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Contents

Introduction ....................................................... 3

The New Easterhouse Mosaic ........................ 4-6

The Mosaics of Easterhouse The drawings........ 7-13

The Mosaics of Easterhouse A field guide......... 14-17

The Easterhouse Mosaic Archive.................... 18-20

The New Easterhouse Mosaic Mick Peter......... 21-23

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Introduction

The original Easterhouse mosaic (1983-2004) was a celebrated community artwork and an

important part of East Glasgow's cultural heritage, lost when it was taken down in 2004. In 2010,

Glasgow based artist, Alex Frost was asked, by Platform the arts organisation within The Bridge,

Easterhouse, to consider using this mosaic as a starting point for his first permanent public

artwork. He initiated this project by spending some time researching the Easterhouse Mosaic,

hoping to learn from its example.

The result of this research was ‘The Old & New Easterhouse Mosaic (and everything in between)’,

an ambitious new project that included 'The New Easterhouse Mosaic', a permanent mural outside

The Bridge; a series of wax crayon on paper rubbings from over 60 existing mosaics in the area; a

field guide to these mosaics and an archive dedicated to the old mosaic.

'The New Easterhouse Mosaic' now acts as a sign for The Bridge. It is unashamedly decorative but

it also refers to The Bridge's many post-industrial functions (swimming pool, theatre, dance and

music venue, library, cafe and F.E. college). Within the design of the new mosaic are facial profiles

of people who use the building as well as water-jet cut symbols that refer to SMS communications.

The series of rubbings taken from mosaics found within the area represent a unique and

overlooked heritage while also plotting the social landscape of the area. These mosaic rubbings

were taken in schools, fire stations, police stations, health centres, community centres, a church and

shopping centre.

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The New Easterhouse Mosaic A 25 metre long mosaic mural, made from both polished and natural finished porcelain tiles.

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The Mosaics of Easterhouse The drawings Rubbings taken from a selection of the 60 + community mosaics located within the Easterhouse area.

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The Mosaics of Easterhouse (Ashcraig School), 2012

120 x 170 cm, wax crayon on paper mounted onto linen.

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From mosaics created by the

Family Action in Rogerfield and Easterhouse (F.A.R.E),

Territorial history schools project.

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The Mosaics of Easterhouse (F.A.R.E), 2012

120 x 110 cm, wax crayon on paper mounted onto linen.

The Mosaics of Easterhouse (Sandaig Primary School), 2012

140 x 260 cm, wax crayon on paper mounted onto linen.

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Detail: The Mosaics of Easterhouse (Sunnyside Primary), 2012

140 x 140 cm, wax crayon on paper mounted onto linen.

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The Mosaics of Easterhouse (St Clare's Church), 2012

110 x 140 cm, wax crayon on paper mounted onto linen.

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The Mosaics of Easterhouse A field guide

A catalogue of all the community mosaics located within Easterhouse.

St Clare's Church - 14 x Stations of the cross.

Family Action in Rogerfield and Easterhouse (FARE) - 2 panels and 1 table top.

Cranhill Primary, Easterhouse Police Station, Oakwood Primary,

Easterhouse Fire Station, St Benedict's Primary - 1 x panel each.

Sandaig Primary - 2 x panels.

Lochend Community High School - 12 x panels.

Sandaig Nursery - 1 large panel.

St Maria Goretti Primary - 2 x panels.

Sunnyside Primary 1 x 11 exterior panels.

St Rose of Lima Primary - 2 x panels.

Easterhouse Health Centre - 1 x panel.

Ashcraig School - 4 x panels.

Ruchazie Community Centre - 1 x exterior panel.

Shandwick Square Shopping Centre - 3 x panels.

(all mosaic panels are indoors unless labelled otherwise).

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The Easterhouse Mosaic Archive

Newspaper articles, catalogues and plans relating to the original Easterhouse Mosaic (1983 - 2004).

Photographs of the original Easterhouse Mosaic (1983 - 2004).

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'The Easterhouse Mosaic' brochure, 1983.

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The New Easterhouse Mosaic

Mick Peter

According to Anthony Caro in the Department for the Environment’s handbook Art for Architecture,

an artwork that fails to deal with site and context is ‘plop sculpture’ (1). Plop sculpture appears from

nowhere and the communities that have had it dumped on them are supposed to embrace their

new local landmark. Glasgow has suffered its fair share of plop sculpture and as a post-industrial

city, perhaps, a far greater amount of dismal ‘plopitecture’. One would be hard to pressed however

to find something more apposite to Easterhouse’s lacklustre housing of the eighties than the

original Easterhouse Mosaic. Alan Kane, who had been working with a Youth Opportunities

scheme in the area since 1980, had started to make mosaic panels in a local school. The reaction to

the first completed parts of the wall being positive, the local community, under the auspices of the

Easterhouse Festival Committee, put out a job description for a supervisor on a mosaic. Brian Kelly,

Tommy Lydon, Willie Hamilton and George Massey applied individually but indicated that it was

a job for more than one artist. Sensibly they were all offered the job, with the addition of Allan

Kane (2). Taking three years from inception to completion, the mosaic was inaugurated in June 1984

(3).

The mosaic’s fame spread after it was completed, becoming part of the discourse

surrounding community art practice. Alongside David Harding’s work as Glenrothes ‘town artist’

and the startlingly trailblazing work done by the Craigmillar Festival Committee in Edinburgh,

evoked so effectively in Helen Crummy’s book Let The People Sing (5), it was an exemplar for

commissioning art in an urban context. Harding even recalls it being discussed at Towards A

People’s Art, a conference in Chicago (4). The project was originally intended to be a catalyst for even

wider ranging environmental improvements. That these ambitions were never realised says much

about socially divisive policymaking in Britain in the 1980s. While a great deal of the housing

remains, The Easterhouse mosaic wall has since been ‘decommissioned’, to use the appropriate

euphemism. The remaining fragments currently reside in polystyrene lined trays in a former school

building site now annexed to a local housing association. Those who worked on it probably didn’t

imagine that they would be candidates for admission into an art equivalent of architecture’s

exclusive ‘rubble club’ today.

Working alongside the now quasi-archaeological remains of the original mosaic, Alex Frost

has managed to integrate the deep-rooted histories associated with it without compromising his

own concepts. His activity in making The New Easterhouse Mosaic connects his practice with the

collective ‘architectural memory’ of the area, situating it intellectually and geographically. The

original mosaic included a profile head in the form of a phrenology chart (at a time when the Prime

Minister was a suitable candidate for having her head examined) as well as everything from benefit

cards to Karl Marx in a toga. Profile heads in various pastel shades, derived from photographs of

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people visiting The Bridge (6), constitute the core imagery of Frost’s work. They are emblems of a

community and emblematic of the success of The Bridge in playing a role in its life. At the same

time the identities of the profiles, and perhaps the potential linguistic play on the word ‘profile’, are

examples of the guessing games that Frost likes to spin around his work.

Frost’s use of what now seems the stubbornly unfashionable medium of mosaic, allows for

rhetorical possibilities and a ‘doublement’ both pictorially and textually. His is an image that

announces its ‘constructedness’ by playfully exposing its compositional artifice. The large shattered

tile pieces serve to amplify the activity of mosaic manufacture and its histories rather than simply

suggesting the illusion of dimensionality. Scattered over the heads are jet cut tiles of non-numerical

and non-alphabetical symbols. It connects to the idea of a sign or a billboard, though in this case a

sign whose characters have slipped and scattered. It’s a deliberately destabilising combination of

imagery that connects with what Frost calls the original mosaic’s ‘accidental postmodernism’ (7) but

with a crucial difference, its dialectical interplay between creation and critique is something that

can be part of how ‘public art’ might evolve. The very open-endedness of the possible

interpretations that this engenders can make contact with our time in ways that the original work

might not.

Framing his work further are his borrowings from conservation methods. He has devised a

way to record Easterhouse’s numerous mosaics by taking monochrome rubbings and pooling them

for an exhibition at Platform. Found in widely contrasting locations in the locality, as well as

exhibiting various models of authorship, levels of skill and scale, the paper versions of these works

become part of another one of his engaging guessing games. They create a map of the creative

surface of the area where partly recognisable emblems and texts emerge through the coloured

crayon impressions.

Some of the largest rubbings are from the Stations of the Cross at St Clare’s church, Lochend .

These smalti (8) mosaics were made in collaboration with The Glasgow School of Art, a role that is

mirrored in the commissioning process of Frost’s new work. His job description as commissioned

artist however, is a role he has chosen to consider as part of his response. By playing with what has

become a community art vernacular, Frost’s work manages to quote ‘craft’ processes whilst

preserving the complexity associated with his gallery-based practice. It is a practice defined by an

enquiry in sculptural language and sculpture as language. These stylistic gearshifts and moments

of authorial duplicity generate a pictorial language to look at and look at again. This act of looking

or reading mirrors an analogy in the introduction to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

‘What you are looking at is a series of dried-ink marks on paper. But you have long ago learned to

forget this and look upon them simply as words’ (9). The aspiration for Frost’s mosaic is that its

pictorial language can begin to be unlocked by an act of forgetting. By laying the original mosaic to

rest the new work can be seen as a part of Easterhouse’s narrative and a commentary on the public

art tradition in Scotland. As Brian Kelly says, ‘you make a public art work and its value and success

is measured by how little it belongs to you’ (10).

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1. Petherbridge, D. ed. (1987) Art for Architecture. London: HMSO Publications. p.98

2. Kelly, B. Interviewed by: Brownrigg, J. (9th March 2012)

3. Petherbridge, D. ed. (1987) Art for Architecture. London: HMSO Publications. p.28

4. Harding, D. (1995) Memories and Vagaries: The Development of Social Art Practices in Scotland from the 60s to the

90s [Internet]. Available from < http://www.davidharding.net/?page_id=15 > [Accessed 1st March, 2012]

5. Crummy H. (1992) Let the People Sing. Craigmillar: Craigmillar Communiversity Press.

6. Platform is the arts centre at the heart of the award-winning Bridge complex. The Bridge also comprises

John Wheatley College and Glasgow Life’s swimming pool and library.

7. Frost, A. Interviewed by: Peter, M. (7th March 2012)

8. Humby, R. [Internet]. Available from http://www.thejoyofshards.co.uk/glossary/smalti.shtml [Accessed 5th

April, 2012]

9. Joyce, J. ([1916] 1966) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Heinemann Books. p. xi

10. Kelly, B. Interviewed by: Brownrigg, J. (9th March 2012)

About the Artist

Alex Frost was born in London, he lives and works in Glasgow. He studied at Glasgow School of Art (MFA,

1998) and Staffordshire University (BA, 1995). Recent projects include exhibitions at Gallery of Modern Art,

Glasgow and Trinty Museum, New York. Recent solo shows include 'The Connoisseurs' Dundee

Contemporary Arts; 'Adults' Milton Keynes Gallery; 'BBQ' Artsway and 'Compassion Fatigue' Sorcha Dallas,

Glasgow.

www.alexfrost.com

mail@alexfrost.com

Photo credits

page 4: Alan Dimmick, Ruth Clark.

page 5: Alan Dimmick.

page 6: Ruth Clark, Alan Dimmick.

page 8: Ruth Clark.

pages 9 - 13: Alan Dimmick.

pages 18 -19: Courtesy of Glasgow East Arts Company.

page 20: Evening Time, June 12 1985.

All images courtesy of Alex Frost and Glasgow East Arts Company, 2012.