The Town Collection is a unique collection of over 80 artworks created through artists’ residency in Huntly over 28 years. It is hosted around the town in businesses and homes, on riverbanks and in woodlands and has recently been relaunched with a new Town Collection map.

At this one-off event, we unpacked Huntly’s Town Collection in relation to formal art collections, principles of care and project legacies with artist Irineu Destourelles, Art Collections Curator at the University of Edinburgh Claire Walsh and Director of Deveron Projects Natalia Palombo. We asked; what does it mean to host an artwork beyond the gallery or museum? How do artists feel about contributing to this unusual collection? How is the town changed by the collection and the collection by the town? We visit three venues hosting three artworks from the collection, including local businesses and unexpected places for a short discussion in each venue, before concluding in Square Deal, a community hub run by Deveron Projects, for more chat and cake.

Schedule of the event:1pm - start of the walk from outside Square Deal, stopping at three venues for a short discussion
2.30pm walk finishes
2.30-3pm refreshments and discussion in Square Deal for those interested in touring the art trail before coming to the event, maps and cakes were available to colelct from the Honesty Cart(outside Square Deal, 22 the Square).

/ About

Claire Walsh is the Art Collections Curator at the University of Edinburgh. She previously held curatorial roles with collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh as well as a guest editorship at MAP Magazine, Glasgow. Her research focuses on the infrastructures of public-facing art collections and archives, and the relationship between the Museum and the Anthropocene. She is co-author of a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge volume ‘Performance: The Ethics & Politics of Care’ titled In the Shadow of the State: Collecting Performance at IMMA and Institutions of Care in the Irish Context.

Irineu Destourelles is a Glasgow-based visual artist. Irineu’s practice lies in moving-image, writing, drawing and painting, revolving around treatment of identity, experiences of creolity and diaspora. Irineu’s work has been featured in exhibitions at CAPC (Coimbra 2020), Museum Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2019), and MAMA Showroom (Rotterdam, 2019), among others. In Huntly, Irineu was developing his project Does It Fall From the Skies Above?, in which he brought a sweet-looking, monster-like city person, Lilo, to Huntly, to explore collective healing through place observation and filmmaking.