Award winning artist joins Scotsman Steps project

Plans to revitalise the Scotsman Steps have received a significant boost, with the news that Turner Prize winning artist Martin Creed has been awarded a grant to create piece of public art for the site.

The Scotsman Steps are an important link between the Old Town and Waverley station, but are currently in a dilapidated state. A joint initiative between the City of Edinburgh Council and Edinburgh World Heritage plans to carry out conservation work to the Victorian steps, to improve their condition and encourage more people to use them.

As a key part of the project, The Fruitmarket Gallery has now received a substantial award from the Edinburgh Art Festival commissions, supported by the Scottish Government’s Expo Fund, to enable a new work of public art by award winning Scottish artist Martin Creed. The new piece of art will be unveiled at the opening of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2010.

Creed’s stated philosophy is ‘I want to make things and I want to communicate with people’, and this new work will become part of people’s everyday experience of navigating the city, challenging their expectations of performing the simple action of walking up or down a set of steps, and highlighting the Scotsman Steps’s existence and purpose.

Creed says that his work is ‘50% about what I make and 50% what other people make of it’, and this new piece will engage and challenge audiences, encouraging us, as much of his work does, to think again about how we inhabit the world.

The artist
Martin Creed was born brought up in Glasgow from the age of 3. He is an artist of international reputation, who makes work of the highest quality. In 2001, he won the Turner Prize with Work No. 127: The Lights in a Building going on and off.  In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious Duveen Commission at Tate Britain, and responded with the phenomenally popular Work No. 850, in which runners sprinted through the space at 30 second intervals. In September 2009, the work was chosen to launch the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, with Sebastian Coe taking the place of one of the runners.

The Scotsman Steps
In 1898 John Ritchie & Co, the proprietors of The Scotsman, bought an extensive plot of land on the west side of the North Bridge as a new location for the headquarters of the newspaper.

The architects Dunn & Findlay were commissioned to design a complex of buildings for the site including offices, print works and commercial premises. What became known as the Scotsman Steps were an important part of the design, as they gave direct access to the lower levels of the building, and to the newspaper’s own private siding at Waverley Station.