Creative Scotland Crowdmatch has provided £15 of match funding
It's a Sign!
Newport-on-Tay, Fife, United Kingdom
All or nothing
This project needs 100% of its target
Aim
I will make an exhibition and publication about the found, defaced, debased, hilarious and incomprehensible floods of signage in our lives.
Signs are everywhere. So are our responses to them- sometimes scathing, sometimes crazy, often a real marker of the time they were made. Sometimes they can change how we feel about a place, expanding our frame of mind.
For example- how would you feel on a sentimental journey to the place you were named after, and where your parents married, if this was the first thing you saw? 'Taking Drugs Seriously' is the sign which greeted me on arrival at Gairloch in Wester Ross.
A bit further up the road in Assynt, here's what I found:
I've been photographing signs and their places all my working life- now I'm making space for them as a subject in their own right. Some of the great photographers- Walker Evans, Joel Sternfeld, Lisa Barnard- have used the pleasures and strangeness of signs as a way to see who we are and how we live.
Of course, some signs simply defy explanation!
I've been invited to exhibit a series of photographs from this long-term theme in my work. From November 14th this year, you're welcome at the Wyllieum in Greenock to see the results.
For this to happen, I'm asking for your help to fund exhibition quality printing and a catalogue. This project has been selected for a Creative Scotland Matchfunder award- so every pledge will be financially matched from Creative Scotland's Lottery Funding Scheme.
The publication will feature writings by writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings.
Ken and I have worked together before- most memorably when we shot a conversational sequence for my film 'Yellowcake" on the capped core of the DIDO nuclear reactor in UKAEA Harwell...
The catalogue will be designed by renowned book artist Killian Dunne.
Killian has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has worked as a Printmaker, Illustrator and designer in Vancouver, Dublin and Berlin. He's exhibited internationally from Quito to Chicago to Berlin.
The third element is exhibition printing by acclaimed printer Lachlan Young. Anyone who has sourced high quality print photo printing in Scotland knows that Lachlan's work and consistency is outstanding.
This project is for anyone who loves photography and the strangeness of the everyday, and what happens when people answer back!
Funding method
All or nothing – this project will only receive pledges if it reaches its target of £5,802 by 14th August 2026 at 2:27pm