CREATIVE Scotland launched a strident defence of their decision to put £15,000 into a project that sees artist Ellie Harrison not allowed to leave Glasgow for a year.
The news of the Glasgow Effect “durational performance” caused a social media storm with hundreds of people taking to Harrison’s Facebook page to attack both the artist and the funding body.
Tabloid reports had initially and incorrectly suggested Harrison was coming up from London to live like a poor person for a year in the city on a “poverty safari”.
The project’s title comes from the term given to the average life expectancy in Glasgow, which is seven years lower for men and four years lower for women that the national average, even when poverty has been taken into account.
In a statement Creative Scotland said Harrison’s idea was “articulated in a strong proposal which met all the criteria for Open Project Funding.”
The project, they said, “focused on exploring whether it’s possible for an artist to generate an existence for themselves by living, working and contributing to a single community, as opposed to being constantly on the road because of the need to earn money from commissions from different places that incur costly travel and accommodation costs and high carbon footprint usage.”
The artist herself took to Facebook yesterday afternoon to try and explain more about the project.
Harrison said the mostly negative reaction had been “quite overwhelming”, but at least it would allow her to tick the “public engagement box”.
“Glasgow has been my home for seven-and-a-half years and to suddenly have a response like this to one of my projects has been quite overwhelming. You have given me so much material to digest, it will take the whole year to do so. I hope to follow-up by meeting many of you face-to-face, when all the fuss has died down,” she said.
Harrison continued: “The Glasgow Effect has been devised to operate on many levels at once, and the questions about ‘community’ being raised on/off social media these last few days is certainly one of them.
“As much as I do care sincerely about the environmental issues raised by the project as my previous work should testify, I also want to highlight the absurd mechanisms at play within Higher Education which were its initial impetus.”
The artist then published the full text from her funding application to Creative Scotland in a bid to quash the accusation that this was the “poverty safari” it had been labelled.
Harrison said she had applied to Creative Scotland as part of the probation of her job lecturing at Duncan of Jordanstone college of Art and Design.
After being awarded the grant, she was trying to ‘donate’ the £15,000 to the university “in exchange for paid ‘Research Leave’ in order to undertake the project.”
Harrison’s statement did not win round many of her critics.
Darren Loki McGarvey launched the West End Effect, where he tried to raise £15,000 to allow him to “live in Glasgow’s West End for at least a year at some point in the next decade.” Those donating would be rewarded with signed Waitrose receipts and kale seeds.
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