"Cramming as many shows into the shortest possible time has long been an Edinburgh International Festival tradition. It is fitting, then, that an artist in residence at the festival this year condensed her project into just 24 hours.
Deirdre Nelson, who works with textiles and new media, spent a day and night at the Dovecot Studios, sleeping in the main hall of the gallery which was once a Victorian swimming pool.
She blogged and tweeted about the experience, taking pictures and lifting snippets from the internet as she heard the sounds of the city outside. At 10.30pm there were the fireworks from the Tattoo; at 3am there was the sound of the bottle bins; at 5am there was the squawk of the seagulls and the drunken song of a group of lads heading home from nightclubs.
Nelson’s work is also on show as part of the gallery’s Heirlooms exhibition throughout the festival. She had spent time in India with traditional weavers who taught her the art of kantha — quilt embroidery from rags, usually old saris. The pieces were used traditionally either as bed covers or to wrap everyday objects. Nelson used what she had learnt to make covers for modern objects — iPads, iPhones, USB sticks. Each carries a code that can be scanned on a smartphone to connect to an online exhibit linked to the physical one — for example, a video of the images that she has embroidered.
“What I wanted to do was to not make something specifically Indian,” she said of her display, which is called Repository of Memory.
“I think people sometimes come back and make very Indian-looking work. I wanted to make something contemporary rather than ethnic.”
Nelson, who is originally from Ireland but is now based in Glasgow, used old jeans and a T-shirt — the latter was bought on the British high street but made in Bangladesh.
The graduate from the Glasgow School of Art said: “I tweet a lot and do a lot of social networking as well as traditional embroidery and textiles. Roanne Dods [the deputy director of Dovecot] invited me to do a residency and we thought about a blogging, tweeting residency.”
Both women spent the night in the gallery surrounded by looms, threads and installations.
On the Kanthasleepover blog Nelson has posted the boyhood recollections of a regular at the pool. “On the Friday night my Ma would send us to infirmary Street baths for a plunge (bath) as we had no inside baths or toilets in Arthur Street. I think it cost 3 pence in old money.
“You’d get a towel and a bar of carbolic soap. It stank. The man running the plunges was miserable. He’d shout, ‘Come on, your time is up, you’ve been in there for hours’.”
The artist hopes the blog, and her experiences creating it, can become the basis for more extensive work.
“I was only there for one night but I’ve had so many ideas,” she said.
“I’m very interested in social history so I think there could be lots I could work with.”
by Lindsay McIntosh
