Derek Michael Besant solicited stories from locals with five questions, including, “Tell me your biggest secret,” “What do you dream about?” and “Do you have any regrets?”Edinburgh Printmakers/Historic Scotland 2015
Edinburgh Printmakers, a visual arts organization moving to a gentrifying neighbourhood in the Scottish capital, is putting its stamp on the place by wrapping a corner of a building with an enormous work of public art – by a Canadian artist.
For his project In Other Words, Alberta's Derek Michael Besant solicited stories from locals with five questions, including, "Tell me your biggest secret," "What do you dream about?" and "Do you have any regrets?" Thirty people responded to the online call-out, and Besant extracted selected passages from the answers to create a collaborative poem that paints a picture of the Fountainbridge neighbourhood and its inhabitants.
"There's an element of the confessional," Besant said. "Some of the stories were so poignant and so revealing and intimate." The artist has created six 3.6-metre-high panels on which extracts in his own handwriting float across out-of-focus selfies of the contributors, unrecognizable in their fuzziness – to be installed outside the building for the Edinburgh Art Festival, just under way.
In the fall, a gallery show inside will feature more of the prints, as Besant, a professor at the Alberta College of Art + Design, settles in for a term as artist-in-residence – a Canadian creating this work for and about a Scottish neighbourhood. "By being the outsider, in one way I have a kind of tabula rasa; I can come into that environment clean," Besant said from his home near Okotoks, south of Calgary. "I am not clouded by being Scottish. … I can hit it fresh."
Marsha Lederman