38. Kenneth Armitage House

Guest Text

Kenneth lived and worked at Avonmore Road from 1959 until his death in 2002, it was the backdrop for his greatest professional achievements. Since 2005, occupancy of the house and studio has been awarded every two years to a different sculptor under a Fellowship scheme that Armitage himself initiated. I was resident there from 2015-2017. The house and studio, an interesting early Arts and Crafts building in its own right, is pretty much unaltered since the early 1970s, and photos from each decade show Kenneth working, sitting, writing, smoking, occupying the various spaces of the house and studio as his hair slowly greyed. It makes for a real wealth of historical context which we became very sensitive to. Many of the objects, and items of furniture visible in the photographs of these pictures are still there: the same battered radiators, the same chairs, the same stove in the corner. The shelves we put our books on were shelves he had made, and higher up on the mezzanine, his own personal library. It's a portrait of sorts, providing to us an almost uncanny window into his passions and preoccupations: Irish social history, poetry, Japan, maps galore, almost no fiction whatsoever... The record player and his beloved Bach there to play, with notes written on the sleeves. The notion of being merely 'resident' there became very quickly impossible; the best way I can describe our tenure there was as custodians, keepers of of a remarkable house, but a keeper of memories too. I felt that responsibility very strongly, and strange as it sounds I felt like I got to know Kenneth quite well during that time. It was an absolute joy to be there, quite life changing, but over two years it also becomes home, normalised no matter how many times you pinch yourself to reassert just how lucky you have been. The house and studio are heavy with associations, and I must admit I found it hard to work there sometimes - difficult to shake off the weight of history and productive activity. I didn't realise it at the time, but I did make some important strides in my own work during that period, the beginnings of things that are only now coming to the fore. Certainly the Fellowship encouraged ambition, to ask bigger questions of myself and my work. We knew that it was quite a significant building architecturally, it had actually been in active use as a sculpture studio for more than 125 years, so that history spirals back in time even further...It took a bit of research and reading to appreciate those things fully. Participating in Open House encouraged us to delve a bit deeper, and amongst other discoveries, we found out that MacLaren had been a tutor of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow. To us as GSA graduates, that made everything resonate even more. OH gave an outlet, or a way to celebrate that history in public, perhaps we also had some more direct need to throw the doors open and welcome people in to talk about it with! Catherine and I have since visited Fortingall in Perthshire to see the village MacLaren designed, and so the legacy continues in some ways... Text by David Murphy, Resident of KAH 2015-17 https://www.davidmurphystudio.co.uk/work