Bar means “in between” or it could be called “no-man’s land.”
Do is like a tower or an island in that no-man’s land.1Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?If not, you will never really change.2
From a deep impulse to find a home, you begin to turn toward your next birth as that home.3
When D. H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 in the south of France, he was memorialised with a pebble mosaic of a phoenix motif, designed by Dominique Matteucci. It uses what became probably the most ubiquitous sculptural technique of Glasgow’s post-war housing schemes, stones pushed into concrete as a way to fill gaps, create features, delineate playgrounds; a form of instant dry-stane dyking or cobbling, echoing the ancient technique of the Roman road. What did this cobbled phoenix signify for the dead man?
D. H. Lawrence emerged from the stour of miners row cottages in Nottinghamshire where his father worked at the coal face. The covers of his first novels were graced with a hand-drawn phoenix, a favoured motif for Lawrence who craved rebirth as a route out of his disgust for the First World War.4 The phoenix has the potential to symbolise emerging liberations, a willingness to surge forward with renewed vitality, cleansed by fire. In terms of civic regeneration, the phoenix also serves as a figurative or symbolic mascot for hegemonic procedures, and I want to talk about these conditions using sculpture as a material body of evidence. For me D. H. Lawrence’s sculptural headstone and his preoccupation with the phoenix as a working-class writer help me to consider the symbolism and infrastructure of regeneration using sculpted material to illuminate that process.
Starting in 2018, I spent the best part of six or seven years researching the scarred biographies of orphaned sculptures in the northeast of Glasgow, Springburn, where I grew up. I was working there as an artist-in-residence and the sculptures fed into an emerging form of community arts practice as research, where sculptures also acted as participants in group work. This fieldwork informed my PhD thesis at Glasgow School of Art (GSA).
Through the residency I had discovered a cohort of sculptural artefacts existing in a solidarity of neglect, shunted around like musical chairs, falling to bits, exiled and vapourised and I realised that pulling them into kinship with humans and their other sculptural comrades would both resuscitate and extend their meaning as singular things. Why do this? Because in relation to each other and as the social objects that emerged out of Springburn as a significant post-industrial zone, they enabled new insight into the built environment of Glasgow North East’s Ward 17. They embodied a colossal unending churn that people had been forced to endure across time. The sculptures’ conditions were evidence of this. I used a method I called resocialisation, where I brought the sculptures back into an energised social consciousness with people, framing them as objects to think and identify with.
Generations of people, to use computer game terminology I learned from my son, were expected to spawn back into post-demolition and regenerated environs, enacting a form of clean slate amnesia among emerging tableaux. I designated the whole of Ward 17 as a Sculpture Park, a mapped and active material field. These sculptures were things with auras, holding profound workers’ histories while becoming completely evicted from their social landscape.
The extremity of this discard was made abundantly clear in two late-Victorian architectural sculptures, Locomotion and Engineering (1902), outstanding neo-classical women carved in sandstone and holding symbols of industry. For over a century they had gazed down on Springburn’s people from alcoves in Springburn’s Public Halls, a gathering space with the words ‘Music Song and Story’ carved above its entrance.
The Halls were repurposed in the 1970s as a sports centre hosting wrestling matches and the tap dancing classes I attended as a child. In 2012 Locomotion and Engineering were removed during the harsh and contested demolition of the building, which had been locked to the public for over 25 years. A local man, Davy Quinn, had intervened on the stone women’s behalf, speaking directly to the demolition crew to prevent damage to the stone sculptures. Days later, Paul Sweeney, now a Glasgow MSP, found them bound in bubble wrap, probably intended for the architectural salvage yard in exchange for a bung. Sweeney negotiated ad-hoc storage with North Glasgow Homes in Possilpark and they sat there for almost a decade until they featured in a Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art Exhibition in 2021, sited at the original Springburn Carnegie Library. The lease on this former library was held by Jobs and Business Glasgow and the vacated building was opened again to the public for the occasion.
Articles on their existence at this time named them The Springburn Maidens, coy and defanged, not the titled custodians of heavy industrial history they actually are. The ‘Maidens’ were lauded but remained in precarity, left behind in the library, itself locked to the public again once the Glasgow International arts festival ended. Former Glasgow Museums conservator Stephanie de Roemer had consistently made the case for the acquisition of these sculptures and their open-access storage at the Glasgow Museums Resource Centre in Nitshill, where a multitude of Glasgow’s precious artefacts reside. Their accession was refused since the sculptures were categorised as architectural salvage and therefore deemed of no significance to the city’s collection. To date there is still no safe haven for Locomotion and Engineering since the building they were left behind in, the Springburn Carnegie Library, is now subject to asset disposal procedures on the part of the council. They have also fallen into the presumed and somewhat casual ownership of North Glasgow Homes, which is deeply problematic in terms of community governance.
Starting then with Locomotion and Engineering, the women I had passed on the street all my life, I made an inventory of the sculptural population of material orphans in Ward 17. I used a method I termed resocialisation and applied it to these sculptures, as well as a granite fountain installed, also from 1902, by the Cowlairs Cooperative Society, and a figurative public realm bronze by Vincent Butler titled Heritage and Hope (1989).
The Victorian sculptures celebrated and dignified labour and the workers’ spirit of cooperative organising. By 1989, amidst the absolute carnage of industrial scale demolitions and re-routed roads, local Springburn people were desperately trying to retain these social histories which were fragmenting in real time. This was the context of support to salvage, embody and memorialise workers’ history through the commissioning of Heritage and Hope via the nascent Springburn Museum, established in 1986. This museum was funded by an Urban Aid programme and curated by Mark O’Neill, who enacted radical new methods of museology to build a collection from scratch in the first community museum of its kind in Europe. The museum played an outstanding role in shoring up some of the area’s fragile social history, using the library as a point of contact, close to where remnants of Springburn’s colossal locomotion workshops were demolished and cleared in the early 1980s.
From the late 1970s onwards Springburn was also subject to one of the most controversial pieces of planning in Scottish road history, when Springburn Road was fully reconfigured to accommodate the new A803 bypass, causing irrevocable damage to the historical layout and subsequent social cohesion of Springburn.5 Then in a process that started in 2008, two major 1960s-era high-rise housing schemes were demolished.
Why was I looking at sculptures? I found such powerful solace in their immortality, especially the late-Victorian objects that had both predated and outlived the behemoths of the Red Road and Sighthill schemes where my family had stayed. The sculptures had endured chaos yet were stoic in their material permanence. In contrast, my immediate family were economic migrants. We moved several times and at one point we were homeless and stayed with my paternal grandparents 19-storeys high in the Sighthill flats. After these high rises were finally eradicated in 2016, I was devastated at their demise.
Writing on demolitions in Boston in the 1960s, Marc Fried identified this grief and the human cost of urban renewal6 as it was expressed through testimony from structured interviews with hundreds of working-class people bearing witness to the destruction of their own neighbourhoods.7 Fifty years later, many people experienced the same grief for the Sighthill housing scheme in Glasgow, demolished over eight years from 2008 to 2016. The demolitions were fiercely contested by tenant groups and activists, including Elaine Ellis, my former classmate at Sighthill primary school. Ten immense and brutal 19-storey concrete buildings, ranged in sequence across space, adjacent to matured and rolling green wasteland with a feral stone circle, significant colonies of bats, some deer. The slow nibbling and traumatic game of decanting which accompanied the demise of these buildings had been a slow-motion deflation, like watching a bouncy castle after the generator is turned off. Sighthill had been scraped from the surface of Glasgow leaving a scorched earth from which something new would arise. In this case, predominantly private housing stock which took advantage of the elevation of The Cuddies greenspace and proximity to the city centre.
Already using the image of the mythological phoenix as a starting point, I began to think through these sculptural orphans and ghosts in relation to future eras of regeneration. If the phoenix is emblematic of life cycles which map onto the ideology of regeneration generally, Glasgow is currently in a new wave. Since £2 billion worth of regeneration schemes were approved in Glasgow in 2020, inhabitants of the city have been living through the slow drip of implementation.8 These projects exist as narratives of rebirth: the transitional phase from failure to success, from blight to abundance, from disease to health, from indolence to prosperity, from dark to light.
In the northeast of the city we have a much-lauded new bridge over the M8, acting as a vital connector, a veritable magic carpet, conveying ‘disconnected’ people across the motorway
For a child in Sighthill, a teenager or a young person, to walk into town in 15 minutes safely and meet their friends – that’s really huge. 9
As someone who grew up in this area, I note the complete obfuscation of a bridge that was already there, the one we used to get to the now-demolished Alan Glen’s Comprehensive School on Cathedral Street and to the city beyond. In the early 1980s, I remember making this trip on a summer night with my sister and my Auntie Norah to go to a new American-style diner on Sauchiehall Street called ‘51st State’ just along from The Third Eye Centre. The town was always within walking distance from Sighthill and a bridge already connected us.
I would assume this prior bridge, an ordinary construction with railings, was born to navigate the M8 motorway after it was completed. The point here being that if you didn’t come from Sighthill and Springburn you would think a community had been greatly served with new infrastructure. Whereas my story is that a community was displaced, rewilded space was acquired for development and the fairytale of the magnificent new magic carpet bridge was in fact a flagship design opportunity that would visually brand the whole Transformational Redevelopment Area (TRA). When I started to understand high-rises, bridges, brownfields and remediation techniques as sculptures and sculptural processes, I began to really think about what material evidence these assemblages provide in terms of social history, spatial management, urbanism, class, aesthetics and public art, all in relation to each other. I also became interested in zoning. There is always a point where regeneration stops and the old place remains. In Sighthill it’s where the old Pinkston Road veers away from the TRA to connect with Keppochhill Road and a favourite sculpture of mine in that area is the Oor Wullie that sits outside McGhee’s factory with his body painted in cakes and pies.
Prior to the myths of the near future of Sighthill and commencing my engagement with Springburn’s sculptures in 2018, I became alert to forms of sculpture located specifically in working-class places around 2016 when I first encountered the Easterhouse Phoenix (Andy Scott, 2001).
This work is a galvanised steel version of the mythical bird realised in sculptor Andy Scott’s signature style. I met it on my way to work as an artist at Easterhouse’s Platform arts centre. Commissioned in 2001 by Blairtummock Residents’ Association it was set to signal optimism at a new wave of public and private spending in Easterhouse and the pride of a community rising from difficult beginnings to a new future.10
The Phoenix was commissioned four years after Scott’s sculpture Heavy Horse (1997), also in galvanised steel, had been installed by the M8 in the Glasgow Business Park at Baillieston Junction, literally across the carriageway from the scheme. The proximity of the horse to the scheme and the sight of it as a spot-welded and professionalised expression of art would have affirmed, to a local tenants’ association looking to commission a sculpture, that Andy Scott was a viable artist to undertake such a job.
There is an incredibly important point to make here around the notion of modelling as a demonstration of procedure, reliability and proof of concept. We model material form but we also model forms of behaviour, decision-making processes, tried and tested ways of doing things. This risk-averse reach for a known quantity is a distinct form of social reproduction and it incapacitates less experienced bodies charged with capital decision making. Public sculpture is possibly one of the most intimidating artforms to implement in terms of risk management and cost so if a tenants’ association, for example, wants to make a decision in that field, it is bound to be supported by external agents including structural engineers, city planning representatives, architects and so on, all potentially preoccupied with conservative material stasis.
This is how a sculptor like Andy Scott comes to proliferate in certain social contexts, the darling of new builds and housing associations throughout Scotland. I say this not to denigrate an artist but to interrogate the processes through which specific forms of sculpture take up working-class space. If Scott just wants to make his work, and people like it, that is fair enough. But it comes to life within tender and procurement systems, regeneration agendas and commissioning procedures which are not necessarily open to sculpture in the expanded field, sculpture as commons, sculpture as social critique, sculpture as a classed expression or sculpture in the hands of ordinary people. These are closed procedures that proliferate despite the more holistic approaches of the Scottish New Town artists’ modern sculptural interventions, like those by Brian Miller or David Harding. Places like Ward 17 in Glasgow are distinct historical neighbourhoods which predate modernity and as such bring a different form of material strata to contend with. Schemes are not New Towns.
If a model is a representation of how something in the real world can be realised, then indeed Scott was selected by local people in Easterhouse to illustrate a community literally rising from the ashes because he was perceived to be competent in this field, with a demonstrated virtuosity that those in the area appreciated.11 Andy Scott is literally the guy at secondary school who was good at drawing, and valued because of that. But for managers, designers, planners, his work is robust, relatively vandal-proof, made with risk-free materials and predictable in its impacts.
The Easterhouse Phoenix sits in, I suppose, the suggestion of a firepit of stones. The last of the flames licks its back. It was a significant sculpture to me, wherein I absorbed the full implications of landmarking regeneration through the paradox of a phoenix that will never self-immolate. Working-class places, communities, neighbourhoods and schemes rise and fall like yoyos in managed decline and ‘transformational’ regeneration across sine waves of time. Regeneration is rationalised through grand narratives of blight and failure, absorbed through the pores of people in stigmatised places and internalised as shame. The Green Lady exists within living memory in working-class schemes, a municipal worker tasked with inspecting the homes of tenants to see if lives were being lived in a suitably hygienic manner. The legacy of this assumed filth is a neurosis and compulsion to clean. Women I work with in the Ferguslie Park housing scheme in Paisley have asserted this, alluding to their Zoflora addictions.
Obsessive cleaning is a form of warding off, holding back decay and decline in acts of purification. It is also what obliterates the residue, obscures the failure, makes good the soiled. So is there a limbo point between cleanliness and filth which is not categorised? The Tibetan concept of the ‘bardo’ defines a profound interval, the pause between one thing ending and another thing beginning, therefore a point of both extreme tension and utter absence. We might commonly understand a mainstream notion of rebirth, of karmic cycles coiling in loops. But the bardo is the condition of being between these conceptual states of dissolution and rebirth, a holding place or a cosmic waiting room. The Roman Catholic doctrine describes this state as purgatory, the point where the soul awaits its reckoning, and hopefully will not be bound over.
I do not understand the bardo as liminal although the concepts seem to share the characteristics of in-betweenness. For me liminal is a word that reeks of melancholy, the over-examined edgeland. It sits for me in a word association of languid and Lenor, the fabric softener. I like the word ‘bardo’ because it sounds like Australian slang and I’ve come to find it useful as a metaphor for the quality of sculptural immortality I’ve been researching. Particularly where unchecked decay has set in.
When I started to meet again the deracinated Victorian-era architectural salvage and chibbed cooperative granite of Springburn’s sculptures, I found solace in the dignity of the symbolic materials that had accompanied my life in the area. Advocating on behalf of their mass and meaning afforded a new form of relation.
My research, then, addressed gaps in knowledge around the value of material sculptural permanence in working-class communities. By demonstrating the deep-time participatory potential of surviving sculptures, specifically when they make a startling re-entry into the working-class space they emerged from, I was challenging distinctions made between permanent and/or monumental sculpture and dematerialised social engagement as fields of practice. Sitting with surviving sculpture brought me deeper into the expanded field where I could equally reclaim demolished high-rise housing as a lost sculptural opportunity. Counter-narrative contradicted the notion of these buildings as failures. The managed decline and neglect of their utilitarian function as housing stock notwithstanding, these were outstanding feats of architectural modernity which stamped a colossal material sequence onto the psyche. Working in the ruins, I began to resocialise the remnants.
The actions I undertook in the resocialisation of the sculptures were as follows:
Repair as Resocialisation: The Cowlairs Cooperative Monument (1902)Reinstatement as Resocialisation: Heritage and Hope (1989)
Replication as Resocialisation: Locomotion and Engineering (1902)
Within my thesis I identified next steps which were to move beyond the classic materiality of bronze, granite and sandstone towards wider material analysis. There is, therefore, a final sculpture of regeneration in Springburn that I want to discuss. Also by Andy Scott, and predating Easterhouse Phoenix by about a decade, it was his very first public realm work after graduating from Glasgow School of Art. Entitled The Bringer (1991), no one in Springburn really twigs that the same guy who made The Kelpies (2013) also made the naked and muscular man blowing an elongated horn to herald another wave of regeneration in the early 1990s. He stands outside the new Springburn Library, relocated from its original Carnegie premises to a smaller space shared with a leisure facility.
Unlike the sandstone, bronze and granite of the other Springburn sculptures, The Bringer is made in ‘cold cast bronze’, which is resin with a proportion of bronze powder. Let’s call it poor man’s bronze. The sculpture began its life as a golden figure but as the material started to fail, it was unceremoniously painted black to camouflage the wear and tear, now also starting to flake. The Bringer is in the bardo. He stands in a space which is not reviewed or subject to care. The only thing that would trigger the council to act on his dilapidated behalf would be an arson attempt by vandals. No one bothers him. Football factions plaster their stickers on his arse. People sit on his brick base to look at their phones and pass the time waiting for someone. There is literally no public seating in Springburn so The Bringer provides an ad hoc bench. A gable end in proximity to him is overrun by an enormous outcrop of ivy, newbuilds have sprung up on his east flank. Nothing will move him unless he is in the way of another Bringer, another force of regenerative change.
All that is solid does indeed melt into air. In my own lifetime I witnessed the complete atomisation of the biggest physical object that held significance for me, the 19-storey block of flats at 16 Fountainwell Place, Sighthill. Where are those particles now? I was transfixed by the remediation data, the profound tonnage of earth that was moved in Sighthill, like it was a form of Ultra Land Art and not just a LAND GRAB.
I happened to find a cohort of sculptures through which I could remain anchored to a sense of place. The bronze Heritage and Hope sculpture I negotiated out of exile was adopted by Network Rail. We plonked it on platform one of Springburn railway station in 2025 where it actually truly resonates as an artefact with a sightline back to its old location. By putting it there though, the sculpture has again highlighted the issues of accessibility at the station, whose platforms can only be reached by long sets of stairs. The amputated limbs of the granite monument to Cowlairs Cooperation were repaired at the end of 2024, but the lack of a bin outside the shopping centre keeps its empty basins attractive to litter. It still fills up with fags and rainwater and empty Greggs coffee cups. All for want of a five-minute fix: move the bin closer to the shoppy! But the Council requires permissions and paperwork and people become disenchanted. Locomotion and Engineering remain locked in the empty Carnegie library, waiting for the carpetbagging NG Homes to pounce on both them and the building. If the resocialisation of these sculptures does not afford resolution, then what is the point?
The point is the social process. People worked with me on all of these resocialisations at ground level to enact change. They were made with small pockets of money on the outskirts of any grand civic vision board. The historical things that were harmed by regeneration processes were made visible again and as such drew attention back to that brutality, whilst demonstrating a hands-on practice of shoring up and stabilising at a citizen scale.
As we see with The Bringer, even the muscular bodies of regeneration will flake and blister. If no one cuts the grass around the Easterhouse Phoenix, it will be engulfed in jungle or smothered with mattresses. It may never burn but its meaning will buckle. It is incumbent on us to accept the human immanence of sculpture and work with its material facts, to be alert to what these material realities can tell us about space and the ways it is sculpted around both them and us.
In Springburn recently, I worked with a stonemason on the repair of a sandstone plinth to host Keys to Our Social Centre (2026), a collective protest bronze I made with local community groups. We discussed his recent repair work on La Pasionaria, the famous 1979 sculpture by Arthur Dooley erected on a Corten steel girder by the Clyde. The iconic sculpture celebrates the British volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. He described the innards of the work, chicken wire and balled-up newspaper, the internal gubbins no one would ever see or even imagine in the first place. This is how sculpture is made, people model material and create maquettes of support, balled-up newspaper makes bulk under chicken wire then is cloaked in fibreglass. It’s not a mystery, we can repair what has been broken and we can imagine our own monuments as a way to occupy our spaces and hold our histories using whatever we have to hand.
Key to this, for me, is an acceptance of the bardo in all its terse discomfort. It’s what I’ve learned in Springburn. Patience.
Notes
- Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, ‘Transcending Madness: The Experience of the Six Bardos, by Chögyam Trungpa’, The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, 12 January 2009, https://www.chronicleproject.com/transcending-madness-the-experience-of-the-six-bardos-by-chogyam-trungpa/. ↩
- Edward D. McDonald, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H.Lawrence (Viking Press, 1936). ↩
- Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, ‘Death, the Bardo, and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism’, Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, n.d., accessed 20 August 2026, https://rubinmuseum.org/death-the-bardo-and-rebirth-in-tibetan-buddhism/. ↩
- Rosemary Reeves Davies, ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Theme of Rebirth’, The D.H. Lawrence Review 14, no. 2 (1981): 127–42. ↩
- ‘Springburn Expressway | Scottish Roads Archive’, Scots Roads Archive, accessed 17 March 2022, https://www.scottishroadsarchive.org/springburn-expressway. ↩
- Marc Fried and the Human Cost of Urban Renewal – The West End Museum, 14 April 2023, https://thewestendmuseum.org/history/era/new-boston/marc-fried-and-the-human-cost-of-urban-renewal/. ↩
- Marc Fried, ‘Grieving for a Lost Home: Psychological Costs of Relocation’, in The Urban Condition (Basic Books Inc., 1963). ↩
- Linda Serck, ‘Urban Regeneration, Defined: Here’s Why It Matters’, University of the Built Environment, 20 January 2025, https://www.ube.ac.uk/whats-happening/articles/urban-regeneration/. ↩
- Gino Spocchia, ‘Remaking Glasgow: How Regeneration Aims to Stitch the City Together’, The Architects’ Journal, 13 July 2023, https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/remaking-glasgow-how-regeneration-aims-to-stitch-the-city-together. ↩
- ‘Easterhouse Phoenix | Art UK’, accessed 26 August 2021, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/easterhouse-phoenix-250448. ↩
- Scientists Say: Model, Science & Society, 4 March 2024, https://www.snexplores.org/article/scientists-say-model-definition-pronunciation. ↩