When Craig Coulthard was growing up in Germany, he liked a kickabout as much as most other small boys. It gave the Edinburgh-based artist a sense of belonging, he reckons, helped him bond and integrate with the German kids. Rather than scrambling about in jumpers-for-goalposts childhood, however, Coulthard’s games took place in a forest, undercover of an all-encompassing blanket of trees that gave the games a more dramatic and mysterious edge. Coulthard revisited his old playground a couple of years ago while on a residency in Dusseldorf, only to find a razed and abandoned site. It was a similar story in Cathkin Park, the former home to the now defunct Third Lanark FC in Glasgow, where Coulthard played as a teenager, and where the overgrown trees lent the environment a moody air. Flying over the Borders en route home from Dusseldorf, Coulthard was similarly struck by the dense impenetrability of the tree-lined landscape below and what might just be at play beneath. All of which goes some way to explaining the thinking behind Forest Pitch, Coulthard’s large-scale spectacle that forms Scotland’s contribution to 2012’s Cultural Olympiad, which offers artistic responses to the Olympic Games themselves. Starting with two football matches taking place over one day on private land on the Buccleuch Estate just outside Selkirk in the Scottish Borders, Forest Pitch will field four teams – two male, two female - made up of players of non-UK origin, but who have been granted Leave To Remain here this century. “Football has always been a big thing to me,” says Coulthard, who is overseeing all aspects of Forest Pitch, from team training sessions to team shirts designed by school-children, “and has been as influential as music and visual art, so I think it’s natural that my work’s going to be about things I’m interested in.” Forest Pitch isn’t the first time Coulthard has looked to football for inspiration. Indeed, popular culture of all forms has been explicit in Coulthard’s work since his time on the MFA course at Edinburgh College of Art prior to co-founding the still active independent artspace The Embassy in Edinburgh. Football strips, flags and t-shirts are paramount, while Coulthard’s band vehicle, Randan Discotheque, released a single, Heather the Weather, in homage to iconic Scots TV weather-girl Heather Reid. As tartan-tinged an anthem as it gets, Heather the Weather’s chucking-out-time sing-along infectiousness is a crossover smash-hit in waiting. While Forest Pitch possesses a similar common touch, the contradictions of such a wilfully inclusive work taking place in a country where the so-called ‘beautiful game’ has been tainted by sectarianism is plain to see. As is too the sport’s capitalist excesses that have recently resulted in Rangers’ financial collapse. As with some of Jeremy Deller’s civic-minded work, Forest Pitch is something of a reclaiming of the original people’s game’s roots. “In Scotland football is dominated by the Old Firm,” Coulthard observes, “but beyond that there are hundreds of thousands of people who go and watch their local teams play at amateur level. I wanted to highlight that football can be a unifying thing rather than a destructive one, and that football doesn’t have to be about power, money and tribalism.” With this in mind, Forest Pitch’s long-term effect will not be apparent for a couple of decades, when trees planted to mark out the shape of a football pitch after the games will at last become visible when the existing plantation that envelopes them is cut down. “It will grow and change into this really odd site,” says Coulthard, “and I hope it becomes something less tangible as well, and that people will try and understand their environment a bit more, and that the people who take part in the games will take something away from the experience that matters.” Forest Pitch, Buccleuch Estate, near Selkirk, July 21st 2012. Ticket enquiries, tickets@forestpitch.org www.forestpitch.org Scottish Art News, Issue 18, July 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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