Leading the Way

Following the St John Ogilvie exhibition in 1979 the Third Eye Centre maintained its precedent for engaging communities beyond visual art when it teamed up with the Association in Scotland to Research into Astronautics to produce The High Frontier.

Image Credit: The Third Eye Centre Archive

‘One of the most ambitious spaceflight exhibitions ever held in the UK’, exhibits drew from photographic coverage of various national and international space programmes, along site models and actual space hardware.  A full supporting programme of events and seminars included Spaced Out season of Science Fiction Film at the GFT.

The exhibition catalogue discusses the imperative issues and questions surrounding space research with an enthusiasm and imagination that seems somewhat outmoded now after the public excitement and novelty of space exploration has faded.  This then innovative concept of collaboration between visual arts orgnaisations and divergent communities remains so and is still prevalent at the CCA today.  But public issues and interests change and innovations become commonplace, and as a consequence, the content of these pervious collaborations perhaps no longer retain their place at the front line of  our interest...

A Community Spirit

The 1979 exhibition on St. John Ogilvie was the first in a series of documentary exhibitions and related publications produced by the Third Eye Centre on famous men and women in Glasgow’s history.   The exhibition concentrated on the life and times of the Scottish Saint and included reproduction documents, maps, models and portraits of key figures that featured in his life and subsequent canonisation in 1976. 

The exhibition involved contributions from local institutions including Aloysius College, The Mitchell Library and the Scottish Catholic Archives and produced an ambitious publication which included the first bibliography on Ogilvie.  

The archive material reveals that this exhibition was prepared and treated in the same way as any visual arts exhibition or event at the Third Eye Centre, and the breadth of participants communicated to in the files of correspondence highlight the curatorial vision of the Centre to engage with and educate social communities beyond visual art.  

Image from Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner Vol. XCV No. 3092

The CCA now has an official Education and Outreach programme which takes an alternative approach  to working with people in Glasgow with initiatives such as ‘This Land is Your Land’.  Other Third Eye Centre  files recently cataloged  document the preparation of a similar gardening and allotment project called  ‘Dear Green Place’ as well as  ‘Garnethill Exhibition’ and ‘Modernisation by Inches’  which  observed and discussed Glasgow’s urban planning and communities.  All early evidence of  green shoots for the Third Eye Centre and CCA’s spirit for community investment and engagement. 

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