An exhibition of Kevin Harman’s art is about to open at the end of this month at Ingleby Gallery.
Over this last weekend he set himself the task of transforming a builder’s skip into a container for a site-specific sculpture.
He chose a skip on Dundonald Street, which the builder was using to empty rubble from a top floor flat. It has to be said that the builder was not terrifically impressed that his skip had been transformed in this way. He told us on Monday he was shocked when he saw it that morning. And of course he was proceeding to fill it with more rubble from the flat being renovated – destroying the guerrilla art.
Before the weekend, Ingleby Gallery explained what the artwork was about: “Skip 17 will take place at an (as yet) unnamed location, somewhere on the streets of Edinburgh through the Easter weekend – the latest in a series of guerrilla-style interventions in which Kevin transforms a builder’s skip or dumpster into an impromptu container for a site-specific sculpture rising from the detritus within.”
Kevin Harman recently described the process in a conversation with the writer Irvine Welsh. He said: ““We go in on the weekend, find a skip on a Friday night, and start emptying it all. Cleaning it up, breaking it all down into categories – all the plastics, woods, metals, bricks glass– and then clean the empty skip, wash it with soapy water, and then spend the weekend stacking it all back in, really neatly.
“It takes about 48 hours…at the start you’re a sort of bin raider, and folks treat you as such, but then they start seeing a bit of order, and they come over, and they’ll start having a chat … and then the workmen come back on Monday and they’re like ‘What the fuck is this?’ It’s like a crop circle or something and they can’t touch it because they are kind of frightened, or respectful of the structure.”
| To book a visit to Kevin Harman’s exhibition at the gallery from 28 April onwards, visit this link: Book: Appointment to visit Ingleby gallery >> |
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
