Background

Inverness Old Town Art is a bold new initiative, supported by the Scottish Arts Council to make art and artists central to the emerging new identity of the Old Town area of the Highland Capital.

Inverness Old Town is the traditional city centre, bordering on the River Ness and comprising some of the oldest streets of the Highland Capital. The arrival of ‘out of town’ retail parks and the Eastgate Mall saw the Old Town district fall into decline until, following the granting of City status to Inverness, funding was secured for a bold package of environmental improvements under the direction of the Inverness City Partnership (ICP) and its partnership officer Marie Mackintosh.

ICP appointed Evi Westmore as their Public Art Coordinator and it was Evi that brought Matt Baker to Inverness as the Lead Artist for the Old Town project in January 2006, with support from the Scottish Arts Council (SAC). The initial brief for the Lead Artist was to sit on the overall design team and advise on the involvement of artists and artworks within the improvements planned for the Old Town, but following a research period Baker saw the potential for using this project as a catalyst for the diverse and disparate cultural community of the Highland region to gain greater visibility within their region and play a significant role in the emerging identity of Inverness as an important regional capital city.

The consent and involvement of local people was fundamental to the vision. This was courted initially with the highly original event Imagining the Centre that took place over 12 hours on Church Street in September 2006, and invited local people to join artists & performers in a conversation about what Inverness was, and could be in the future. Memorably, this event involved 14 local artists (including a musician, a historian, a playwright, graffiti artists, sculptors and new media artists) who used giant projections, audio art and performance to bring to the surface the cultural importance of the Old Town for the city. Traffic stopped as roped specialists unfolded a banner down the length of the Ramada Hotel to declare the event had begun.

Imagining the Centre started a new alliance between the city and the Highlands & Islands cultural community and from this foundation grew IOTA. A programme of five permanent and temporary projects are currently in development with close links with local businesses and residents to transform key sites in old town of the city, which is run jointly by Susan Christie (Arts Project Manager) and Matt Baker (Lead Artist).

NEW VIRTUES

The first permanent manifestation of IOTA is the new public space at the top end of Church Street formed by Matt Baker’s strikingly contemporary installation Three Virtues. Baker was struck by the long-standing local memories of the Victorian statues depicting ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ that looked over the town before their removal in the 1950’s and set out on a six month quest, with local people, to find three new virtues suited to Inverness for the 21st century. This culminated in ‘The Philosopher’s Salon’ wherein 25 local intellectuals debated the list of more than 100 suggestions. The selected virtues of ‘Perseverance, Open-Heartedness and Insight’ are now represented in the street by three sloping outcrops of naturally riven Caithness stone which appear to have pushed their way up through the paved surface around them. Each ‘outcrop’ is inscribed with one of the new virtues (in English, Gaelic and Old Norse) and from each is growing a birch tree – the birch being one of the pioneer species of the Caledonian Forest.

IOTA

Following the success of the Three Virtues and Imagining the Centre a proposal was developed for a further five projects that would help the transformation of the Old Town into a key cultural destination for Inverness and the wider Highland region. This was granted the maximum £100,000 ‘art in public places’ award by the Scottish Arts Council in November 2007 and the IOTA project was born.