If you’re involved in the arts in Scotland and you don’t live under a rock, you’ve probably heard of The Glasgow Effect by now. No, I don’t mean the phenomenon whereby people from Glasgow have an unusually short life expectancy, but the art project of the same name by Ellie Harrison.
Over the past day and a half Scottish Twitter (which Buzzfeed informs me is A Thing) has gone nuts over this project. Bloggers and journalists have jumped in to have their say about the nature of the project, the nature of funding, the nature of art and the horrors of the online world.
I’m not here to write about my opinion on any of these things. It doesn’t matter what I think of her project or her decision to title it The Glasgow Effect or to use a picture of chips to represent it. It doesn’t matter whether she’s English, Scottish, Martian or Prefer Not To Say. The point is that as far as I can tell, her application for Creative Scotland’s Open Project Funding should never have been assessed, let alone granted.
Creative Scotland’s guidelines can be found here. On Page 13 they say “Academics or other education professionals seeking funding related to their educational role cannot apply.” Seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?
Ellie Harrison is a lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College. But of course lecturers take sabbaticals, and a lecturer who is also an artist might very well take time away from her post to concentrate on her practice, right? Right. And that would seem quite legitimate… but it doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here.
The day after this teacup tempest began, Harrison made a pinned post on the Glasgow Effect Facebook event. Here it is, quoted in full (emphasis mine):
Hi everyone, thanks so much for your interest and engagement in the project: both positive and negative. Glasgow has been my home for seven-and-a-half years and to suddenly have a response like this to one of my projects has been quite overwhelming. You have given me so much material to digest, it will take the whole year to do so. I hope to follow-up by meeting many of you face-to-face, when all the fuss has died down.
Before I sign off Facebook for a while, I would like to address the important questions raised about the money. Anyone who’s done any research about me will know that I am interested in the undesirable consequences of certain funding systems, and, I am working to set-up a radical alternative: the Radical Renewable Art + Activism Fund. This will form the bulk of my workload in 2016 whilst in the city…
Like any provocative artwork, The Glasgow Effect has been devised to operate on many levels at once, and the questions about ‘community’ being raised on/off social media these last few days is certainly one of them. As much as I do care sincerely about the environmental issues raised by the project as my previous work should testify, I also want to highlight the absurd mechanisms at play within Higher Education which were its initial impetus.
In the interests of transparency and to provide a more detailed context for the project, I will shortly publish the full text from my Application to Creative Scotland on the Tumblr. The Application was written over the course of one month in June 2015, in order to fulfil one of the criteria of my 3.5 year ‘probation’ for my Lecturing post at the University. I was required to “write and submit a significant research grant application”. After one unsuccessful attempt, on 20 October 2015 I was awarded the grant. Since then, I have been negotiating an Agreement with the University to ‘donate’ the £15,000 to them in exchange for paid ‘Research Leave’ in order to undertake the project.
In this Agreement I have been careful to stipulate that the money be used solely to cover my teaching responsibilities and that a post be advertised externally, in order to:
a) create a job opportunity for a talented artist in Scotland
b) provide the best possible experience for my students in my absence
The fact that this University, like most others in the UK, now requires its Lecturing staff to be fundraisers and is willing to pay them to be absent from teaching as a result, should be the focus of this debate.
At least now, thanks to you all, I have ticked the Creative Scotland’s ‘Public Engagement’ box, I can get on with the real work.
So the £15,000 will be (or already has been) given to Duncan of Jordanstone College to allow them to hire someone to replace Harrison for a year. The application itself was written to satisfy her employer’s requirements. Obtaining this funding and carrying out this project allows Harrison to continue in her lecturing role. Fair enough… but how is this not “seeking funding related to [her] educational role”? And if the funding she sought *is* related to her educational role, then by Creative Scotland’s own rules her application shouldn’t even have been assessed.
Creative Scotland put out a statement in support of Ellie Harrison yesterday. Here it is (again, emphasis mine):
Regarding the current debate around Ellie Harrison’s project…
Ellie is a recognised artist with an MA with Distinction from the Glasgow School of Art. Her idea, articulated in a strong proposal with the working title “Think Global, Act Local”, met all the criteria for Open Project Funding. It focused on exploring whether it’s possible for an artist to generate an existence for themselves by living, working and contributing to a single community, as opposed to being constantly on the road because of the need to earn money from commissions from different places that incur costly travel and accommodation costs and high carbon footprint usage.
Ellie’s project is based on the premise that if society wishes to achieve global change, then individuals have to be more active within their communities at a local level. In restricting herself to staying within the city boundaries she is keen to explore what impact this will have her on her life and on her work as an artist with national and international commitments.
Our funding will support Ellie’s creative practice in Glasgow and we will be interested to see how the project progresses. As part of our funding conditions we will require an evaluation of the project once it is completed.
So according to Creative Scotland, The Glasgow Effect fits the Open Project Funding criteria. Which either means that CS isn’t au fait with its own criteria, or that artists *can* apply for funding that relates to their academic roles, in which case they need to rewrite their guidelines more accurately.
That said, Creative Scotland makes no mention of the money going to Harrison’s college and their way of putting things seems contrary to hers. I wonder if they’re actually aware of how it’s being used? They should be, since artists have to present a projected budget when they apply for funding (while the text of the application can be seen here, the budget was not included along with the other supporting documents). But again, if they are aware that the funds are going straight to Duncan of Jordanstone, how do they reconcile that with stating that Open Project Funding can’t be used for anything relating to an artist’s academic role?
I’ve put this question to Creative Scotland on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve yet to receive a reply, but then they seem to be keeping a bit of a low profile today. If I haven’t heard back by this evening I’ll email them directly, and whatever they tell me I’ll be happy to share. It’s quite possible that there’s something I’ve missed, something that allows them to bend their criteria this far, or some explanation that has passed between Harrison and Creative Scotland but hasn’t made it into the public sphere.
For the sake of the others who straddle art and academia, I think it’s worth pursuing an explanation. I want to find out if this funding stream, which currently looks like it’s closed to any academia-related projects, is actually more open than it appears. And I want to be reassured that Creative Scotland is being as scrupulous as it needs to be about observing its own policies…
EDIT: Creative Scotland has responded. Quoted in full:
Just to confirm that the £15,000 funding that was awarded to Ellie Harrison for the project, originally titled “Think Global, Act Local!”, through our Open Project Fund was to support the artist in her work on this project and the development of her creative practice. The funds will not be paid to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design to cover the costs of her teaching post. This complies with our criteria for funding through the Open Project Funding route which states that it can be used to support “the time to research, develop or create work or content including artist’s bursaries to support practice development.”
Well, now I’m *really* confused. I think Creative Scotland and Ellie Harrison need to have a wee chat and figure out whose version of events they want to use in future. At best, one or other of them is incorrect about this…
jenmcgregor.com 
9 responses to “Somewhere in the #GlasgowEffect stooshie, there’s a non-subjective question…”
There’s a budget summary – which I’ve copied & pasted – because I don’t know how to link to the right bit…
Budget Summary
What is the total budget of the project / activity? £25,484.01
This figure is based on my total cost to DJCAD as an employee, including the contributions it makes on my behalf to National Insurance (13.8% of salary) and my pension scheme (22.5% of salary)
What is the funding you require from Creative Scotland? £15,000.00
What percentage is Creative Scotland’s contribution to the total budget? 59%
How much committed co-funding is in place? (cash and in-kind) £10,484.01
This figure indicates my own resources as in-kind support
What percentage of the total budget is this committed co-funding? 41%
http://glasgoweffect.tumblr.com/
Yes, there is a summary (I’ve linked to her application above, so this would be visible to anyone clicking through). It’s very informative about how much she needed, how much would come from Creative Scotland and how much would come from other sources.
What is *doesn’t* tell us is where any of this money goes. That’s what the budget itself would tell us – as I understand it, she’d be expected to submit a rough breakdown of how she would envisage spending the money. And that’s the bit we need to know. How did Creative Scotland think the money would be used, based on what she submitted?
Of course, if you no longer have to submit a budget breakdown that’s another matter… and that’s something CS would *definitely* need to address, because a summary like this is far too vague.
ah. I think CS has clarified that none of the budget is supposed to be going to the D of J – so I don’t know where that leaves it.
If you look at the Open Funding application form, there is a budget breakdown page after the summary. Applicants are required to complete a table of costs, detailing how the money is meant to be spent.
But that’s the bit that Ellie hasn’t made public, and I agree that the answer to this mess might lie in the breakdown.
Thanks for clarifying that, Flav. 🙂
They have! A spokesperson from DJCAD has said that they’re talking to Ellie Harrison about other ways of handling it – but they’ve made it clear that they expected her to give them that money, based on the arrangements they’d made together.
So I wonder where the idea that the money could be used this way came from, since the guidelines would seem to make it pretty clear that it couldn’t. Either Creative Scotland approved her application knowing what she intended to do with the money, in which case they broke or ignored their own eligibility criteria… or they *didn’t* know what she intended, in which case they either failed to read her application properly, or she didn’t make it clear in the breakdown, or there was a change of plan after the award was made. I think the budget is the key to figuring out where the miscommunication happened.
if this is known why aren’t Ellie and CS being pressured to explain who is lying?
Sorry, didn’t spot the notification for this comment! There is some pressure on both EH and CS to explain what’s going on – the Courier seems to be applying pressure to Duncan of Jordanstone as well. There’s not a huge amount of public pressure because, frankly, most people were only interested in the mud-slinging and not in the application of arts policy.
Harrison has said that her negotiations with Duncan of Jordanstone are ongoing and that she’ll write something about it soon, so all we can do is wait and hope someone finally says something about this that makes sense.