think about how to write about the archive.
CG: It was fantastic. We watched a film, Holly Argent’s Interleaving the archive (Group Action with KK). It was about a pair of Polish artists who had made this work over their career and so it was kind of bringing that archive to life. And then I wrote a poem out of that. It was really amazing and also the way that the filmmaker had reflected on it throughout and the kind of almost performance piece that she produced using an overhead projector and the transparencies.
SD: What is next for the project? How do you envision it now in its final form?
IM: The Fruitmarket Gallery is just about to reopen after our refurbishment, which was the occasioning of the Writers’ Shift project in the first place, when we were without a building. At the moment, the focus of the gallery has been very much about how do we get this new building open and all that side of things. But what we’ve got in our heads is to find some point soon to present this work. We’re exploring different publication options, either co-publishing or working just with the Fruitmarket Gallery’s own imprint, because The Fruitmarket Gallery is a publisher publishing substantial monographs about the exhibitions that we show. So there’s a publication outcome on the horizon, and plans for a symposium-esque event. Writers’ Shift doesn’t have a finite end point; there are threads that keep coming out of it. Each of the lead writers has run a workshop with the staff and board which has generated new work from them as well. Shola von Reinhold joined us for our online Book Week Scotland 2020 event, giving a transcendent talk on 1986’s From Two Worlds exhibition, and I’m very keen to support them to put that work into written form. But I do want to make sure that we make time, and Tom will be the first to say this, to celebrate the incredible achievement of all the writers because we’ve got thousands of words of brilliant work, sitting in seasonal documents that we need to find a way to get out. The biggest thing that I think the project’s supported within the organisation is a shift in our relationship with our past.
JG: We will look to do more to get other people excited about what what’s available at the Fruitmarket in its rich archives, as well as the space itself. Going into the future, you know, we want to have events.
IM: Yes, and in terms of future events, one of the threads is that Jane’s found an amazing woman who was in the programme back in 1975.
JG: Yes. I discovered the performance artist Jill Smith (aka Jill Bruce). What happened was, I was looking back through the archives, and we were trying to find the first woman artist to exhibit in the Fruitmarket. The archive suggested that the first time women exhibited at the Fruitmarket was when a group of Eastern European artists exhibited in the late 70s and among them was Marina Abramovich. So she’s a big starry name to kind of get a hold on. And there were several women in that exhibition as well as Abramovich. Then I was looking back and I noticed that there was this artist called Bruce Lacey who had a solo exhibition and it was the fourth exhibition that the Fruitmarket had put on. But when I opened the document, it said that the exhibition was called ‘The Manifestations of the Obsessions and Fantasies of Bruce Lacey, and Jill Bruce.’ And yet it was described as a solo exhibition by Bruce Lacey. I looked at all the reviews in The Scotsman, and The Times and the way it was written up by the press. And again Bruce Lacey was interviewed about his exhibition. And yet, she was in the title of the exhibition. And she was a co-creator of the exhibition. So I did a lot of research and tracked her down, she’s still alive, and she lives up in the Hebrides.
So we had planned to meet in person, so I could go and interview her. And of course, nobody was allowed onto the islands. We’ve been in correspondence with each other and I sent her the poem that I made, and luckily, she really likes it and she wants to perform it. So obviously, my ideal is, I want her to come down to the Fruitmarket and perform it. I also want to work more with Louise Dick, a local artist and teacher, who spent four amazing years as gallery assistant in the Fruitmarket in the 1980s. I wrote a poem about this, and how life changing her own visits to Fruitmarket exhibitions were for her younger self, when she and her classmates at Craigroyston School were taken there by their teacher, the sculptor John Kirkwood, to see a show with his work in it.
TP: The first thing that we did had a great effect on me throughout the project, and that was going into the old building before it was renovated and seeing the roughness of it, which gave me a strong visual sense and a strong aesthetic sense. And it reminded me of an artist like Antoni Tàpies. And that affected me so I worked on him and was drawn to translate works about him as well. That had an effect. And then, before the Covid came in there was Brexit. And Brexit came in just as we were starting in this project, and that had the effect of a very strong desire to reach out, you know, and that was my thing of, you know why Venice, and the international Venice Biennale was so important for me. And then, as Jane said, with the Covid thing, we were responding to a building that we never got into, again, that was empty. And we had to imagine its transformation. And I think this gave us a certain freedom to imagine, that we might not have had if we’d seen it incrementally being transformed. So I could imagine you know, the Fruitmarket with a garden on its roof and all sorts of things. We had a freedom, because it was all happening in our imagination. It wasn’t happening in reality, you know.
CG: But you know, a lot of the time when we’re having these organisational discussions, they go in emails, and then that’s all gonna, you know, disappear. But there’s all these very procedural and just kind of everyday letters and faxes that survive in the archive, which are just about the everyday process of running the gallery and arranging logistics, but which involves making artistic choices and making political choices, as well as making economic choices and practical choices. I don’t want to say it’s all there, but there’s a really big fossil record. It’s just so interesting to read in between the lines of letters, you think, oh maybe this person really wanted this other person to come, but they couldn’t say quite how much they wanted them to come. Or I feel like this person didn’t want to be doing what this letter was about, and they’re doing it with the most extreme reluctance. And so I made a wee zine called Shifting, part of which was using these letters and making poems out of them and turning them into love poems, or looking at the politics of moving art works, especially big art works, across borders. And I was fascinated by this idea—it’s not always true, but it was certainly true in I think a couple of cases in the Fruitmarket’s history—where it was easier to move the artwork across the border than it was to move the artist across the border, and that’s something that’s still true. That aspect of it is something that’s still with us.
SD: The word ‘borderless’ is a strong lens for me to enter into this interview with, from everything I’ve been gathering so far. You know like borderless across time and borderless across so many different aspects. How would you sort of summarise your role within the project itself? Was there a particular role? Is there a particular sort of approach that you entered with and has that changed from since you started interacting with the archives and did it come out the same way as you envisioned going in or take its own path?
JA: I don’t think so, but Iain was the faculty group leader! It was all his idea and he welcomed the poets into the vicinity and structured the dynamic, working on both sides of the wall, he opened the archives and art doors to our spray of words. He gave us incentive to be original and a purpose to share. I was part of a wise-minded collective, we were all so different in poetic style and yet shared similar visions. It was a deeply brilliant balanced circle. I was so excited! I felt privileged to gain behind the scenes access at the Fruitmarket and within the inner workings of the other poet’s minds in response to that as it surfaced. I knew I had favourite artists I wanted to draw from and independently dived in from there. I was surprised to discover more inspiration than I first imagined. And I read some great poems from the other ‘Shifters’ as we shifted through the work and merged our creativity and voice. Well, I think we are all happy with what we forged together. It was such a transformational time for the gallery as it halted on hiatus before its expansion and upgrade. I never imagined having adventures with hard hats and torches in old crumbling Edinburgh nightclubs or to have one of my poems blown up into a giant poster across the front of the gallery when it was then shut for lockdown. And I didn’t expect to make such lovely new friends or to bond deeper with others.
CG: I think just my particular interests led me to go into the archives and do these sort of found language experiments and also to think about the border crossings and the particular status of art with respect to borders. I’m really interested in this phenomenon of people, ultra-rich turning their money into art by buying expensive art. And as people continue to do that, and buy art off each other the price of the art increases and that has this knock-on effect for individuals and for the mass enjoyment of art, because certain art that is very valued is just locked away in a warehouse in Switzerland and nobody can ever look at it. It’s really interesting to think of art as a commodity. I think the Fruitmarket is a much different sort of institution, but it’s still part of this, somewhere that you can just walk in off the street in Edinburgh and look at some art and the fact that the Fruitmarket is right by the train station, it’s in the fruit market building where fruit used to be sold and now it’s not exactly selling, but it’s where people can go into, to go and achieve and get their daily dose of art. But also interesting to think about the things that might make people not want to go in, feeling uncomfortable or not knowing that it was there or whatever. And so I don’t know if it’s my role, necessarily, but that was my particular interest and what motivated me to be writing what I was writing. But it was also really fed into by everybody else’s role and interest as well, which is why it was Iain’s curation of us as a group of people which was so important. We had diverse interests.
JG: I just think, as a poet, my role is to make poems. I’m not sure I came in with an agenda or a sense of a role beyond a sense of responsibility. And I think I had ideas about what would interest me, and they didn’t necessarily turn out to be the case. It was much more about people, and about civic space. And about asking big questions, as Callie has said, it’s a struggle to get free admission to current art of international standing, including local art of international standing, into city centres for citizens to access. And once I started pulling on threads with fellow poets and exploring these ideas, I found it a very moving experience.
A very moving experience indeed; throughout the interview, we at Gutter were continually immersed in how engaging and borderless the discussion turned out to be, how welcoming and generous the poets at Writers Shift were, and what an amazing project this is shaping up to be. Reading through the poems, we are left with a sense of palpable excitement for all that is to come from this project in the months ahead.