Helix Sentinels Project

The Official Release Jephson Robb appointed

2010-10-05T15:23:00.000-07:00

28th September 2010

For Immediate Release

THE HELIX COMMISSIONS SCOTTISH ARTIST

TO LEAD DESIGN OF MAJOR PUBLIC ARTWORK

Scottish artist Jephson Robb has been commissioned to lead the design and construction of a major public artwork for Falkirk’s innovative Helix project.

The artwork, currently known as the Abbotshaugh Sentinel, will take the form of a significant earthwork and will be located in the Abbotshaugh Woodland near Langlees in Falkirk.

The woodland lies in the northern part of the Helix which is set to transform over 300 hectares of land between Falkirk and Grangemouth into an exciting new greenspace and visitor attraction.

Twenty-three expressions of interest in designing the Abbotshaugh Sentinel

were longlisted by artists from seven countries.

The Helix project brought together a community client panel comprised of local residents to review the applications and whittle them down to a shortlist of five. Jephson was finally selected following a two-day interview process which involved working with community members in a series of activity sessions known as charettes.

Said Jephson: “I am delighted to have won the appointment to work with the Abbotshaugh and Langlees/Bainsford community on developing an artwork for their woodland site. The artwork will be developed through community engagement and consultation, building upon the great work and relationships already established with the community by Landlab/Vista Projects and the Helix Trust. My aim will be to deliver an art work which will help regenerate the area and lay the foundations for a more positive future.”

Colin Armstrong, chief executive of the Helix Trust, said: “Everyone involved with the Helix is delighted to have Jephson on board. His artistic creativity, along with his obvious enthusiasm for the project, stood out from day one.”

Christian Barnes from VistaProjects, who facilitated the community client panel along with John Kennedy of Landlab, praised the panel’s efforts and commitment. “I’ve been overwhelmed by the panel’s commitment to the project and the intelligence and diligence with which they’ve approached the project,” he said. “It far surpasses anything we have seen in the professional sector.”

He added: “When we started work on the Helix project, we had the luxury of imagining an ideal scenario where a community would take responsibility and control of an aspect of its own cultural regeneration. What we’ve seen so far has filled us with fresh optimism and hopefully established a new approach to the public commissioning of artists that can de adopted elsewhere.”

Falkirk artist Helen Coffey, who is a member of the community client panel, said: “Jephson's appointment is exciting for me personally, as I have a strong interest in community involvement and have already produced a piece of work for the Abbotshaugh Community Woodland (a sun clock). Throughout the interview process it was clear Jephson would have no problem engaging with the community. He was comfortable working with the youngest to the oldest members of the Dawson community. I feel Jephson will listen to our ideas and create something unique that people will want to use. The whole process will bring the community closer together.”

Jephson will begin working with the local community from the first week of October. The first conceptual design is expected to be ready by spring 2011.

http://www.jephsonrobb.com/

Nearly there and looking back.

2010-09-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

When John and I wrote the original report for the Helix Project we were in a strange and unusual situation. The Helix was one of 313 entrants for a one off Big Lottery grant of £25million. Our role was to contribute to that bid with a programme of community based public art/public realm proposals called ‘Sentinels’. When we submitted our report we did not anticipate that Falkirk would win funds, not because we thought it wasn’t worthy, it plainly was, but simply because the numbers were stacked against us and the competition from higher profile areas was so intense.

As a consequence when we devised an approach to this project we simply ignored the competition and imagined an ideal scenario in which a design competition would be directed and led by an empowered community acting as its own client.

Rather than being ‘consulted’ about it after the appointments were made the members of the client group would ‘work’ being responsible for the appointment and supported in every way possible by us. The competition, rather than being a process in which competitors would finally meet the client after the winner had been declared, would be replaced with a recruitment process where relationships would be built providing foundation for an iterative design process and for local intelligence to be shared.

As the appointment process now nears completion. We feel a sense of building excitement. We have been overwhelmed by the panel’s commitment to the project and the intelligence, fair-mindedness and diligence with which they have approached the project. It far surpasses anything we have seen in the professional sector. We have also been fortunate to find a committed partner in Grace McDonald Head of Community engagement for the Helix Trust who has smoothed our way and made things work which we couldn’t have achieved by ourselves as ‘off-comers’.

We worked first to develop a brief for the project conceived as a landscape treatment/earthwork intended to catalyse renewed community engagement with the community green space known as Abbotshaugh woodland. Because the volume of material involved was quite large there is a prospect that it could be shaped into a substantial mound.

The creative brief was drafted for and amended by the community group and issued as a callout closing in April. The brief emphasised place-making and community engagement and received

more than 40 expressions of interest from a range of applicants from architectural firms (including a Stirling prize winner) to individual sculptors.

The community panel poured over this material for hours, writing detailed comments and notes. It helped them to clarify their thinking about the woodland and the right approach for a creative intervention there.

In June it was decided which five artists would be offered honoraria to participate in a charette held in the woodland and in the nearby Dawson Centre on David’s Loan.

The interviews/charette were conducted over a two day period in July and were preceded by briefings and tours of the Helix area followed a lunch at the Dawson Centre attended by Alex Ferguson MSP (Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament) and Michael Matheson MSP (Falkirk). Community members were able to join the session and members of the local community also attended.

In the afternoon Alex and Helen from the panel led a walking tour of the area in the Abbotshaugh woodland and around the local community. The day provided a good opportunity for the artists to absorb the thinking of panellists and community members and for community members to meet and discuss ideas with the artists.

The following day the charettes were broken into two sessions during the day on either side of lunch and allowed for five and a half hours of unprepared discussion followed by an interview led by the community panel. During the charette the public were admitted and free to become involved.

We met again in August to confirm the panel’s preferences and we are waiting now for formal processes to be completed for the Helix to confirm an appointment in September. Its been a privilege to meet the shortlisted artists and in debriefing them I have felt a real sense of loss for the contributions they might have made.

When we started work on the project we had the luxury of imagining an ideal project where a community would take responsibility and control of an aspect of its own cultural regeneration. The project and the panel has filled us with new optimism and hopefully established a new approach to the public commissioning of artists that can be adopted elsewhere.

19 August 2010, David's Loan

2010-08-20T09:46:00.000-07:00

For reasons of needing to preserve confidentiality and respect privileged information this blog has been neglected since the 7^th January and I can’t write as much as I would like -but the project has been going ahead apace.

John and I have worked with the Helix Trust in Falkirk to assemble and support a panel drawn from the community of Langlees and Bainsford who will act as a community based client for the project and support this with social networking tools.

We have been overwhelmed by their commitment to the project and the intelligencewith which they have approached it. We worked first to develop a brief for the project which was drafted and amended by the community group and issued as a callout closing on the 26^th April.

The brief received more than 40 expressions of interest which in the event we narrowed down to 23 eligible entries. There was a wide range of entrants from architectural firms to individual sculptors. The 23 expressions of interest were compiled into a document of over 400 pages which the community panel poured over, writing their detailed comments in exercise books.

It was decided at the short listing meeting held on the 4^th June which five artists would be offered honoraria to participate in a charette held in the woodland and in the nearby Dawson Centre on David’s Loan.

2010-01-07T05:37:00.000-08:00

Fantastic day in Falkirk yesterday. (Nightmare drive through snow to get there but... Once there such a special day with the mountains looking fantastic in the snow.) Meeting at the Helix Trust with Grace MacDonald and a trip out to the Asda transport depot near Langlees. Their meeting rooms overlook the community woodland slightly above the tree canopy and give a tantalising prospect of the landscape that could be sighted from the summit of a giant earthwork a huge contrast with the uneasy sense of enclosure that you can get on the network of paths through the site. Next up with John on the 14th Jan to meet with community members who might take an active part in the project looking forward to that.

A Picturesque Ruin, Claife Station, Windermere - or - How to make use of a short walk up a hill!

2009-12-10T12:32:00.000-08:00

Over the summer (probably on the one day that it hasn't actually rained in Cumbria this year) I visited 'Claife Station' at Windermere for the first time in a long time with the intention of photographing it again. I have been doing some work about early picturesque tourism for the Cumbria Tourist Board and looking at the site fitted in with that. The structure is now owned by the National Trust but was originally developed on lands belonging to John Christian Curwen the owner of Belle Isle which is the large island at the centre of Windermere in the English Lakes.

John Curwen was actually born John Christian but took his wife's name (Curwen) in order to inherit wealth. He bought and named Belle Isle after his wife Isabella.

The 'Station' (A term invented as part of a unique system of landscape appreciation proposed by Thomas West in his Guide to the Lakes - Claife Station is described here) is an interesting building constructed as a faux gothic hunting lodge on a promontory 'Claife' situated at the eastern shore just below Belle Isle overlooking Windermere.

The central feature of the building was a room on the first floor with large 'portrait format' windows which existed for taking in the elevated view through very large coloured glass windows and looking down on the water table below as if it were a living mirror or as Mark Haywood of the University of Cumbria once described it to me as a vast 'suture' that could join the near and far ground without ever really appearing to occupy the middle ground. All of which really only makes sense if you are a genteel 18th century watercolourist/person of taste... However eccentric West's words may seem now, nonetheless, what an amazing experience it must have been to be in that room enjoying the sense of privilege, enclosure, revealed landscape and coloured light.

What I had forgotten however is what a total experience the visit to the building was, firstly the journey across the lake by boat, the landing at Ferry Nab, the entrance to the pathway that led to the 'Station' through a gothic arch (Now let to the Freshwater Biological Association and closed to the Public)

The short but steep climb that followed terminated through an identical arch at a ledge in the side of the hill. With the 'Station' to the right, its Eastern elevation hanging over a precipitous rock face.

The first floor room would have been reached through a small entrance and up a further flight of stairs cantilevered out of the wall.

The building is closed off now but the site can be accessed via a public footpath on the road between Ferry Nab and Sawrey on the eastern shore of the lake.

I have been thinking about this cluster of buildings in relation to this idea of an elevated viewing point. It's a simple landscape and architectural experience. A gate way - an enclosed ascent - the reveal of the building through an identical gateway at the top of the climb - the privilege of admission as a guest of a wealthy man - a room full of coloured light and elevated panoramic views....

23rd November 2009, Forth Valley College - Community Consultation

2009-12-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

Here is an explanation of our appearance at Forth Valley College equipped with a sandpit and 24 kilos of salt dough together with a 1:500 base map of the Langlees/Bainsford area. We sat amongst all the other representatives and waited to talk to the public about our ideas.

When we had presented our report we had looked at the site on the map and seen not two towns: Falkirk and Grangemouth, but one larger conurbation with Greenspace at its centre. The Helix area is today what remains of the green field that separates the two. At its thinnest point it has been whittled down to a 'buffer zone' of only four hundred yards. Here the new football stadium stands like a cathedral at the centre of a great new city. What if, instead of being a 'buffer zone' and as Peter Cook once memorably described the countryside “that green stuff that keeps towns apart”, this landscape were to be husbanded, cared for, worked and maintained as a parkland might be - drawing inspiration from the example of Olmstead and Vaux' masterpiece of landscape architecture, Central Park in New York?

Which brings me back to the salt dough and the sand.

We have been working to identify the technical constraints that might govern an architectural brief for the design of a landform/hill in this area (there are many constraints) but first and foremost there is the issue of how big the hill actually is. At 1:500, half a kilo of salt dough equates exactly in volume to 42,500 cubic metres of spoil the estimated quantity of material available to the project so the object of this madness was to engage people with the scale of this quantity before it has been given any any shape or form and to test the idea that the existence of this material represented a significant creative opportunity.

The consultation was a lot of fun with people sculpting their ideas in the sandpit and modelling the salt dough on the base map. Much of the consultation involved sticking post it notes with comments on exhibition boards around the hall but the sandpit became a kind of palinpest in which mountains were raised, levelled and raised again in a different form.

At the end of the day we felt strongly that the existence of this spoil material had been recognised by the community as a creative resource that could be used to improve the amenity of the area. I personally spoke to a large spectrum of people from Jenny Lim, a former GP, with whom I discussed an idea for 'calorie signage' to measure the health benefits of walking to a small child whose name I did not discover who produced a ridiculous shape and when asked how exactly that was a hill said 'this bit is for sledging!'. (Until this point I can honestly say that I had not considered sledging as part of a performance specification that the Sentinel would need.)

Both John and I despite our misgivings (stage fright) loved talking to people about it and from the day we have some exciting leads that we hope we can develop into a client group for the project.

We are proposing to recruit a small group of individuals representative of the community to act as a client in the appointment of a 'hill designer'. We will do the leg work, we will research the technical brief, we will manage and facilitate the process for them but the appointment and the ownership of the aspirations and the problems associated with the site will be theirs. We hope that what is done in this area will add to the amenity of the community woodland, build community capacity and point towards the vital issue of management in the site. As a result of Monday’s session in Falkirk we are much more confident about the project

To accompany our experiments with sand and salt dough we showed a slide show of man made hills constructed as burial mounds, war memorials, cognitive maps and earthworks. If you would like to look again at that show you can see it on Flikr here and for the edited highlights of what got built in the sand pit and moddled out of dough (The good, the bad and the ugly) click here

28th October 2009, Langlees - Falkirk

2009-12-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

We arrived in Falkirk at 9.0 o’clock on Wednesday 28^th October, a full two hours before we were due to meet representatives of the Helix Trust and spent the time in scruff clothing walking around the Langlees and Bainsford area taking photos. A weird move that necessitated getting suited and booted in the toilets at Falkirk Stadium afterwards in order to look presentable to the committee! In the last two years since we originally submitted our report to the Helix Board in support of its big lottery bid for the Living Landmarks Programme we had heard very little of the project’s progress as plans for its mobilisation gathered pace. In some ways it is challenging to start to implement an idea that is two years old. It sort of needs 'proving' again. When we wrote our report and made the suggestion there had been no oil price spike, no industrial dispute at the refinery, no end in sight to the credit boom. The Helix, proposed in one economic environment was to be delivered in another. Would the ideas stand up? Would it still make sense? Visiting the site again was like a double take. But this time not a punt to the lottery but for real.

The Helix Trust is looking first to develop one of our projects which is described in our report as the Barrow Sentinel. It is a proposal to create an earth work from the spoil created by the creation of a new lake and associated canal works. Of necessity the project had been a little vague in its original description and had relied on some core assumptions but it is now as it was then basically a very simple idea that relates to the first experience we had visiting the site without knowing the place, the people or anything. We had driven into Bainsford area two years earlier in 2007 parked the van got two bikes out of the back and started cycling along every footpath, every road, every nook and cranny of the Helix site from Langlees to Polmont. One of the first places we came to was a small trotting ring (which really wasn’t that public) we spoke to a man who kept horses at the site and he told us where the paths were but the overwhelming impression we had was of being lost and unable to see where we were.

Our route from Bainsford to Polmont was in an easterly direction, it is also slightly uphill taking the tidal reaches of the Carron, the sewerage works, the sea loch, the M9, the football stadium, the arable land to the east of the stadium and the hill area around Polmont which has since been inscribed as a World Heritage Site and marks the location of the earthworks that formed the outer perimeter of the Roman Empire - more generally known as the Antonine Wall. Obviously we didn’t travel in a straight line!

Of course, standing at Polmont looking across the Firth of Forth we finally saw the vast scale of the landscape and the massive structures in it from the refineries at Grangemouth to the mountains across the Forth. What a magnificent place. I live on the perimeter of the Lake District which is a miniature by comparison with this vast landscape. Standing there its not hard to imagine a connection with the peoples who lived here at the time of Antonine Wall.

We left Polmont via the cemetery where tidy graves, well kept and respected, look out over this vast estate like a well cared for necropolis. There is a lot to envy to a strangers eye in this place - the kind of things I’d pass over in my own backyard without valuing - not least the graveyard in which I imagine many who have lived here would wish to be buried. It would be a great place to be buried.

Looking at Ironside Farrar’s landscape masterplan we saw the whole site as a series of separate outdoor rooms. Had we travelled east to west we would have been able to gain our bearings straight away but for no reason other than a whim we travelled the other way up hill and ended by looking back and identifying all the places that we had been.

As we continued to work on the project and devise our proposals for the site this first experience has been at the core of our thinking about the site.

We imagined that from each of these ‘out door rooms’ (which in the Helix master plan now carry names like ‘Central Park’) it would be impossible to see into the next. I remember trying to explain this idea to a group of people by drawing a cartoon of periscope in a maze. The idea of being in a place without knowing what was next to you.

In the end we settled upon the name ‘Heuristic Devices’ for our Sentinel Projects (the name was John’s idea) but we agreed that it worked best because nobody who we met knew what it meant and as a result every time we used the name we would have to explain ourselves. For reasons of expediency here is a link to Wikepedia’s definition of heuristic. We like the idea that the heuristic device is a model or representation of a place that can be used to understand it and resolve a problem like where am I? A good example is a map to landscape in the hands of someone who is er, lost. The heuristic device isn’t the thing it describes but it is a representation of it and a working of it that enables understanding.

Amongst the projects we proposed were mechanical bridges (with viewing platforms), a huge mirror in the sky and lastly a hill, a giant earthwork which could use the excavated spoil to offer this raised ground in the flood plain at Langlees and Bainsford at the westerly end of the site and create a view point from which people making use of the community woodland and local path network could see the whole of the plain before them.

On our arrival two years ago I had jokingly said that if I had a cherrypicker I would have been able to get our bearings straight away - as it was we had wandered slightly lost through the community woodland and it was from this that the idea of an elevated view point was born.

The function of the ‘sentinel’ commissions is in each case to act as a guardian of the amenity green space. We felt strongly that the status of this landscape had suffered from a lack of management and neglect. Despite the evidence of particular initiatives to improve it and that it contrasted strongly with the rich arable landscape to the west of the Carron. There is no need for the community woodland to be flat, in fact its networks of paths would benefit from new vistas and desire lines that link Langlees and Bainsford to the wider landscape setting. The view point could become a place to walk to.