- Venue
- Cupar Arts
- Location
This year’s Cupar Arts Festival invites artists to respond to the broad theme of ‘Drawing Attention’. It is undoubtedly a success with several very interesting works and events around the town including live music, drawing workshops and live art throughout the 10 days of the Festival.
On arriving into Cupar on the train one is immediately met with Ticketline/Just Passing Through in the station waiting room in which Joanna Foster invites commuters to write messages or make drawings on scaled up train tickets. This highly effective and engaging idea is enhanced by the homely touches such as the screenprinted cushions on the benches and the beautifully hand printed tickets. The messages range from simple statements of hunger to memories of train journeys and comments about the festival and the nature of art. The success of this piece seems to be its simplicity; it allows the visitors to become part of the festival and acts as an icebreaker encouraging travellers to start conversations.
There are several impressive venues this year, including 15 Millgate which hosted Richard Demarco’s drawings of closes from Cupar, Edinburgh and Picinisco in Italy, highlighting the ‘small and secret places’ which make each place unique. This is shown alongside Kate Downie’s expressive large scale drawings of incidental places around Cupar; the borders and pathways which are often overlooked. A large mural on the wall in the courtyard was the highlight for me, featuring an alleyway full of colourful bins.
Also in Millgate is Judy Spark’s installation, A Quiet Damp Elevated Hollow which investigates the human as receiver. Spark documents her experiences of visits to various receiver sites around Cupar through sound recording and text. These charming texts are displayed on walls alongside a beautiful pencil drawing of one of the receivers. In the centre of the room a display of several different radios plays static interspersed with the sounds of wind, running water and soft voices recorded at each of the sites.
However it is Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins’ piece which steals the show, a space for reflection on themes of food sustainability, celebration, farming methods (both large and small scale) and Cupar as a market town. Each element of the installation opens up a conversation surrounding these themes and many more with particular relevance to apples and small scale orchards. An Unsustainable Column of perfect, patented Pink Lady Apples ‘grows’ out of the bed of spent peat, now devoid of nutrients, which covers the floor of the first room. The second room, to which access is blocked by small potted apple trees, is strung with bunting and contains a small hand-cranked apple press. The floor in this room is strewn with imperfect windfall apples from local gardens and orchards, providing a stark contrast with the carefully manicured store bought apples and highlighting just how detached we are from the growing process of the food we eat. Visitors are invited to don fruit-bag shoe coverings, walk on the dead soil, enjoy a mug of hot freshly pressed apple juice and consider the issues and situations that Baxter and Gittins’ present in response to their research and conversations in preparation for this installation.
The biggest disappointment of the festival is The Warehouse which houses some of the most visually interesting works which however unfortunately lacked substance or coherence. Fiona McGarva’s delicate installation Linea, which although intriguing and relevant to the industrial feel of the space is regrettably overshadowed by the venue, the nooks and crannies of which proves much more captivating. This piece would have benefited from a much plainer backdrop.
Volker Rosenberg’s Abstract Painting with Air Suspension is described in the catalogue as ‘using a real car as canvas…to evoke associations to do with car use environmental issues; transport necessity in rural areas; school runs; road safety; self expression cars (and) driving styles”, however I fail to see how any of these themes, with the exception of self expression, is articulated in this piece. The reported inspiration for the pattern on the car was Fife lace which also seemed arbitrary in light of the other supposed themes. By contrast his Contemporary Art Show Souvenir Tattoo consisting of a choice of temporary ‘art’ tattoos designed by the artist is another example of a simple fun idea that really worked. This piece allows visitors to ‘become the art’; it alludes to ideas of permanence and consequence in an accessible and amusing way.
Other highlights of the Festival included Karen Spy’s installation at the YMCA and Liz Skulina’s Out and In. Karen Spy’s work consists of artefacts from her ‘mindful action’ performances which track the story of the Cupar unicorn and its horn. Spy conducts a meditative journey with a small audience to the little known resting place of the horn; a well, from which she draws water, distilling the unicorn’s essence before symbolically restoring the horn to the unicorn statue in the town square. The installation is itself a meditative space. A large screen shows footage of the walk, a slow, quiet pilgrimage, while the artefacts invite reflection on the symbolic quality of objects and how this can be transformed into embodied experience through ritual.
Out and In, curated by Liz Skulina is held in one of the most interesting and loaded venues of the festival. Skulina has opened her home to show her own work alongside that of artists such as Moira Payne and Colin Kirkpatrick. The works respond variously to ideas of nature, home, public and private space, domesticity and women’s roles. Most notable amongst the works here is that of Aileen Stackhouse who has drawn onto and cut directly into the walls of Skulina’s house to create her installation which examines ‘The Place of the Flaw’. By physically altering the room Stackhouse goes further than any of the other artists in pushing the idea of public and private space and uses this unique venue to its full extent.
