The Regenerators

The Regenerators was a new solo commission for the Director’s Programme of Glasgow International festival of Visual Art (20 April – 7 May 2018).

The work was a huge site-specific architectural intervention responding to regeneration in Glasgow’s East End. Using print techniques developed with local fabricators, Peter made an 80 metre-long artwork (the largest ever staged at the festival) formally reminiscent of a newspaper strip cartoon. The hoarding featured Peter’s drawings of crumbling buildings, a medieval castle, tenement housing, modern flats with a series of rooms, glimpsed through cut outs, which contained scenes of tenant association offices, town planners, knights and serfs, thereby compressing the history of the site into a graphical anachronistic timeline.

The context of top-down regeneration is brought into question by a level of public involvement which was absent in real life, and a strong sense of historical discontinuity is brought to consideration of the modern city.

In developing the work, Peter led a programme of workshops with young people in the city, with Glasgow International and Glasgow School of Art’s Wider Participation programme, which works with pupils who live in priority postcodes, are care experienced or attend one of GSA’s target state schools. There was a subsequent show of their work for the project and, co-publishing with GIasgow International and OE Press (Paris), a catalogue was produced which documented the collaborative research methods on site.

The Regenerators was made in conjunction with the Year of Young People 2018 and Festival 2018 (the cultural programme of the 2018 European Championships). The work was opened by Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs. It received 1,108 unique visitors, was reviewed widely in publications including Studio International and further disseminated through interviews on STV2 (19 April 2018) and BBC Scotland (20 April 2018).