On the cusp: artist, community and intangible heritage

For over ten years, I have worked as a commissioned artist to realise artworks through collaborative processes in a number of Scottish locations. These projects have shared themes of land and heritage, working with individuals and communities who have witnessed significant change. Living memory, before it becomes ‘history,’ has been an important link in these projects. Art commissioners, archivists, curators, funders, as well as those with shared community of interests (from artists to urban thinkers concerned with notions of place) have increasingly recognised the potency of community-based narratives that combine personal and collective memory with locally-based social history. These narratives frequently reverberate to contemporary questions of environment and sustainability. Through two specific projects Travelling the Archive (2015-2016) and Ghosting the Castle (2017), I will discuss How do artists engage with heritage contexts and narratives within the creation of commissioned artworks? Both projects involved working with key arts organisations, archivists, and local history groups in two coastal villages, whose rhythm of life had been dramatically changed by both the building of major road bridges and decline in the fishing industry. How the projects worked with the notion of heritage will be discussed, including the challenges of working with ‘intangible’ forms of heritage that are still detectable in a changed landscape, yet are at the point of disappearing. UNESCO has argued that community-based ‘intangible cultural heritage can only be heritage when it is recognized as such by the communities, groups or individuals that create, maintain and transmit it – without their recognition, nobody else can decide for them that a given expression or practice is their heritage.’ So what then is the role of the artist and the function of artworks within this context? And finally, what are the differing motivations of community, commissioner and commissioned artist?