Blueprints – An Exhibition by Alistair Peebles at the University of Stirling, June-Sept 2013

Abstract

In this paper the Orkney-based researcher Alistair Peebles introduces his exhibition, Blueprints, which opened on 7 June 2013 in the University of Stirling's Centre for Environmental History and Policy, to complement the conference ‘Landscapes of Conflict’ (). He describes its origins and relationship to previous work of his in poetry, photography, and book-making, particularly concerning landscapes of the islands – in their contemporary uses and in the persistence of possibilities, visual and cultural. A reading of these matters in the contrasting context of the graffiti and associated dynamics of erasure in marginal urban areas provides an opportunity for speculative reflection on ingenuity, risk-taking and ownership.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments for inspiration and advice are made to the individuals named above – Alec Finlay, Libby Houston, and Amy Todman – and to others with whom these ideas have been discussed, in particular my wife Carol Dunbar. I wish to thank the copyright holders whose works I have quoted, and also to acknowledge the integrity of the work by those graffiti artists whose drawings I have used as sources for a number of the prints. I am grateful to Erasure for permission to use album titles of theirs for two of the prints. In preparing work for the exhibition my thanks are due to Alfons Bytautas of the Printmaking Department, Northumbria University and to Morag Tweedie, and the Art and Design Department, Orkney College, UHI. I am grateful for the support of my PhD supervisors at Northumbria University, Prof Craig Richardson and Prof. Ysanne Holt, and Prof Andrew Patrizio of the University of Edinburgh; and finally my thanks are due to Northumbria University for financial assistance with production and framing.