Documenting Hilltown, Past, Present & Future Presents...
WE REIGN INVISIBLE
In conjunction with Environment Arts Team (Dundee City Council) as part of the Documenting Hilltown project in Dundee. Four main works hang high up around The Little Theatre's walls and further up the Hilltown on Alexander Street exactly opposite Maxwelltown Tower's former location. All works were made with items gathered from the four demolished Maxwelltown Multis. Also featuring background research material in Documenting Hilltown's HQ, 211 Hilltown alongside work from Astrid Leeson.
ABOUT
The Hilltown's contrasting identities of residential contentment and inner city decay reflect in the familiar imagery created in Peter's works: a large group of youths, poised and alert; a silhouetted bunk bed, unusually grand in form; the last tenant to vacate her flat in Wellington Tower, whose name is Wendy; and a Modernist interior of a building, the scale of which is unclear. All include forms of decorative pattern throughout, mostly simplified, but reminiscent of ornament found in architecture, palatial and elaborate in style.
A series of workshops with local schools/community groups (see Community in index for images) informed and inspired the project prior to the artworks being made. Alongside these, a gradual gathering of the contents of evacuated homes, strewn with domestic remnants of their former selves, provided the physicality and materials that the work grew out of as it developed.
The workshops dealt with issues of identity and belonging relative to the vast changes taking place in the area. Out of one theme of 'camouflage', arose striking scenes akin to classical imagery from books such as Peter Pan, Oliver Twist and Lord of the Flies. But the immediate similarities drawn from such literature appeared not to equate to today's society. In 1954, Lord of the Flies unfolded a narrative of events amongst a group of schoolboys that shocked and questioned the innocence of childhood and beyond that, humanity. Today, regular reports of evils aplenty may arrive more expectedly than not, and personas of whole communities become infused by public perceptions weighty with contempt. Recently, Dundee's own history of youth gang culture was revealed in the book Gangs of Dundee by celebrated Dundonian author and poet, Gary Robertson.
The exhibition's title refers to a point in Lord of the Flies when the precarious order of civilisation still remains 'invisible yet strong' before fading into non-existence.
Two months after the demolition explosions were felt, Peter's works hang with emblems of the community that once was and questions what remains, what still reigns of, as Gary Robertson affectionately calls them, "the Hulltoon Multis".
The exhibiton takes place as part of the Documenting Hilltown, Past, Present & Future project. See more at
www.documentinghilltown.com
www.facebook.com/wereigninvisible
CLICK below for more info on each work:
