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. Al
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.