list.co.uk/festival Bobby Niven | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
SMALL WONDER
Susan Mansfi eld talks to Bothy Project creator Bobby Niven about his latest venture, a special commission in the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town
R ather proudly, Bobby Niven shows me a consignment of thick wooden beams. Discarded by a timber-frame company for being too curvy, they are perfect for his latest project: an artists’ bothy he is calling Palm House, which has just opened at Johnston Terrace Wildlife Garden near Edinburgh Castle as part of Edinburgh Art Festival.
The wood and glass structure provides a space for artists residencies (Neil Bickerton, Alison Scott, Daisy Lafarge and Deirdre Nelson will take a week each), as well as a focus for activities, conversation, growing plants and eating pizza baked in a mud oven. Niven is known as one of the creators (with architect Iain MacLeod) of the Bothy Project which currently runs three small-scale off-grid artist residency spaces at Inshriach near Aviemore, on the island of Eigg, and the distinctive tilted Pig Rock Bothy at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Palm House is a bothy with a difference, however, the i rst Niven has built without MacLeod, and the i rst to draw on elements of his own sculptural practice.
‘The other bothies have been in collaboration so I’ve not fully had a chance to let rip in terms of adding more sculptural elements,’ he says. ‘I don’t think of the others as art works, whereas this is. The curved beams supporting the roof will be carved into arms.’ One of the festival’s The Making of the Future: Now commissions, the bothy is also an homage to town planner and polymath Patrick Geddes, who envisioned a series of green spaces around Edinburgh’s Old Town, and has been cross-pollinated by Niven’s other commission this summer, a group show at Inverleith House which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Botanic Gardens’ modernist palm houses.
Plant Scenery of the World, which runs until October (see review, page 101), places work by i ve contemporary artists next to rare and unseen archive material from the Botanics’ collection, and is being heralded as a tentative new beginning for the gallery which has been closed for over a year. ‘It’s a bit of a compromise, but maybe it’s a good one and good results will come from it,’ Niven says. ‘I’ve really enjoyed working in the herbarium, I was there for ten days, they gave me my own pass.’
10–17 Aug 2017 THE LIST FESTIVAL 101