Spaces of Uncertainty - The Bakery
Mixed Media
2014
A collaborative project by myself, Calum MacGillivray, Lotte Fisher, Koren Dumbleton, Jack Bishop, Meadhbh Nic Nuadhait, Joe Coghill, Jennifer Galbraith and Kirsty Dalton
The Bakery was founded in response to a piece of text titled Spaces of Uncertainty, written by artist Allan Siegel and curator Eszter Lázár. The Bakery imbued a practical feature of the cityscape, an iconic chimney from one of the last functioning textiles mills in Dundee, with significance akin to that of any purpose-built memorial or shrine. Artists from across Europe were invited to submit works in response to Spaces of Uncertainty. The diverse range of work created was then brought together for a combined exhibition at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, December 2014
Dundee, fourth-largest city in Scotland, professes to be the 'City of Discovery'. The city is built on a once thriving textiles industry, but now finds itself in limbo. As the knowledge industries are emerging as a new source of wealth, the city is making a transition. On the ruins of its proletarian past, Dundee delves into an unknown future; it sheds its old skin - physically and mentally - and must rediscover itself. Fixated on future economic prosperity, the present is relegated to the past tense.
The Bakery is a newly established organisation in Dundee whose purpose is to oversee the current transformation processes. Staff members of The Bakery draw on a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and use their expertise to strip away what they deem to be unnecessary for the future utopia. Meticulously, they count, measure, calculate, make estimates, review, document, discuss, analyse. With their ubiquitous clipboards as universal carriers of information, they scrutinise the fragmented expanses of a devoid present.
Performance, Budapest 2014
Exhibition Space, Budapest 2014
Click here to purchase our book which documents our project from its genesis, with a foreword from Tracy Mackenna.
