00:00 My name is Norman Sun-Hibbert, I'm 77 in January and I'm an artist.
00:13 The last 50 odd years I've been fortunate to be able to show my work through various
00:18 groups and solo shows in various places, Glasgow and Ayrshire.
00:23 I would go to a lot of exhibitions and look at other people's work as well and that got
00:29 me thinking about sculpture and art installations.
00:32 I saw people using materials and scale that I wanted to use but didn't have the confidence
00:40 to do and by this time I'd retired from my professional role as a social worker and a
00:46 mental health officer and I applied to Glasgow School of Art and was fortunate enough to
00:52 get a place in the Sculpture and Environmental Art department.
00:56 I did my degree there and then later did a Masters in the Painting department.
01:03 I've always been interested in fabrics because we all wear fabrics from day one so we're
01:09 all exposed to colour, to pattern, to repetition.
01:13 When I see people I see their clothes they've got on before I see them, so I started using
01:18 fabrics a lot in my work.
01:20 Glasgow School of Art were going to be putting on their 70th anniversary fashion show, annual
01:26 fashion show and I was 70 and I got asked if I'd like to be a model in the fashion show
01:33 and they said yes without thinking about it and then they thought about it afterwards
01:38 but no I went through with it and I kept saying to people it was never on my bucket list at
01:44 all to wear heavy leather jackets with big rubber tubing on it, hand painted torn jeans
01:52 with torn fishnet stockings over them, but I loved the experience, I really enjoyed the
01:59 experience so I was pleased to have been asked to do that.
02:04 First fire at Glasgow School of Art was in 2014 and I along with other fourth year students
02:12 in Fine Art we were getting our work ready for our degree shows in the Macintosh building
02:20 and mine, I'd finished, I think it was the final day of install and I'd put all my work
02:28 up and all my documentation, went for lunch in the Reid building and before I left the
02:34 Reid building it was pointed out to us that the Macintosh building was on fire.
02:38 We weren't allowed to leave for safety reasons, leave the Reid building so I had to stand
02:43 at the front door or inside the front door and watch the windows of the studio where
02:48 my degree show work was blackened, cracked and in flames pouring out.
02:54 Like all the other fourth year students who lost their work or had it smoke damaged I
02:58 was upset because I'd put a lot of effort into making the work but when I was asked
03:02 by one of my tutors why I wasn't as upset as some of the young people for whom I realised
03:08 it was their opportunity to showcase their work for the first time, I explained it in
03:14 my professional life as a social worker and mental health officer, I'd often, well not
03:19 often but on occasions had to support families who'd lost children or members of their family
03:24 in house fires so in comparison, you know, there wasn't any comparison.
03:29 When the degree show was burnt in the first fire in the Macintosh building we got a bursary,
03:36 the Phoenix bursary which allowed us to make new work and the plan was that, I think it
03:42 was a year later, we would exhibit in the Reid building and I got a great space in the
03:47 Reid building and I decided because of that time I think people were still sort of remembering
03:53 the start of the First World War and there were various artworks and art installations
03:58 relating to that done by other artists throughout the UK.
04:02 I decided to, my research into the First World War really honed in as an ex-mental health
04:08 officer on people who came back from the war but were either physically horribly damaged
04:16 or mentally scarred and in particular I was aware that PTSD was unknown at that time,
04:25 often it was referred to as soldiers being shell-shocked and the sad thing was that often,
04:31 I think there were about 350 odd men who either deserted from the front line or wouldn't go
04:40 over the top into battle and were accused of cowardice and were shot at dawn by their
04:46 own comrades.
04:47 So that got me to think even more about what I could say with the fabric works.
04:55 The piece I made, I called it Landscape and the reason I called it Landscape was because
05:00 sadly for a lot of those who died, they actually disappeared into the landscape.
05:06 The mud was horrendous in a lot of these battle areas so the bodies were lost altogether but
05:12 then I thought about men who were lost in their heads as well so the fabrics I used
05:19 were all from men's shirts and the colours and the patterns on them related to elements
05:26 of the landscape so I called the work Landscape but it was made of 102 small fabric figures
05:32 and from a distance the work, it was a big installation, it looked very pretty, it looked
05:38 very attractive but then when people got up close they discovered that all of the figures
05:43 without exception had one or more limbs missing and they all had identifying items attached
05:49 to them which was really meant to replicate dog tags.
05:52 I've continued to make sculpture and installations and to do some performance.
05:58 I've never stopped painting, I've never stopped making collages as well and then just over
06:04 two years ago I moved down to Ayr and my studio looks into a tidal river, a harbour, a working
06:11 harbour that daily has small boats coming in to deliver loads.
06:16 There's a wonderful array of buildings, storage buildings in the harbour as well.
06:21 Beyond the harbour I can see the open sea and I can also see up part of the Ayrshire
06:27 coast and again it was just the shapes and the colours that I was exposed to on a daily
06:37 basis and there was constant change because of the weather, the time of day, the lights
06:43 were always changing and so my exhibition that I'm installing at the moment, Views from
06:51 My Studio, was really just a celebration of all that I've been exposed to every day from
06:59 all the windows in my apartment and I've loved doing it because I said earlier the sculpture
07:08 and art installations are more political works.
07:10 These are more of a celebratory nature, because of what I'm exposed to.
07:15 I keep saying that there's a mixture of landscapes, seascapes and they're abstracted.
07:23 I'm not trying to recreate reality, I'm playing about and making another reality if you like,
07:33 but just as intense as well and I realise that a lot of what I'm seeing and what I'm
07:40 doing with what I see is maybe personal to me but I'm hoping that the work will still
07:47 prove attractive to others as well.
07:50 I see people doing big paintings that I admire, I've no inclination to do big paintings.
07:57 For me, and again it maybe goes back to the sculpture idea, I like them to be objects
08:05 and the reason I put them into box frames as well is so that it can be handled by people.
08:11 For me, in my own head, every painting has its own story, maybe a little story but it
08:17 has a story and in the way that stories, whether novels or short stories, are put between two
08:24 covers I put a frame around my stories to contain them.
08:29 I want them to be, I think the word is domestic, paintings and I want people to be able to
08:37 hold them and not feel that they're something that just has to be on a wall and can't be
08:41 touched.
08:42 So the exhibition at Ioto Gallery runs from Saturday 2nd December to Saturday 16th December.
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