Craig McCorquodale
Project Description
Living on the street for two years, Craig watched Sauchiehall Street fall into a kind of non-place - with dilapidated buildings, fallen retail environments and fire-ravaged sites throwing up urgent questions of purpose. What is this street for? Who decides what a city is? Why should the failure of big business and regulation deprive people from a street pulsating with memories?
Responding to these questions, Craig and Molly will collaborate with those connected to Sauchiehall Street to unpack feelings, memories and new visions for the street. This process will lead towards a one-off 24 hour durational artwork, Questions of Sauchiehall Street, where 24 artistic interventions will happen across the street over one extraordinary day. Each hour of this day, including all the way through the night, a new artwork will be installed on the street by a different individual or group connected in some way to this place. From living rooms to nightclubs to kebab shops, the street will be animated with opinions, statements and actions that speak to Sauchiehall Street's realities, heritages, contradictions or future possibilities.
Artist Biography
Craig McCorquodale is an artist working across a range of contexts, but mainly performance. His enduring interest is in collaborating with people who might never have done anything like this before, inviting unusual constituencies of people into unmissable, unforgettable artworks. He thinks of this as Social Sculpture: working with the experience people have of their own lives to create radical, vital and beautiful events. In recent years, Craig has made work in large theatre spaces, swimming pools, libraries, city parks, churches and construction sites, working with children, policemen, ballroom dancers, football teams, a 100 year-old, an embalmer and a town crier.
Craig is currently working with Factory International, National Theatre of Scotland and Take Me Somewhere Festival on new projects and has previously made work for Wunder der Prärie Festival at Zeitraumexit, Lyra, Culture Collective, FABRIC and Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto.
For this project, Craig will collaborate with Molly Jack, a visual artist working across sculpture, installation and new media. Graduating from the Sculpture and Environmental Art Programme at Glasgow School of Art, Molly has worked with the materiality of the city to disrupt the rhythms of the everyday, playing with intimacy and anonymity. Molly has a particular interest in the ethical questions surrounding socially engaged practice, with themes of her work often reflecting ideas of love, family, memory and the artist's gaze. Molly has recently been working at Scottish Action for Mental Health within the context of Addiction, supporting people across the city, and now seeks to draw upon these experiences within her artistic practice.
Image Credits
Tommy Ga-Ken Wan