The City as a Living Artwork

I’m Janice Kirkpatrick. I work as a multidisciplinary designer with Graven Images who are based in Glasgow.

I graduated from Glasgow School of Art from the Department of Graphic Design after studying film, film animation and video. I then went on to do a theoretical MA in Design where I produced objects and furniture.

I now practice for the larger part of my time as a graphic designer but also design and develop domestic products. I teach a few hours a week in the Product Design department in the School of Art.

I was involved in writing Glasgow’s outline bid for Year of Architecture and Design 1999, for which we chose the title, “Glasgow—The City as a Living Artwork”.

This title was selected because we felt it best communicated that Art, if we must call it that, is in everything around us if we can only see it. We also wanted to express our belief that Art is not something dead, or apart from our everyday life, hidden away in galleries, but is an integral and important part of living.

Notions of what Art is change with our changing culture and constantly require recalibration and re-evaluation.

The title was necessary in order to give the Arts Council of Great Britain a clue to what we seek to achieve in Glasow. To those of us who wrote the bid the title was of value only as a tactical marker, what really mattered was the structure of our outline document which has a broad strategic base aimed at promoting the appreciation of design and architecture in the broadest sense through education, example, innovation, participation and communication.

I personally believe that the terms Art, Architecture and Design are inaccurate and even anachronistic and elitist. What artists, architects and designers do is essentially the same. We all share a well documented creative process through which we control the evolution of ideas to a greater or lesser extent. This process is the same irrespective of whether you produce books or buildings or oil paintings. The things that separate us into factions are technical specialisms and snobbery. There’s nothing to stop a painter from designing a hair dryer as long as that painter takes time to access the technical knowledge she or he needs.

All designers, artists and architects underpin and inform their intuition with analytical methodologies, a bit of sociology, a bit of psychology, a bit of colour theory and so on. Sometimes artists use more intuition and a little less analytical method, sometimes not. What is more important is what binds us all together, the creative process and the sensorial language we communicate with. Design, architecture and art are sensorial, utilising all of the senses, not only the visual. I believe we all communicate through manipulating the elements of culture which I believe to be symbols, language, myths, rituals and values.

I believe we would all do the public and our respective professions a great favour by talking more plainly about what it is we do, to each other and the public.

I believe Glasgow’s bid for City of Architecture and Design promises to be a good one because it tries to bring together all the apparently separate factions within architecture, design and art, helping all of us to understand and communicate more eloquently with one another and the public around us in the belief that everyone has a responsibility in the shaping of the future.

I hope that by communicating with each other and inviting the public to participate people will better understand, value and contribute to the world we’re creating around us.

And if that sounds idealistic then I make no apology.