Last night, at Abbeyview Community Centre, Dunfermline, artist Nicola Atkinson Does Fly, Abbeyview Artist, chanelled the spirit of ballerina Moira Shearer, tapping out a rhythm her feet to accompany viola-player Aby Vulliamy, performing her score based on Shearer’s finest hour, playing Vicky in the Powell & Pressburger masterpiece, The Red Shoes. The evening also saw attendees biting into oranges, and a slideshow by ‘cultural broker’ Ben Spencer, who presented his ideas of What Is Beautiful?, the title of this installment of an ongoing series of public art gatherings dubbed Clock People.
Not, you might think, typical entertainments on a rainy Thursday in Fife, but almost run-of-the-mill for the residents of Abbeyview, who, since last March, have been working with Nicola Atkinson Does Fly (a nom de guerre Atkinson adopted after making a video about a fly, a creature chosen because it is ‘irritating and essential’) and a brace of invited artists.
‘I almost see it as like working in a band of musicians,’ Atkinson says, explaining her collaborations with artists and community alike, ‘We all have our instruments - our artistic forms - and were working together as a collective, but still distinct.’
It’s this sort of approach that marks Nicola Atkinson Does Fly out as a sensitive, engaged practitioner of public art, a mode of working that all too often sees an artist descending on a community with a set project in mind.
‘My approach is always very gentle,’ she agrees, ‘There might be a lot of work going on, but I’m not interested in just parachuting in. For a piece called dwellings, I had the idea of making little cardboard houses, based on the houses that are going to be knocked down in Abbeyview. I presented them to the school so the students could put them together, and maybe sign them. But they did everything you could imagine with them, and I ended up with hundreds of different crazy houses. That was interesting: I’d presented them with something that was complete to me, this really beautiful aesthetic piece, and they really matched that. Another example would be [Belle & Sebastian guitarist] Stevie Jackson’s songs - he wrote two inspired by Abbeyview - and the school music department said, “Oh, we can do this song”, so they took it away, worked on it, and presented it back to him’
Such easy interactions are matched by the use of happy coincidences and a free-wheeling approach to fresh ideas, tactics which Nicola Atkinson Does Fly has developed under the banner of Random And Dynamic Art Risks, or RADAR. ‘The RADAR project is about doing something slightly mad, about taking risks’, she says, ‘When you’re doing public art, there’s an unpredictable aspect, and that’s exciting. This is going to sound terrible, but you really get into a zone, and begin to have an intuitive trust in what you’re doing.’
That intuition binds the wide array of events at Abbeyview. Clock People earned its title when a clock was suggested as a useful piece of public art, and Atkinson joked that residents should just ask other people for the time. That simple concept - of people as the focus of public art - now informs the regular gatherings, which seek to define the future of public art in the area by discussing allied ideas, from last night’s meditation on beauty, to November’s edition, The Importance of Time. Nicola Atkinson Does Fly’s performance in the guise of Shearer grew in a similarly organic fashion. ‘I was researching Moira Shearer for another piece,’ Atkinson says, ‘I knew that she was born in Dunfermline, but suddenly saw that the What Is Beautiful? event was planned for her birthday. So I had to do something involving her. Those sort of serendipitous things just seem to happen.’
And they keep happening, spreading Abbeyview art around the world: a project that saw Atkinson drawing the stock of a local hardware store, selling her efforts for the price of the goods drawn, was mirrored in New York by artist Sophia Pankenier, and Stevie Jackson performed his Abbeyview songs earlier this month at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. ‘Things can reside here and start here,’ Atkinson says, ‘but I the work has to have a life outwith the place - I like the idea of it being a worldwide thing, but an intimate worldwide thing.’
Abbeyview is making a quiet mark on the wider art world, then, and looks set to continue to do so, with Nicola Atkinson Does Fly’s light hand on the tiller, generating oblique strategies and working towards, ultimately, a public sculpture in the area. Before the Abbeyview Artist enterprise draws to a close in March, though, there is much to be done. Artist Luke Fowler is preparing a film for a Clock People event titled Permanent vs. Temporary, a Cabinet of Curiosities is touring the country, and, it seems safe to say, a public art scene in Abbeyview will remain in rude health, long after Nicola Atkinson Does Fly flies on to her next project.
This review was first published in The Herald on January 18th, 2008.