The questions that I addressed on the Fellowship considered spatial practices as strategies for critiquing approaches towards the built environment that view it as static, impermeable, rational and circumscribed, such as the heritage industry’s quest to preserve buildings at a given moment in time and space, or urban planners’ zoning of contemporary cities. These are approaches that, I would argue, limit the readings and uses of space/place, stifling the potential for the individual, idiosyncratic, imaginative relationships we can have with our environments. These approaches are exclusive, restricting access and ownership, exemplified by heritage sites which present seamless, authoritative versions of the past, from which many histories – especially those of non-dominant classes, races or gender - are absent.

I addressed these questions by creating a series of artworks – or interventions – in two contrasting, but complementary, locations in Glasgow:

The Britannia Panopticon building in the city centre, where the dilapidated remains of a nineteenth century music hall are secreted above a functioning amusement arcade. And Tramway, a contemporary arts venue on Glasgow’s Southside, housed in the city’s former tram works.

The locations were chosen as examples of buildings in flux, whose changing fortunes, functions and appearances demonstrate notions of space/place as fluid and mutable.

Tramway, built in the 1890s, has been an industrial site (as the city’s tram manufacturing works), a popular family destination (as Glasgow’s Museum of Transport) and home for ‘high’ culture, in its guise as a contemporary arts venue.

The semi-derelict Britannia Panopticon music hall lay buried for decades in a city-centre warehouse but was once at the heart of Glasgow’s working class entertainment district.

Both buildings wear the evidence of their histories in their fabric: the layers of the Britannia Panopticon’s flaking paintwork; the steel tramlines in Tramway’s floor.

Both are sites of multiple, competing narratives, bound up in the social and cultural fabric of Glasgow. They are sites in which the varied interests and investments of those who use and remember them are interwoven, whose histories and potential futures are open to debate, but which are susceptible to drives to formalise, contain or close down their varied functions and meanings.

Over the three years of the project, I spent a considerable amount of time at each location developing interventions – artworks which invited spectators to participate actively in their creation and reception – and holding work-in-progress ‘showings’. Observation and documentation of these showings, together with audience feedback, informed and shaped the interventions as they evolved - reflecting ongoing changes at both locations and in their wider social, cultural and geographical contexts.

Final public showings of the interventions took place 18 - 27 October 2007 at the Britannia Panopticon and 15 February - 2 March 2008 at Tramway.

This website documents the creation and reception of the interventions. It records responses to them from a wide range of spectator-participants and includes reflective writing on the research project. My hope is that it captures something of the new and unpredicted reactions to the locations that the interventions engendered, offering fresh insight into the places and spaces that hold our cultural memories - the sites that allow us to juxtapose alternative interpretations of our pasts and presents, and to imagine our futures.

* the title of the project, glimmers in limbo, is (mis)appropriated from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie and refers to the way that we experience memories, especially those linked to space and place, as unresolved memory-images interleaving past and present.