Item MS 339/3/5 - Sale of the Attic

Following the death of Marshall Anderson, Peter Haining was born on 01.01.2000. It was his aspiration to spend 10 years living in the south of Ireland where he could experience a Catholic culture, one diametrically and theologically opposed to his Protestant upbringing. In order to establish a foothold there he applied for a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin – IMMA – which at the time was hosting the Monika Kinley collection of outsider art. It was Haining’s intention to research this international collection then carry out his own audit of autodidactic artistic expression in the whole of Ireland, thereby perpetuating research that Marshall Anderson had carried out in Scotland during his decade. Haining laboured as an agricultural worker to raise the money for his journey to Ireland and in March 2000 he left Dundee by bicycle to travel to Cairnryan. He crossed to Larne and began to cycle round the north coast of County Antrim. In Carnlough he came across the eccentric and individualistic installation of Moscow Joe McKinley, which he photo-documented. From this first encounter a relationship was cultivated and a later video was recorded. Haining’s residency at IMMA commenced on 01.09.2000 giving him ample time to zig-zag and detour through the country before arriving in Dublin. When the residency at IMMA ended in January 2001, Haining moved to another residency at Cill Rialaig in County Kerry. Here the doors closed on him in March and with snow on the hills he was back in the saddle, touring and documenting naïve painting and sculpture, as well as decorated cottages, of which the Republic of Ireland had many. These being a distinctive Catholic expression and therefore mostly absent in Scotland. The IMMA residency had been valuable in several ways. It had given a stipend which Haining saved to continue funding his itinerant lifestyle, and it also helped open doors to art organisations, which offered opportunities to give public lectures introducing his research to the general public. In 2004 Haining moved across the border and rented property in Enniskillen. This was paid for by labouring part-time as a gardener. During this period he self-published his research into autodidactic art as a limited edition computer disc. Various problems in the attic in Dundee coupled to a feeling of completion in Ireland urged Haining to return to Scotland. His research was catalogued as "HIBERNIA – Haining’s Irish Biketour in Eire and Round Northern Ireland Arts" – and is now archived at the National Irish Visual Arts Library in Dublin. Back in Dundee Peter Haining took up residence in the Attic Archive where he began a series of works, completing some DATA projects and filing the material relating to the Marshall Anderson decade. He fabricated folios from Anderson’s clothing to contain drawings and constructed boxes from recycled cardboard to secure correspondence, periodicals and publications. He also invested in a powerful desktop Mac with film editing software so that he could produce a series of DVDs based on video footage recorded in Ireland, as well as digitised analogue VHS recordings and current video shot in Fife. The resulting collection of 36 DVDs was boxed in 2 editions and archived in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and Artpool in Budapest. Before finalising his decade on 31.12.2009, Peter Haining had to set in motion the selling of the attic at 37 Union Street, Dundee, and with that resolve the problem of what to do with its multi-various collection of artworks, books, objects, ephemera, packaging, and toys.