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The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art (HICA)
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View of HICA
The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art (HICA) was founded by Geoff and Eilidh Lucas in 2008. From 2008 to 2016 the project formed an extensive artwork operating as an artist-run gallery, located in the hills close to Loch Ness in the Highlands of Scotland. As such, it considered the nature of the ‘concrete’, exploring ideas of materiality and the history of Concrete Art to reflect generally on our relation to Nature: HICA’s exhibition programmes were devised through this focus while the activity of working with other artists to present exhibitions provided instances through which to consider the ‘concrete’ results of the project’s engagements.
By these means HICA considered our subject/object relations, what a current and consistent understanding of a ‘concrete’ art might be, and how an examination of artistic activity could lead to a better understanding of the potential for living sustainably. While this phase of the project, as artwork, ended in 2016, the HICA organisation is still maintained and HICA’s curatorial activities continue. More details on the HICA organisation and project can be found here: www.h-i-c-a.org HICA exhibitions page: www.h-i-c-a.org/exhibitions HICA publications page: www.h-i-c-a.org/publications Examples of HICA projects and exhibitions: 
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Daniel Spoerri exhibition at HICA
Detail of the installation |
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Liam Gillick, 14 April - 6 October, 2013
From Fredensborg to Halen via Loch Ruthven: Courtyard Housing Projections, 2013 Digital print series, each 42 x 59.4 cm |
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Richard Roth, 1 May - 5 June, 2011
Vernacular Modernism, detail of installation (colour chart) |
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Jeremy Millar, 2 May - 6 June, 2010
Still from Preparations, 2010 |
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Geoff and Eilidh Lucas have considered HICA’s relational activity in terms of a ‘gardening’ process: individual decision making as involvements with people and with things, which act to form, or obstruct, basic symbiotic relationships. This process logically includes all interactions with the project, no matter how slight, as ‘concrete’ activity shaping the overall work.
Nominating this as a gardening process stresses the relation of the ‘gardener’ to the resulting ‘garden’ (in whatever form it takes): involvements that may be understood to reap what is sown, drawing an immediate parallel to the activities of artists, in forming individual artworks, and presenting exhibitions. As a vital element within the life of the HICA project, Geoff and Eilidh Lucas maintained a vegetable plot adjacent to the gallery as an ongoing statement of this parallel, counterpoint to the exhibition space, and a site of general reflection on these processes. (Geoff and Eilidh Lucas jointly kept an allotment for some years prior to running HICA, and continue to maintain an allotment as part of their EQ project, in France.) |
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View of the HICA vegetable garden
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The gardening comparison further enabled HICA’s reflection on the nature of the ‘concrete’ in drawing a parallel to plant physiology: considering how plants integrate environmental information without neural networks highlights a level of communication which we may also experience, and may be constantly immersed in, in our involvements in these relational processes and in our general negotiations of our surroundings.
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Haroldo de Campos
Cristal Forma, 1958 Presented as vinyl lettering on glass as part of HICA's 2011 exhibition Grow Together: Concrete Poetry in Brazil and Scotland |