Last weekend, I received a tour of Glasgow’s Kinning Park Complex via NOW NOW, a 6 member all female arts collective who all graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 2008. Comprised of artists Catrin Jeans, Sarah Messenger, Perri MacKenzie, Ruby Pester, Nadia Rossi and Catherine Weir, they have been functioning as a collective for the past two years and have actively worked on collaborative live art and participatory projects and events across the country, and have been doing so with little support from/expectation of receiving public funding.

Getting more involved with KPC on a voluntary level, NOW NOW’s presence in that space is one of those invisible examples of how abandoned spaces, even if turned over to the arts, still require an endless energy to program and dream about the potential of the space.

Image courtesy of KPC

Set in an old 3 storey red sandstone elementary school on the south side, KPC has apparently been functioning as studios and venues since 1996 after a group of citizens and artists did a lock-in when the Victorian school was scheduled for demolition. Currently operating as a registered Community Interest Company, KPC is a maintained building, which wasn’t really an interesting point until I stepped foot into The Glue Factory on Wednesday night for the Glasgow School of Art 2011 MFA grad show.

As the second year The GSA MFA grads have shown in The Glue Factory down in the Speirs Lock area, and the first time they’ve had the entire show in this space (last year they also had CCA with former years in Tramway), the shift from an arts venue to that of a raw venue has not been kind.

As a space, The Glue Factory is a rat hole. There was an idea to turn it into a multifunctional arts venue, as the building is also located in the same industrial estate which houses new studios for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as part of an art as urban rejuvenation plan that also builds on The Scottish Opera and The National Theatre of Scotland sitting nearby.

As far as I can tell, not much has been done since last year’s MFA graduation show. From the loose leaf paper signage “signaling” the MFA show to the indoor port-a-potties, The Glue Factory can appear gritty in that inspiring way to the romantics who care for the industrial architectural highlights running throughout the complex, but as a viewer, I found the show overall to be quite disingenuous.

The space is demanding, and a show that responded to its demands could potentially be good, but as a venue for studio work chartering two years of ideas and progress wholly unrelated to the factory, the venue was a lame duck, and consequently, the works didn’t fare too well either.

The blame can’t entirely fall on the space as there was a general lack of inspiration running throughout the show. A few works stood out, namely by John Nichols, John Thompson, and Giuseppe Mistretta, but even then, there was nothing that evoked a sense of thorough process and exploration, which last time I checked, was still what a MFA was all about.  One comment shared was that the show “looked like a race” while another repeated description heard throughout the evening was that there were “no new thoughts.”

Documentation (see above) from 2010 looks pretty good, but so far I have only seen images of works in space rather than details of the work proper. There appears to be a lot of large empty spaces both converted and waiting throughout Glasgow, which is always exciting from an arts point of view, but finding that awe-filled balance between the right space, people, and programming remains less visible.