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I have finally completed the drawing of the Concierge office at Red Road Court, and have duly moved on, with very little further ado, to the next drawing on the list! I will follow this up with a few posts talking through the drawing and some of the processes behind it – for now, feel free to take a look.
I write from up on my space at red road – a lovely day, though the wind’s up a bit.
Progress is steady but in worried it’s still too slow – the photo shows where I am with the drawing at the moment…
I have about an hour before I should be heading off to the next meeting – in part, to avoid the crowds expected for the Pope! I just don’t seem to be working fast enough – this is just an enormous task!
Work continues on the Red Road dialectograms, with a greater sense of purpose now an actual deadline – the end of November – has been put on a whole series of drawings that must be ready for the publication of Alison Irvine’s novel. It feels like I have been dithering for ages, and now have suddenly started to cram for the big exam.
In the last few weeks I have been back with the Concierges at Red Road Court, to do a more thorough tour of the station and to collect more stories. I got great material and I think the drawing is really clear in my head now. I also went on a walking tour with Alison and ex-residents Bob, Marie and Finley round the scheme, where they showed us some interesting spots that are classic ‘dialectogram’ locations – outwardly meaningless, perhaps even unimpressive, but deeply significant to their lives, an integral part of their personal history. This included the railway line, where the Red Road kids used to assemble to hurl abuse (and often other things) at the kids from the neighbouring screen. The train track was the crucial borderline between the two, and being seen to defend it – or succeed in invading… There were some very striking – and even alarming – stories told in the hour or so we wandered. That the local kids used asbestos from the exposed bits of wall in the flats as chalk to mark out tennis courts, football pitches or peever grids, was actually one of the least hair-raising revelations. Bob’s family were one of the first families into the scheme (he was born there in 1968) and one of the last to come out. He and his parents have agreed to work with me to reconstruct their old flat. More on this in subsequent posts.
Marie, Finley and Bob.
The image below shows the view from my space in the community flat at 10 Red Road Court.
Iseult Timmermans of Streetlevel Photoworks, who runs the facility have kindly let me have a room to work in for the next few weeks, and I plan to be in the place every Thursday for the next while. The amazing view aside, its great to be able to actually work in one of the flats, not least because of the opportunity to check details, such as the grab-rail on the balconies, which I really struggled with on previous drawings. I was able to get inside my own head and concentrate for a good while. And then Muhammad came in – he is 8 (if I remember rightly), was mad about football and didn’t seem too impressed by my slow progress or my style of drawing. He was also pretty disgusted at my very poor grasp of international football teams, and at my passing ability. Excuses about having boots on, and not trainers really didn’t seem to wash with him at all.
Still, nice to get some feedback – I hope that the flat will be a place where people can drop in to see what I am doing and, if they feel so moved, share information and stories that might help with drawings. I plan to draw an overall groundplan of the scheme that locates people within the complex, so this would be ideal for assisting with that part of the drawing.
And so, I get down to it – I have actually started one of the final drawings, and I must admit, I was almost too nervous to put ink on the board. The 80s style photo-montage below shows what I started from in my own dear garret, and how far I’d advanced it while working up at the flats on Thursday. Still a lot to do…
I post this – the first dialectogram from Red Road – with a sense of genuine relief. I feel like I have been gnawing at the edges of the project for weeks, but now I’ve been able to take some roughs and realise just a portion of what will be the drawing for the Concierge’s station at 10 Red Road Court.
This is somewhere between an initial sketch and the final drawing – a rehearsal, if you like, concentrating on just one part of the whole concierge station. This drawing shows the reception and CCTV scanning area of the station as it was just before Christmas. The reception is where the duty concierges answer public queries through the counter, and keep an eye on the CCTV screens. Here are some pictures I took during the visit.
The popular notion of jobsworth voyeurs in uniform robotically scrutinising every aspect of what a citizen says and does is something of a received wisdom, but Jacky and Grant (misrepresented as ‘Graham’ on the diagram) gave no such impression; they glanced at the screens here and there during the interview but clearly maintained a sense of discretion and tact in what they did. The station had the relaxed, easy feel of a mail-room or workshop; tomato soup was cooking on the stove in the kitchen and copies of The Daily Record were yellowing in an in-tray. It felt cosy, and human. The concierges I met that day were impressive in their knowledge, tact and understanding of their job, and the very diverse group of people they serve. They knew every inch of Red Road and could speak at length about the buildings, what they had been used for, and the many tenants who had passed through. Both Grant and Jacky had worked there for about 20 years and could recall many of its past tenants by name – and even knew where many of them had subsequently gone since. Not very far, as it turned out; many old tenants had shifted to the new GHA flats and houses across the road, out of a desire to stay in the area their families had lived in before Red Road was built; the concierges, and many of these tenants are North Glasgow people who clearly retain a strong sense of place and belonging.
This set me wondering; would it be possible to draw where, and when a selection of past tenants had gone since they left Red Road – and perhaps where they or their ancestors had been before?
An interesting idea, but there is still the small matter of actually drawing spaces such as the concierge station, which proved to be a rather difficult task. Missing from the above image is a good chunk of the station itself; no waiting room, side offices, locker room, storage areas showers, toilets or corridor is found in this representation of flat 1/04. I had attempted to do full drawing of the flats but soon found myself running into difficulties. I’d taken loads of photos, but when I got back home, I found it very hard to piece them together into a coherent structure; rooms were in the wrong places and the scale was shot to hell. When I can renegotiate access to this and other flats, a small camcorder will be essential, so I can join all the different points together in my head.
I had looked at the plans drawn by Bunton architects in 1962, which can be found in the Mitchell Library, and attempted to use my sketches from here as the basis of a floorplan. However, it was evident from the very beginning, that matching up the original drawings to the present would be difficult, given that renovations and even the process of making the plans (excuse the pun) concrete would change the layout. The ‘orientation’ capsule in the right of the image was taken from one such drawing from Bunton’s original plans, but I think that I would like in future drawings, to work from the blocks as they actually are, as they have no doubt changed even more since then.
What I wanted to do with this drawing was try out some techniques and ways of presenting information, narratives and ideas. I’ve tried using some comic strip elements and cutaways to open up the view of the station and use, as much as possible, visual cues to explain what is here and why. I think some of them work, and some of them NEED work, but I would be interested to hear any comments or ideas on progress so far.
A true dialectogram should always list its mistakes and I had no space on the drawing proper, so shall catalogue my errors here! I am not at all happy that I got the names of two of the concierges mixed up, and I think the CCTV cutaways are pretty dull and awkward looking. I also need to work on drawing people from a bird’s eye view. My first instinct was to be quite abstract and ‘symbolic’ as is evident with Jacky, but by the time I was drawing Grant, I was dissatisfied and trying for a more organic approach. None of the three figures look entirely right at the moment, and look out of scale to me. I know that nothing on the balcony is entirely in the right place either, and referring to pictures after the fact showed a whole raft of mistakes around the counter area – the clipboard with tenant’s details was placed INSIDE the reception, not outside as my drawing has it. Also, none of the men ever smoked inside the office, staying outside to do so, which is why I have noted it on the comic strip to the left – I would not want anyone to get in trouble as a result of a doodle! More important though are the questions and ‘to-do’s’ I am left with. Getting bird’s eye right is one important task for the next drawing, but there is still so much to find out; what exactly are all the keys for? What do the consoles do? What is shown on the CCTV? What other stories do the concierges have to tell (and what is on and off the record)? Why are there Beano stickers stuck to each of the lockers (not shown in the drawing)? And should I attempt to do a ‘key’ for everything you might find in one of these interiors? How long will that take? The answers will, I hope, be forthcoming…
The tragic deaths of three Russian nationals (reported as Kosovan by the Guardian, which does however, get some other details about the schedule for demolishing Red Road entirely wrong) at the Red Road Flats stunned Glasgow and made international headlines. As far as we know, the Serykh family, refugees who had arrived here from Canada, met the news they were to be deported by tying themselves together and throwing themselves off the veranda of their tower block. They were found at the bottom of the block early in the morning.
I had held back from commenting on the incident straightaway, for the sake of general decency, and because the exact picture was so unclear. But a blog documenting so-called socially engaged art cannot ignore what such incidents suggest to us.
Questions remain about the official narrative that explains the incident - a suicide pact in which all three people can be induced to jump simultaneously seems implausible, and going round the rumour mill are suggestions it may have been a murder. But I am also wary that these other counter-narratives – the involvement of the Russian mafia, or Kosovan gangsters (true or otherwise) play into ethnic stereotypes that distract from other, much more important questions over the predicament of asylum seekers in Glasgow.
Whatever the particulars of the Serykh case itself, the wider questions about how people who find themselves in situations similar to the Serykhs are treated remain, and have been covered fairly well in the local press. I certainly agree with the calls for a full inquiry.
