DAY OF ACCESS

Alec Finlay

Monday 4 - Thursday 7 November, 10:00am - 4:00pm

Various Locations Across Dundee

NEoN is bringing the Travelling Gallery to town, Day of Access exhibition will pop up in various locations across the city.

Travelling Gallery is delighted to be working with Alec Finlay to support Day of Access, a powerful campaign which encourages estates to open their land to allow access for people affected by disability. By using hill tracks and four-wheel drives, people who have never been able to immerse themselves in wild nature are driven into the heart of Scotland’s beautiful wild landscape.

The Day of Access campaign passionately believes that everyone should have the opportunity to experience wild nature. Travelling Gallery will act as the campaign bus touring Day of Access across Scotland; presenting information and artworks and allowing a space for discussions. Documentation from the pilot Day of Access, including work by young photographer Sam McDiarmid, will be exhibited in an art installation created by Finlay.

The themes of disability, access and ecological remediation are explored in Finlay’s poems and artwork. Pages from books exploring illness, pain, walking and healing, including A View from the Front Line by Maggie Keswick Jencks, are used as paper for thoughtful drawings and commanding words “THERE CAN NEVER BE AN EXCESS OF ACCESS”.

Alongside his own work, Alec has invited other artists and poets to exhibit including Hannah Devereaux, Alison Lloyd, Ken Cockburn and Mhairi Law; each bringing their own creativity and experience to the project. The work is collaboratively displayed like a scrapbook or diary pinned on a garden trellis, alongside other domestic apparatus and soft furnishings, such as blankets, a clothes horse, and hankies.

About the Artist:

Alec Finlay (Scotland, 1966) is an internationally-recognised artist and poet whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. Much of Finlay’s work considers how we as a culture, or cultures, relate to landscape and ecology. Through permanent and temporary interventions, integrative web-based projects, and publications, Finlay weaves together generous experiential works, often collaborative, sometimes mapped directly onto the landscape, embedded socially or accessed online. Recently Finlay’s work has focussed on place-awareness and ecopoetics.

Tour dates in Dundee:

Monday 4 November, 10:00am-4:00pm

Boomerang Community Centre, 10 Kemback St, Dundee DD4 6ET

Tuesday 5 November, 10:00am-4:00pm Morrisons, 1 Afton Way, Dundee, DD4 8BR

Wednesday 6 November, 10:00 am-4:00 pm, please note the gallery will be closed to the public on this day.

Baldragon Academy, 69 Harestane Rd, Dundee DD3 0LF

Thursday 7 November, 11:00am-9:00pm

Wellgate Centre Main Entrance on Panmure Street

Photography Kathryn Rattray