Rose Tinted Green Bottles: Memorialising Govan's Wine Alley
A temporary installation marking the transformation of Govan's notorious Wine Alley.
The project
2005-2008
Commissioned by: Roots in the Community
Lead artist: Matt Baker
The brief:
To develop a participatory arts project to engage residents creatively in issues surrounding the development area
The process and solution:
I recognised the fondness that many local people had for the area, desolate though it was. The small space had been given many names and reinventions, though the spirit of the Wine Alley endured throughout.
Through dialogue with local people, face to face in community sites and on line in the early days of digital communications, I captured the memories and anecdotes of dozens of people who had lived on Kintra Street and felt some attachment with the space; from a Carnaby Street fashion worker, to a New Zealand emigrant.
Every memory became a wine bottle label, lining Kintra Street for one day. The installation intended to make memories, an ethereal concept, visible and tangible. This was out of respect for the community whose identity was embroiled in this space, and for the awareness of the developers about to build a new layer of history on the land.
The result:
Members of the Govan community engaged with the artists, shared more of their own memories and discovered others'.
Lead Artist Matt Baker and supporting artist Colin Begg developed the concept into permanent artworks, taking 89 of the memories and creating an icon to represent each one. These were made into signets for each house on the new development, giving every new home a connection to its ancestral past.
"The 89 signets represent a fragment of the story of Kintra Street up to this moment in time. Working on this project, we have felt that in some small way we have been guarding the spirit of this place during its time of change." Matt Baker and Colin Begg