Colm Cille’s Spiral, a series of contemporary art and literature commissions and dialogues rethinking the legacy of sixth-century Irish monk Colm Cille (St Columba). For this project, ATLAS worked with the Glasgow School of Art and others to produce Convocation, which fed into the wider Colm Cille’s Spiral programme.
The Colm Cille’s Spiral programme unfolded across six different locations throughout Ireland and the UK, beginning and ending in Derry, Londonderry for the 2013 City of Culture festivities. ATLAS along with the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow University and the CCA collectively created the Scottish ‘spiral’ in the project.
Convocation comprised a residency at Raasay House, which brought together a group of scholars and artists, encouraging them to make work engaging with the extreme past. The group included the Glasgow School of Art staff and alumni working alongside artists from Derry and Skye. Work from this residency period went on to be exhibited at the Glasgow School of Art, highlighting the group’s process and creative dialogues – showing the ‘journey of ideas’, linking the creative and research practices explored by the group.
The project title, Convocation, means ‘a calling together’. ‘The Spiral’ is a common form in manuscripts and monuments, which amongst various meanings represents the dialectic – a method of debate for resolving disagreement.