Landscape as conceptual art: retrieving values in John Latham's conceptualisation of 'Five Sisters' (1976) as monumental process sculptures

Project outline

Mid-Lothian shale bings such as "Five Sisters" have contributed hugely to the recent formation of new landscape features in the Scottish landscape and provide an example by which further sites of new energy production (oil fields, coal mines etc) may be exploited once their industrial value has become moribund and redundant. Residents and visitors to West Lothian are greatly aware of these industrial monuments and their overpowering effect on the landscape. Their sheer size is more difficult to convey to someone who has never seen them. When production ceased in 1962 there were 27 bings containing over 200 million tons of shale.

The adjoining derelict shale bings "Five Sisters" speak of landscape histories with which Scotland is not normally associated. Nevertheless they present a typification of the Scottish landscape as a place uneasily accessed, yet oddly beautiful in its increasingly industrialised horizons. The dramatic brick-coloured precipices of the shale are now mostly covered in wild flowers and grasses inhabited by a variety of birds such as kestrels. Before the project, the "Five Sisters" as described by Latham's feasibility study (Tate Britain, 1976) were not sufficiently recognised in either civic or creative institutions, despite growing evidence of a wider constituency of artists working at or with shale bing imagery, and some governmental investment in understanding the 'value' and cultural or geographical typologies the bings represent.

The proposed research's potential application and benefit was a reidentification of "Five Sisters" as a site of art, reaffirmed in its recognition by civic and governmental authority as a place of 'natural' wonder into which other artwork may come into being.

Achievements

The central output is the validation of John Latham's original proposal and its recognition by the Scottish Development Agency (later Scottish Office) that the derelict shale bings known as ‘Five Sisters', and part of the shale bing complex that Latham termed ‘Niddry' Woman, are artworks of the highest quality, comparable to the greatest land artworks of the 1960s-1980s. The sites will now be preserved through their status as Scheduled Ancient Monuments.

As part of the 'Dialogues: Britain in conversation with post-war Europe' programme, Craig Richardson was invited to spend a week at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where he gave a seminar on "John Latham’s conceptualisation of Five Sisters as ’monumental process sculptures’ (1976)".

Ongoing influence

As well as constituting a major driving force in the understanding and theorisation of Latham's further artworks, the validation of the 'bings' continues to elicit sensitive and varied responses to the site from a number of artists, particularly through photography.

Material and data collected as part of the project has been deposited at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Archives. This will allow further scholarly access.