I’ve always enjoyed going to Edinburgh’s West End Fair. It’s a pop-up village of stalls, sheds and marquees in the grounds of St John’s Kirk (on the corner between Princes Street and Lothian Road) filled with artists and designers showcasing their work. It starts in late July and keeps running right through the festival season.
This year, for the first time, I decided to give things a go with a stall of my own. I’m here from the 29th of July until the 22nd of August with my Atlas of Scotland project, which means I’m currently on day 15 of 25! Thank you to everyone who has stopped by so far.
I see every art market as a kind of experiment to see what works. I’ve been learning a lot at this one, both from my own experience and from the very kind community of stallholders. I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to create next and feel ready to try new things once August is over.
What do you wish for?
Last month I went to see the Yoko Ono exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. It’s a fascinating retrospective on the artist’s life of creativity and activism. I enjoyed the many elements of ‘participatory art’ which invited visitors to write on walls, hammer nails into pictures, and tie wishes for the future onto trees.
One room, which began with a plain white boat surrounded by plain white walls, was soon covered in the messages and drawings of thousands of visitors. At the exhibition entrance, a group of trees were strung with hand-written wishes covering everything from the global to the personal.
As the 10-year anniversary of the Scottish independence referendum approaches, I’ve also been reflecting on some of the cultural activism we engaged in as part of National Collective (the cultural campaign for a Yes vote), including our very own wish trees and other forms of ‘participatory art’.
Below you’ll see me tending to our wish tree on Calton Hill in 2013. We wanted to ask people ‘What kind of Scotland would you like to live in?’ - a question which many said they had never been asked before.
The simple act of writing a wish on a piece of paper gave people the chance to really think about what kind of future they wanted, and in turn, how they might get it.
We took the wish tree to all kinds of events and street corners and amassed a really fascinating record of people’s hopes for the new Scotland. It was nice to be reminded of the unexpected power of articulating a wish.