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THREAD: This is the Concierge Station, showing the base of operations for the custodians of the now demolished 10 Red Road Court in North Glasgow, 1st in a series of 5 dialectograms I would make @ the iconic Red Road Flats. It is also the first fully formed #Dialectogram. 1/20
Red Road for those who don’t know, was a housing scheme raised on a windy plain in Barmulloch in the late 60s. It was both emblematic and unusual within Glasgow’s massive programme of post-war high-rise, largely due to their Manhattan style build. 2/21
The name itself, is also evocative.’Red Road’ has a poetry and mystery to it that Whitevale, Moss Heights or even Basil Spence’s Queen Elizabeth Sq. never quite managed, whatever their comparative architectural features. No wonder Andrea Arnold borrowed it for her 2007 film. 3/21
But beyond this poetry are the hard facts of Red Road deserve; essentially condemned in 2008, in its final days the crumbling scheme was decanting the original population of working class Glaswegians & homeless tenants while managing its intake of asylum seekers & refugees. 4/21
A stalled utopia containing so many of the problems that beset us then, and now. How could I NOT go there? 5/21
But as with last week, let’s go to before the before... 6/21
Excluding the many contributions made by my wife (debt unpayable) I owe my career to 2 other women; @seonaiddaly who gave me my first stab at being a ‘proper’ artist with the How’S The Ghost? exhibition @Market Gallery in January of 2009, & the writer @AlisonMIrvine 7/21
@AlisonMIrvine enters the story when she visits How’S the Ghost?, half of it being the work of her friend & my co-artist, Chris Dooks. A few weeks later & I meet her at Chris’ wedding. She asks if she can show Travellerology to people she is is working with at Red Road. 8/21
Jonny Howes, who oversees much of the Red Road Cultural project immediately ‘gets it’ (which is Impressive, as I still didn’t have a clue what ‘it’ is). He asks me to come and work at Red Road, where I will focus on documenting the interiors of the buildings. 9/21
So. Without any sense of whether I could even repeat the trick, I of course say ‘yes’, telling myself I would work it all out as I went along. So when I first set foot in the concierge station, my ‘first contact’ with the scheme it very much is into ‘the unknown’. 10/21
I meet Jackie - soon to retire from the job, and Grant. Tea is made, I am shown the discarded knife and syringe box nestled among the pot noodles, and once they’ve gotten a look at me, the stories started to come out. I sketch, photograph, take notes. 11/21
Even at this early stage I knew this had to be different to Travellerology, as I had a great deal to learn about THIS place. I drew (another pun for the scorecard!) upon my experience as a field researcher & adapted ethnographic & oral history techniques into my methods. 12/21
Soon after that initial foray, a terrible tragedy - the shared suicide of an asylum seeker family - requires a respectful distance for some months. It underscores the need to take care with this subject. I will need to effect a tone very different to Travellerology. 13/21
I try to stick to THEIR words, fresh from the field, preserve the integrity & meaning. I try to put how they see things to the fore when ’labelling’ what I still see as a pastiche-diagram. With that, another crucial feature of the dialectogram is accidentally discovered. 14/21
I knock out an initial drawing with what I have - small by my standards at A3, & incredibly rough. I stick with the bird’s eye view, but add elements from comics, a splash of colour, elevated sections to show other angles & perspectives, verbatim quotes &commentary. 15/21
And there you have it - all the basics of the dialectogram, together for the first time. 16/21
This first stab proved very useful in other ways. When I return to a new pair of concierges, Donny (a mine of information & deadpan quips) and Tam, it is with the ‘Concierge prototype’ under my arm. It proves to be a great means of starting & focusing the conversation. 17/21
#Dialectograms rely on conversation as much as they do on pencil and ink. Without the cooperation of these key workers (& I should also mention Billy, Brenda, Enrico & Yvonne) this piece could not exist. 18/21
It was during the making of the concierge that I began to learn the pitfalls of making artworks deliberately impossible to take in at a single glance. When 1 concierge cracked a joke that may have gently poked fine at management diktats, he only noticed it 2 years later. 19/21
He went pale. Then laughed out loud - as he said to me later ‘hopefully when the guy sees it, he'll laugh about it. Because it's exactly true.’ But it raises an important point about the imbalance between my power to depict & shape the narrative & that of my participants. 20/21
I’m still not sure how well any of my efforts to address this since have worked -I’ll get to that in due course. But next week we stay at Red Road, & shift our attention from its custodians to its denizens. It starts with a long walk on a grey Sunday morning... 21/21
