50 APPENDIX B Interview with Peter McCaughey (Wave particle) on Socially Engaged Art Date of Interview: 25/11/2024 Location: Glasgow (face time) Interview with Peter McCaughey, conducted on [Date 25/11/2024], his experiences in socially engaged art explores approach to art as a tool for community empowerment. The conversation delves into McCaughey’s views on the role of art in social change , offering insights . So first of all, I will start with your sort introduction and how did you come into wave particle. And I would also like to know how did the community build and how this project started, and what is your motivation for starting the Wave particle? I'm trying. There we go. K…. Well, wave particles started, it's hard to say exactly, maybe 22 years ago, something like that. And, at the time, I think I would have put it quite simply that I just simply wasn't capable of doing justice to the projectsthat I was being offered, and needed to build a small team around me to, to deliver the work. And I think it's worth saying that, pretty much everybody who works in a kind of public facing way, in architecture or urban planning or community engagement, pretty much everybody does work in teams, and, artists are often exceptional in trying to do all the work on their own. And, so it was interesting to think of the model of a small architect's office where, you could share skills and, you know, approach work from a kind of multiskilled perspective. So that was kinda I think that was really how Wave Particle came about. And I should explain that the name is a fusion of 2 projects that I made. 1, Wave, was a very ambitious, large scale outdoor multiscreen projection. In the moment of, or very shortly after the demolition of a tar block in the Gorbals in Glasgow. So the idea was that in relation to an old mill in the heart of that, area, there would be a 10 video screen synchronized projection that kind of reflected the changes in the area in the immediate aftermath of this, demolition of a tar block. And that was WAVE. So it was, at the crazy end of both time and site specific work on a very tight budget in a derelict building at a time when, video projectors were not easy to get. You had to go all over the UK to get them. So that was the scale of that work. And very public facing it, it was full of interviews with members ofthe public. The idea was to reflect the work back, to the public, almost immediately after the demolition had happened so that the kinda the reflections on the idea that demolition is a little bit like amputation was able to be kinda, you know, tapped into life. And it's an interesting one in terms of your questions later on Just to note that, when the demolition happened, it was a wee bit delayed. So it happened at 2:14. Our event was scheduled for 10 o'clock at night. And during the demolition,someone was killed. A lady was killed, her name was Helen Tinney. And, she was killed because the demolition team had done a very poor job, and they hadn't properly protected people from the explosion. And somebody was out with the exclusion zone, but still was hit by a piece of concrete and was
51 killed. And,so there was a lot of discussion with the local community council and others about whether or not the work should proceed. We ourselves felt, you know, very torn about it. And we discussed it with the community, and, actually, it was decided to proceed. The community decided asthe work had a strong sense of requiem and memory about itthat, they would prefer it to proceed. So, we did indeed proceed with the work on that day. So, anyway, I don't think, actually, over the years I've ever done anything that was as crazy in terms of its demands as that particular project. So, although that was very, very early, it was also very crazy. And so there were so many different people involved in that. So that gives you a sense of the scale of that project. And, Particle, was a little book that I made, with my father's drawings in it. So it was, you know, I hired my motherto steal the drawings that my father did on newspapers, when he wasn't when he was on the telephone or when he was trying to do the crossword puzzle. And he wasn't even conscious, really, that he was doing them, but he would do these beautiful little drawings. So, I hired my mother to steal his drawings for a year until we had enough to publish a book, which I presented to him on Father's Day. So, that's obviously, you know, a very different scale of work. And I kinda feel that somewhere between wave and particle are, all the kind of projects we might dream about or think of doing. Some very intimate and personal, small scale. Others, with lots of other people involved and all sorts of outdoor considerations to be born, kinda ethical and technical and chronological decisions to be made and balanced. So, when you work with those community and involve these people, do you face, challenges, when you have to approach them and convince for the idea that you’re thinking on? Like, most of the people won't consider it, like, okay. We can do it. How do you make this project work in the long run? Well, I think that, you know, it often depends, what you're doing and why you're doing it. And I think we decided, when I say, you know, we I suppose I should really say I. I kinda tend to think , we these days, but I think I decided, a long time ago that I was interested in the kind of, knowledge and creativity of the people that I would meet in their stories and their positions and their knowledge, and that it was possible perhaps to build work where the content was significantly drawn fromlocalities and places and people, and the armature was kinda provided by me. So, in terms of persuading people to be interested in or to, in some way, permission or sanction the work, what you're really asking is, do people are they interested in, or do they sanction our permission, themselves so that, because the work reflects them? And that still is a challenge, actually, because, you know, there are all sorts of considerations about the things that somebody might say to you in an interview about whether they want that to be shared in a public space. There are also momentsin an interview that are quite testimonial or confessional or revelatory. And those can leave people feeling as though they have exposed themselves or that they are kind of, you know, they are in some way, you know, vulnerable because of that honesty, like you, Elizabeth. And, and so it's not a given that an engagement
52 with another human being can actually lead to something that can be shared even back to them or their own community. So there is a processto go through that is, you know, that is rigorous. But, the hope is that you do secure that permission and that then have potentially something to share with that person that they haven't necessarily even seen in themselves. And, but the work is often easy to do. And it's easy because we live in a society in which, there's a significant level of loneliness. There's a significant levels of alienation and disconnection. People that I encounter all the time seem to feel significantly disempowered, and disconnected. And even the simple gesture of listening to somebody and paying attention to those things that they say is often a kinda welcomed connection. Yeah. And it's good for me because, you know, I'm I am as an artist, I have been for a long time as interested in other people's stories as in my own. Yes. I understand that not every artist thinks that way. And some artists are very compelled to tell their own stories and to express their own feelings and, or to try and kinda pin down what it is they see or what it is they, feel and spend all their time effectively, you know, in a solid themselves. Right Yeah. Expecting themselves. Yeah. You know? And I think that's totally legitimate. And I really understand that. Yeah. Everybody has a different approach, and most of the project, like, when you want to work with you want to be a social worker and also an artist, and you think more about working for people rather than narrating your own stories. So, it's quite interesting to me, which is, like that's why I thought to interview. And, and this topic was quite fascinating to me because my own practice sitting on edge, I want to take to the direction where I don't want to focus not on just making my own story into artwork, which is for the people. My next question is, art living Lauriston project, what innovative approach did you take to ensure that the artist intervention resonated deeply with local community while fostering a sustainable impact? And how did you engage with the community member throughout this long term process? So, it was quite interesting. There's a little backstory of an art strategy, as in the one for art and living Lauriston. An art strategy, will occur, in an area like Strathclyde, Glasgow, because, a council has stipulated that there needs to be a percent for art. And they will write that into a tender document so that, a contractor who is proposing to build the houses that, for example, a council or housing association say that they need in an area, that contractor will have to include within their costs the possibility of a percent for the art. And, we came in quite late to the first phases of, what was happening in Lauriston. There was already a master plan done. So, the designing of the kind of public space, the provision of, housing and landscaping, infrastructure, and, even artwork had already been kinda, to some extent, detailed by a team of architects. And, so the plan that we inherited, if you imagine looking at an area of, thousands and thousands of homes with green space in between, just in the south of the city of Glasgow. And this plan included, a very large spike that was effectively about a 100meterstall, and it was
53 envision envisioned as a kind of placeholder for a sculptural work of which the entire budget of the 1% for art would be used up. And this was an idea that this spike could be seen, from Buchanan Street and that, therefore, it was a valuable idea because this would connect, a new community and quite a working class community at the time to, the heart of the city. So, this was a real one liner. The contractors loved this idea because it was big and pointy and kinda, you know, shiny. And they were quite happy that this is this or some similar variant of this is what would be built, for the public artwork for, Art and Living Lauriston. So there is, by the way, a very similar sized spike in Dublin, which you can see. So it was an ill thought through, terrible idea. And, our first goal was to persuade everybody that instead of, spending money on designing and building this spike, we might instead do the exact opposite… So, we persuaded eventually everybody that the first couple of years of the art strategy should be entirely event based in which allsorts ofsmall events and festivals and points of engagement would be designed into a process. There'd been, little thought given to permanent work and that actually everything would just be about, making connections and introducing people to their own creativity and finding ways to reflect that back into, the physical lie of the land. And, that yielded all sorts of really interesting things, including a local galley in the area. We helped to supercharge a local galley, which was called Past, Present, and Possible, which had a very, very significant turnout of the community and in which we brought in a artist who did stone carving to work with children to stone carve their drawings onto stones live. So, everybody, you know, do a little corner of this very busy kind of, process, where, children were carving stone. And those stones were ultimately distributed atthe base oftreesthat were planted in the area, which we organized for the children themselvesto plant. And, at the same time, we started an ambitious project to make portraits,to make a kind of portrait archive of people who lived and worked in the area. And, they were very simple portraits. They were video portraits in which everybody justsimply chose, a colourfrom a range of coloursthat they kinda identified with or was their favourite colour. And that was the background to their portrait. And it was just a still, it was they were still for about a minute. So, it's a kinda like an ordinary portrait in photography, but it captures a little bit of kinda their distraction, the wind blowing through their hair, a little smile that comes across their face, a thought of somewhere else they need to be. So those portraits are like that. And then those portraits were put together in, a large bank of portraits. And, they're quite interesting because they sit as a community without necessarily, being taken together. So, they seem to be somehow when their head moves a little left, it seemsto referto the person beside them and so forth and so on. So gradually, we built up, you know, connections and capacity and introducing people to a range of kind of ways of making and thinking about art and reflecting ideas. And, and one of those events, which was probably the most significant that led to, about 4 years of activity in the locality was we managed to we noticed we were always looking for, what was happening, just paying attention to what was happening and what was not happening in the area. And one of the areas that was a dead space was a series of railway arches that runs right the way through Lauriston. And, those were owned by Network Rail. They were void spaces, inaccessible to the community, inaccessible to everybody. And we persuaded, Network Rail to release 1 to us. Network Rail, I have to say, are very hard to work
54 with, and, it was a lot of negotiation. so we secured one arch, and then, eventually, we scared all of them, and we were left with this amazing resource. Each arch was about 8 meters wide, 5 meters high, and 20 meters deep. It was, they had these galvanized gates in the front of them, and those gates were secured by, by us, by combination locks. So it was easy to share those combinations, and literally, we were able to, give anybody who's interested in having a space a space. And this brought in all sorts of activity, all sorts of, interesting dynamic. A lot of that was focused on bringing artists actually into the area because it's often the artists who have the appetite, the desire, the skill set, and, and the capacity to come and you know? So if you say to an artist, okay. I've got a free space. Do you wanna use it for something? They will always say yes. So,so we ran a a rather incredible program, I have to say, which was based on being able to say yes. And it's quite an extraordinary, experience of just what happens in society if you can just say yes to everybody. one of my favourite examples, just to give you an idea of scale, was that, a group of 2nd year students right across Glasgow School of Art were frustrated atthe cuts to staffing that they were experienced and wanted to protest this. And they, they made a show called 25%, which I they said I said to them, what do you want? They said, we need space. I said, how much space? They said, well, go away and think about that. How much can we have? I said, you can have literally as much as you like. They said, could we have 4 arches? I said, of course. You can have as many as you like. Then they came back a little later, and they said, could we have 10 arches? I said, you can have as many as you like. And, eventually, they,they got 18 ofthese arches. And they curated a show right across the school, visual communication, tiered design, architecture, fine art, and it was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen. And no one kind of, project was maybe particularly resolved, but the all of them together, about 500 folk turned out to see it. Lots of people in the community were curious about this and came to see it, and there was something for everybody in that kind of space. And it was a great meeting of, kind of arts community across the city and the local community What was the result of a student taking a stand for their spaces? it's interesting. You know, politically, it got a lot of coverage. It galvanized the student body. I would say it kind of, give those students courage to be a bit more political in their aspirations. Whether or not that's had any impact on staffing at Glasgow School of Art, it may be a coincidence, but, not long after that, the process, was implemented where we brought in the kinda the extra level of technicians at Glasgow School of Art, which has been a fantastic success for everybody where you bring in artist graduates to support they're called studio assistants. And that's been, an incredible success actually in terms of, supporting students kind of through the workshops and through making. So, I can't claim that that happened directly. And in terms of your questions that are about, you know, there obviously, some you're hungry for data and evidence as you should be as well as the qualitative. So, it's hard for me to draw a direct line to that and say we have quantitative analysis that shows that that particular process began something that ended up in, about, you know, 15 new staff being recruited at Glasgow School
55 of Art. I can't say that partly because, that kind of data collection is expensive. It takes resource. It it's like a research project. You know, and you might do somebody might do their PhD based on that and kinda be spend 5 years actually collating that kinda data. So, unfortunately, today, I don't have too much of that data for you. But I can tell you that that happened, and then that happened. Mhmm. And, likewise, with the 7 arches, with the local Gorbals project, later on with the men's shed, those arches became very widely used. And, you know, we do we can cite the numbers of exhibitions that were in the spaces, but it was it was quite something to be able to and I think it's really interesting in response to your own thinking about your own practice. You might say, if I consider the arches an artwork, and you then say, Peter, what did you do? You might say, I did almost nothing. I did almost nothing. All I did was have a conversation which allowed me to cut off a key lock and replace that with a combination lock. And then I just said yes to everybody, and I honestly said yes to everybody. I think there was one show that we had to query because it had, the particular, artist was interested in women's pornography and was interested in kinda how you know, that might be, just that was her area of study. And it was difficult for us to sanction that because of the open nature of the arches. But we did indeed eventually permission that by getting her to put curtains on the front of the arch so that you couldn't, video project into it. You can see the video projection. And, to put the warnings that you might expect on the outside so that nobody could wander in. And we put an age limitation on it for people to go in. But out with that, I did no curating. I brought no connoisseurship to that process. I literally said yes to everything. And that was a particular sort of work, and it's a sort of particular release of control. And, and it produces really incredible things. One of my very favourite things from that was, in Arch 2, we had the arches were numbered. As part of that 25% group, students decided to build a small stage, and everybody who had a musical instrument brought 1 in. And they just set them up in the stage with no text, no kinda nothing written, just on the stage. And over the course, a whole series of new bands formed. Somebody who could play the guitar,teamed up with somebody who could play the drums, and they did a little public session that was live, and it was very organic. Some of it was tuneless, and some of it was unbelievably well coordinated. And I believe that some people did get together then and start to, you know, form bands that went on to things. But it was like, a genuinely open process and a really great education for me about, that idea of very significantly removing yourself from the process. The other things we did were the things like a janitor might do. We cleaned up afterwards. We made sure that there was electricity and light when we could do that. We managed to kinda make that work. So across us across the course of 4 years, it was a really, it was a really magic space.
56 Thank you very much. So, my next question is about the Open Museum. It's, with the Open Museum, how did the wave particle challenge traditional notion and accessibility in art while ensuring the collections remained artistically significant? And what techniques did you implement to create meaningful connection between artwork and community? It's a very simple recipe, and you're very welcome to steal it. We're very copy left with everything we do. But the simple recipe is so simple. The last so your last question first is that, you know, I have a great faith that, people hold treasure, and that not only is that treasure interesting to themselves if you reflect it back to them, but to their families and to their community. And it's that very simple process of mirroring something that you've identified in an individual or a group back to themselves, and that it's a guaranteed recipe for success. And we do this in all sorts of places, and it never fails. But it is interesting to note, and I only had to refine this thought, and this is different than the entirely open process of the arches. I was challenged when we did work in Venice in 2018 by a student intern to say, Peter, do you mean that you're really interested that anybody can just bring anything along and that you would exhibit it? And thisis in a show in Venice that we did. And at that time, I thought that I did mean that, and that's exactly how we ran the arches. It was, you know, no curating. But I realized in other projects and in the projects like the outer museum in Helensburgh that is not the case at all actually. And the analogy would be this. If somebody brought along some what you might classify as Sunday watercolour painting Mhmm. That, was not very technically well executed, was, the content of which was very cliched and kind of, you know maybe poorly made, ill thought through, and significantly maybe reflecting a broader lazier idea in of what constituted art in contemporary culture. If somebody brought that along, absolutely, yes, I should be critically engaged in that. And I should say, yeah. Well, you know, I'm not quite sure that is the most interesting thing about you or that you have to show. So, what Theo challenged me to realize is that, actually, the conversation and the hunting for content is a real intersubjective exchange. It is a type of meeting of minds. And when I say I trust that each person has treasure, I trust that they have something that is extraordinary and as filtered through my understanding of extraordinary and my understanding of the nuances of storytelling and conceptual art and kinda so you are bringing an expertise to that. You're not blank at all. You're bringing a real expertise to that. And that was a clarification. And in the outdoor museum, it was that the process each kind of object that came forward, each idea that came forward was kind of filtered through a range of kind of processes, which included a a sense of, you know, the finding something that somebody had that was had just the right level of twist or the right level of kind of, something about it that made it, that made me really confident in its extraordinary nature as an object. And so that's a slow process, and that eventually yielded, 15 things that, went on to a series of plinths, that became the first phase of the Arthur Museum, a phase that was designed to continue, and it has continued to this day where, we've handed over that kind of curatorship to others. And, I should say that the work came about through a kind of demand from the community. So, it was quite interesting to note that the project through which this happened
57 was a project to address Calhoun Square in Helensburgh. And Calhoun Square in Helensburgh was to be a landscaping, a relandscaping done by, a set of landscape architects and engineers to make Coon Square more of a social space. And it was in the engagement and community engagement for that process that the community came and said, what we want is a museum. We want you to build us a museum, because we have so much history to share and so many stories to share. And, it was not within the gift of the landscape architect to build a museum. There's no budget for a museum. There's no space for a museum in that project. So, but the idea still floated in my mind. And when the space was being designed as a shared space, which means that pedestrians and traffic use the space, equally, so roads feel like footpaths. That's a kind of thing in the UK. And when it was being designed like that, the, landscape architect put in a 134, granite cubes into their design. And these granite cubes were there to make the pedestrian feel anchored and safe in public space. And it was at this point that we were able to take that idea from the community and manifest it. And I said to the landscape architect, these 450 granite cubes that you're putting in, what are the chances that we could use our art budget to change the height of these? So, a bit like a Daniel Baren work, you just kind of bring a little variation, and you move those to be much more plinth sized. And if we turn them into plinths, then we can use them as an exhibition space for artists. And that is exactly what happened, and that is exactly what is happening to this date. So, of the 134, I think there are now 20 plinths that have been activated, and, that will continue happening. we've handed over everything. We handed over our subcontractors, our maintenance guide, our kind of processes of gathering content, the people that we met as a steering panel. So, we handed that to the community that, so they now effectively do that themselves with some input and funding from the council. So how do we approach the funding? So, the funding, in this case was, like with Lauriston, we had, we get a small portion of the funding. So that project was called Cord, which was bringing together, a series of towns in Scotland to be supported for what they call regeneration funding. And, I don't tend to use the word regeneration myself. Ithink it's assumptive, and, it's a bit of a claim when actually all you're doing is changing physical space. I think real regeneration would have to involve resilience and supporting, sort of, you know, people's health and well-being, their employability, their income generation. Real regeneration would have to be about people. But, anyway, that particular project had about 7 and a half £1,000,000 to do the work in Coghoon Square, of which our budget was about £50,000. So we began with a, relative to everybody else, a tiny budget. But we didn't have to pay for the plinths because they were already kind of in the contract. And we eventually ended up fundraising, and raising about another 100 and £20,000. So, the work that we did, which was not just the plinths, but some other work as well, had a budget of about a 150 or £170,000, which was still very tight to do the work that we did. But, so that's not untypical of a project where you begin with, a budget that has come from percent for the arts, which has come through and managed by a local council. We are commissioned by the
58 team of architects who bring us in on their tender process. So, they win the competition partly because they've got us on our team, and we bring that different thing to that, the possibility for doing a different level of engagement with community. And, then we do some fundraising. So, we because we wet everybody's appetite with this idea of this project, and people kind of fall in love with the idea. And then all of a sudden, it's the thing that they're talking about. And then sometimes, if you're lucky, the project will win awards or win prizes and kind of, you know, it becomes a bit of an exemplar that will lead to other projects in which, again, you go into competition, and everybody's heard about the project, for regeneration, which I never use as a word. It won, I think it was nominated for the Doolin award. It won another couple of awards, which you should remember. And it was actually nominated funnily enough, it was nominated for the Museum of the Year category in a world competition in which the winner, eventually, was an underground museum in China, which cost £400,000,000. And in the catalogue for that award ceremony, there is our tiny wee project as a shortlisted, you know, a shortlisted entry alongside those, other projects. So sometimes the ideas are powerful enough to be you don't even have to have a big budget, but you can do that. So that a couple of things I would note about that for your own practice. We had kinda we had raised money for the project. We were at the end of that project, and we had raised about £50,000. And we thought it was a lovely idea to share all the resource, our subcontractors, and the money that we'd raised with the local community. We thought, how cool would it be that we've just started this process and that other people take it forward, that they understand what to do. They've got the template. They've got the access to the bronze foundry. They know how to kinda do the 3d scanning. They understand, how to do the school's workshop to dinner. So, everything was shared with them. And, we thought that would be a lovely idea to a way to work in the world where you start something off and you then leave it behind with all the parts that people need to become the artist. And, in doing so, we made a terrible mistake. We absolutely underestimated our own role, and we overestimated the capacity of the community to step into that. And I think this is a mistake that artists who work with communities, make all the time. You feel that you're in a room and everybody is really excited, and everybody is really galvanised and everybody is talking about theirideas and they feel that it is possible. And you forget that Part of the reason for that is that you have catalysed that. And the reality with human nature and human energy is that when you remove the catalyst, things go back to normal again. Yeah. And, that was our experience in that project that we underestimated all the things that artists do to make things happen. And that that is really quite hard to replicate. And that if you really do wish to replicate that, you need to spend more time in mentoring, more time in training, more time in handing things over. You need to take people right the way through the process. Like, for example, in the casting of bronze, you need to, you know, allow them to build the maquettes. You need to let them, see the bronze being poured. You let need to let them see how that feels as well as how that
59 succeeds. You need to kind of, you need to really apprenticeship that properly. And that's a whole other level of, work and engagement and time if you really want to. And I think a lot of really well intentioned work out in communities fails because, artists just don't have the resource to spend enough time. And in some projects where I think artists are doing things better than we do them in wave particle, Artists have decided that they need to be based in one place for the rest of their lives. So, for example, the Stow network, you get, an artist like, Matt. Matt's second name isjust escaping me at the moment, but you'll find it if you look it up. And, I actually convinced Matt. Matt would have been a bit like me, a peripatetic artist working in different places for bits of time. And I and I thought he had a great capacity and interest in doing that. And I kinda challenged him and I said, I'd commissioned him to do a work in govern. Then I commit (Matt Baker is his name). And I said, Matt, you know, have you ever thought of what you could achieve if you spent the rest of yourlife, in one area? And Matt claimsthat he that sowed a seed that he couldn't get rid of and that eventually he went to Dumfries and Galloway and does incredible work there, as a kind of permanent artist in residence, taking you know, achieving you can imagine what you might achieve over 50 yearsin a place. And this is both of usin that regard are influenced by the model of an artist like David Harding, who, was appointed to be the town artist in Glenrothes and was paid to be there, lived there and worked there amongst the community for 10 years as a kinda in a time made over, I think, a 150 permanent public artworks with a teamof works. So, it's a really good model. It's probably not one that I'll ever you could say to me, why not? If I know that it's a it's the best model, why don't I do that? And I just am deeply peripatetic. I'm deeply kind of, it's the way that I feel I work best, you know, is to is to move around and kinda I do even the same at the art school. I remove myself from full time teaching to be just a visitor there. Just come coming in and out and dipping in and out so that can work on occasion. That's very interesting. And how do you balance, when you work with community and being an artist, I would like to know how this balanced approach work to be successful as both social change and being artist? I think that, for me, there are some, there are some artists, I think, who just do not see that division, the one that you've just made. And I think of those people as being and those people that are very proud to call themselves community artists. And there was a long tradition in Scotland of community artists, and it was a very kind of, very committed people who would work in areas like David. And they would just see that what was produced was valuable, and they weren't too worried to think about what was their work and what was the community's work. And those are, those people have an incredible level of commitment and generosity. That's not me. I retain a need to kind of explore my own kinda unmapped territory and to kinda tap into those absurdist and incomprehensible feelings and things within myself that needed to be chased down in the form of kind of material, drawing, cast, sculpted, and maybe even painted things.
60 So, I retain that within myself, and that is particle. And the idea of the construct that we've set up is that as it as by the nature of its level of WAVE really functions. WAVE is busy, works a lot within communities, and is well paid to do so. We demand to be as well paid as the architects and landscape architects and engineers that we sit down with. And, you know, so we get an hourly rate or a daily rate this that is similar to theirs. We think it's really important politically to say that our we value ourselves like that, so we've lob lobbied for that. So that means that wave actually makes money. And the idea is that, Particle, which will never make any money,steals money from Wave so that Particle is resourced by, Wave. And that means that once in a while, I can spend, you know, what otherwise would be impossible sums of money on particle projects. So, you know, I consider the work that we did in the happenstance was a good hybrid of wave and particle, but probably more particle. Certainly,the last 5 months were all particle and that last five months cost Wave about, £40,000. But, so, you know, it's quite interesting. And one of the things about that, it means that, and this is another thing about me personally. Some people have the patience and the capacities to be, to be making funding applications all the time, and I don't. We've very rarely apply for funding for our own projects. Once in a blue moon. And often so in other words, you know, all you could spend a lot of artist organizations who are charities spend probably 80% oftheirtime trying to be sustainable,trying to be trying to survive, trying to pay staff wages,trying to, you know,raise the funding fromCreative Scotland and other organizations to survive. So, it's very, very labor intensive. We don't do that. We are a limited company, which means that we are, we operate a bit like a kick, but we are a limited company. We are, VAT. We pay VAT and tax. And kinda so we literally earn the money that we use both for, wave and for particle. So, it's like it's been a self resourced entity. And, I I would find it difficult to have continually to be responding to a board, which is what happens if you're a charity or even a kick. And, I think that can work for some people, and I really admire those that do. But what we've built in Wave Particle is a model which probably would apply would interest a lot of other artists because it's about being you know? And Wave Particle is not a collective. It tries to respect and, have a degree of mutuality within the people who work within Wave Particle, and it's really interested in them and their wishes and the things that they would like to do, but it is it is not a collective. So, we don't sit around together deciding what we will do collectively. It's very clearly, a project that is kinda it is my directive, as an artist that and I seek the help of other artists to do specific things, you know, and bring themon for very specific tasks and pay them to do those specific tasks.
61 So, it's kinda you know, some artists are good enough that they don't need help with budgeting or administration or, you know, are so multiskilled that they can do all those technical things themselves. And, again, that is me. My gifts are kind of I'm an idea generator. I'm very good with people. I really love talking to people, and I'm really good at finding treasure within people. So, I know what I'm good at, and then I help other you know, I get other help with other people with all the things that I'm rubbish at. That's quite interesting to know what people have and then direct the project. I think I almost got all answers within. So yeah. Thank you very much.
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