City Art Centre, Edinburgh until February 19
What do you do when you go home and find it isn’t there anymore? One imagines this was a question photographer Paul Duke might have been forced to square up to while making his prodigal’s return to Muirhouse, the north Edinburgh neighbourhood where he grew up. No Ruined Stoneis his answer.
When Duke revisited in 2014 after several decades away, his old house had been demolished, wiped out by several generations of demolition, regeneration and attempted renewal of an area central to the UK’s botched post Second World War civic experiment in urban living. Despite this, the communities that grew out of it have gradually gained strength through adversity enough to survive and cement their relationship with the neighbourhood.
Both facets are evident in No Ruined Stone, which takes its name from a line in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem, ‘On A Raised Beach’, in which MacDiarmid writes how ‘There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.’ So it goes in the barren landscapes depicted by Duke throughout his untitled black and white images.
Here, neglected fields grow wild while waiting new constructions to accompany those in the distance. Solitary trees stand leafless, like some Beckettian meeting point lost to the breezeblock flats they surround. Shop front shutters remain firmly down. A lamppost leans, bent out of shape like an impression of Pisa. Steel girders form acrucifix embedded in rubble, awaiting resurrection in the stillness.Fences are everywhere, designed to contain things as much as keep them out, the physical manifestation of the social, economic and political barriers that prevail.
Between the gaps of all these wide-open spaces are the people. They are there in the washing hung out on the high-rise balconiesand inside the flats, but mainly they can be found in the series of portraits shown side by side with the landscapes. Most of those depicted look straight at the camera with a quiet dignity as they go about their day after seemingly bumping into Duke like this. It is these wordless exchanges that give the area its oxygen, and its heart and soul.
Much of the eternal work in progress depicted in No Ruined Stonewill have either been bulldozed away or built on again with new layers of bricks and mortar since Duke took his photographs. Throughout this process, the people remain, laying the foundations for change in the places where the flowers still grow through the cracks.
Scottish Art News, February 2022
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