Hello! it’s been a while, I know.
So part of the Peter Scott factory project includes a publication. It’s gone through many vague iterations and ideas, and now I’m getting my teeth into planning how it’ll actually look.
At the beginning, it was a series of essays about all the spaces in the factory, full of stories and imaginings of what happened in there, but as things went on, that didn’t feel like quite the right way to write about things.
I’ve been sifting through the photographs I took in summer 2018 in the factory. Over the time in there, I used various cameras, but my favourite one to work with was a Panasonic borrowed from the lovely people at Alchemy. I think I started with about 1500 photos taken on that camera, and have made a copy of the folder in order to trim it down to more like 50-100. Right now I’m down to 530, and it’s getting harder every time I sit down to bin some more.
The ones that are really jumping out at me at the moment are the images of windows.
This one might be my favourite:
The Peter Scott sign is (I think, I’ve not been in Hawick since March) still there, and it’s glorious. This window sits opposite a flight of stairs leading from the main offices on the ground floor, and studios on the first floor, and this room with the steamers might have been the first room in the main Buccleuch Street building that visitors saw with actual machinery in it. On the way up the stairs, the wood panelling stops, and the glass bricks finish, the handrails and the lino tiles get a bit grubbier, and you enter the real working parts of the factory. Confronted by this shadow of that big swirly S for Scott, it stirs something in me of how this place feels from the inside, and looks from the outside. Something more eloquent to be written about this later.
This one has St. Mary’s church as a delightful view through the window. In one of the history books I read on Hawick, St. Mary was the only woman mentioned. Hmm.
And this one is facing the A7. I had lots of fun in here on the unicycle, although the floor is pretty oily, so things got a bit slippy at times. I like the reflections on the shiny painted walls, and all those things in the ceiling, there’s so much stuff in an empty building…
So I’m trailing off because it’s nearly bedtime, but more photos soon! And if I’m not too late to submit an essay to the Callants Club Common Riding Essay Competition, maybe I’ll post that on here, too. It’s all about love, but I’m feeling a little nervous about it (don’t we all?). 💓
Jessie Growden 