Output details

"Walter, do you remember? A Search for a House" - a body of work including photographs, a model, paintings and a film that took place within two linked exhibitions

The output, supported by a Quality Arts Production grant from Creative Scotland (£19,742) and Borders Regional Council (£500), constitutes a new body of work by Cranston within linked exhibitions: ‘Between the late and early’, Royal Scottish Academy (May-June, 2013) and an expanded solo show at Hawick Museum, Roxburghshire (August –October, 2013).

Underpinning research explored issues of loss, memory and imagination representing spaces and stories relating to Wilton Lodge Stables, a house once situated behind Hawick Museum, and in which the artist’s father lived as a child. Hawick Museum resonated as a context through its physical and emotional proximity with the exhibition’s specific content. Over the last 15 years Cranston accumulated personal and archival material: visual, textual and oral, including a painting of the house (1960) by the artist’s uncle, Walter, painted from memory ten years after the house was demolished. Using this house as a recurring leitmotif, the aim was to examine how the dynamics and stories surrounding particular buildings engender a sense of the uncanny and in so doing, construct an open form of narrative. The exhibition created the possibility of (re)constructing and (re)imagining specific people, events and scenarios through a new space afforded by the artwork between perceived and imagined realities.

The exhibition comprised archival photographs, a commissioned model by Kieran Shellard, fifteen paintings and a short film by Cranston http://vimeo.com/50693256. This film resonates with Garcia Torres’ 'Have you ever seen the snow?', a reflective search for Boetti’s ‘One Hotel’.

Cranston’s work was developed in dialogue with the elderly community in Hawick, principally the artist’s father, who despite his increasing dementia, described the house in detail and his associations with it. It has led to a solo exhibition, http://www.hamishmorrison.com (19th November - 14th December 2013) and as guest panellist, 'There's a Ghost in My House', Tate Britain, 2014.