Our initial conversations about theme were equally informed by two considerations: the works in the Art Collection, and the unique characteristics of both the Collection and the Travelling Gallery.
During our first visit to the Travelling Gallery, driver and guide Andy Menzies showed us some archival images of the bus. He said the Gallery’s most popular social media posts are those showing where the bus is on its travels.
Thinking about Andy’s comments and the bus as travelling gallery, during our next group meeting I proposed a potential focus on landscape art—I was interested in the curatorial dynamic of having static images of Scottish landscapes travel through contemporary Scotland in a mobile gallery. We quickly realized, however, that restricting ourselves to landscapes would not do justice to the Art Collection, and would potentially limit our exhibition overall.
To revise this idea, we returned to our project brief, which centres the collaborative relationship between the two partner institutions and asks us “to test the potential of this partnership.” With this in mind, we outlined several intriguing parallels between the two institutions:
- The Art Collection does not have an exhibition space; the Travelling Gallery is an exhibition space, but does not have a fixed or permanent home.
- The majority of the Art Collection is inaccessible to public view; the Travelling Gallery aims to make art broadly accessible.
- Neither the Art Collection or the Travelling Gallery are usual spaces in which to encounter art.
We realized that we kept circling back to the concept of place. Thinking about art about place allowed for a greater diversity of the Collection to be shown than just landscapes, as well as encouraging a meta-reflection on the sites in which these works are stored, displayed, and viewed.
For our project pitch, I summarized these concepts in a mock-up promotional postcard.
Our theme and description remained mostly unchanged from this point, although we did continue to tailor our concept to the partner institutions as we worked more with them. Our broad focus on art collections in general, for example, gradually became more rooted in the specificities of the University Art Collection. For the final exhibition description, which was used on our public promotional material, I edited our guiding questions slightly to reflect this increasingly “behind the scenes” focus.
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