I'M SORRY, I'm really sorry, I'm really sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I really am sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about that, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I apologise, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, forgive me, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm, really sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...
The apologies are broadcast through 14 speakers hanging from weighing scales of the sort used by fruit-sellers or butchers, which are in turn suspended from the ceiling. As the male voice intones the apologies, the needles on the scales twitch.
This work is part of an exhibition by the Belfast artist Philip Napier which opens in Derry's Orchard Gallery next Saturday. Coinciding as it does with the 25th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the work could hardly get any more site-specific.
The work includes a mobile public address system on a 20-foot high telescopic aluminium frame with large trumpet speakers attached to the top, which also broadcasts apologies.
Napier (31) says he was preparing for the show last June when Prince Charles visited Derry and was handed a letter of protest from the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign. Prince Charles is commander-in-chief of the Parachute Regiment which shot dead 14 civilians in the Bogside area of Derry in January 1972. Napier says the occasion, on which Prince Charles referred to the grief suffered by his own family after the murder of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten in 1979, set him thinking about the function of private and public apologies.
WHILE Derry is the reference point for the work, called Gauge, the notion of making 0an apology is loaded with resonances far beyond Derry city. Napier says he is interested in the "shifting values" of the work, which he is at pains to establish is not an "opportunistic or glib" comment about Bloody Sunday. Like many of his other site-specific sculptures or installations, Gauge is about the social and cultural baggage which viewers bring to it.
Nothing in Northern Ireland, he says, is perceived as neutral. The most mundane objects are loaded with meaning. In other works he uses objects such as old military musical instruments, or bus signs with - place names on them to examine the nuances with which viewers shape, and are shaped by, their environment. Much of his work deals with the subtle trappings of colonialism which pervade all aspects of life in the North.
Napier's own working environment, a huge, draughty and damp studio on the top floor of a run-down former factory in north Belfast, "absolutely informs" much of his art practice, he says. The walk from his home in largely middle-class and sedate south Belfast takes him through the city's commercial centre, which largely resembles any other British city, to the bleak north with its mills and factories, which were once part of Ulster's industrial prosperity but are now little more than relics of its colonial history.
Looking down from his studio, Napier points to different areas, and names them. To many Belfast people, they are instantly recognisable as Catholic or Protestant. The layout of this cityscape, with its clusters of houses, hemmed in by walls which serve as a so-called peaceline, convey a profound sense of stasis. He says he tries to make his work "adequate" to the experience of life in this place where "social theory is played out".
"What's important about here is that, whilst it has unique features, the situation itself is not unique," he says. "That's what allows one to communicate on a broader level, because I think too often the place is articulated as absolutely unique, therefore the rationale that one applies anywhere else couldn't be applied here, and I think if one interprets it as profoundly unique then one isn't dealing with it."
He says he tries to use his work to understand the place, not to illustrate it. "It's trying to find a way through the situation rather than being a victim of it."
Since he graduated from the University of Ulster eight years ago, Napier has exhibited and travelled widely. He participated in last year's L'Imaginaire Irlandais event, represented the UK in the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea in 1995 and Ireland in the XXII Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil in 1994. He recently completed an installation in the tunnels which serve the Republic of Ireland terminal at Heathrow Airport, which will be launched next month by the British Airports Authority.
Napier was one of two artists selected from a national competition in 1994 for a £20,000 public art project planned by Laois County Council. The project was part of the Department of the Environment's Per Cent for Art Scheme.
The selection committee was made up of representatives of Laois County Council and artists nominated by the Sculptors' Society of Ireland, the Arts Council and the Association of Artists in Ireland.
Napier says the council rejected his proposal for the Togher interchange on the Portlaoise bypass five months ago. He says he understood there had been difficulties with the project which was to have been a collaboration between himself, the motorway engineer and the landscape architect.
The competition for the selection of the artists was managed by the Sculptors' Society of Ireland which says it is considering legal action against the council.
Napier's proposal had been to place between 3,000 and 5,000 plastic bird decoys on a set of bars overlooking the road. The work was intended, he says, to convey a sense of "portentousness" and to address traffic travelling at more than 70 miles per hour.
Laois County Council notified the Sculptors' Society of Ireland last August that its technical adviser was satisfied that difficulties would arise in relation to the maintenance, visual aspect and safety of the work. The director of the Sculptors' Society, Aisling Prior, says it received £2,500 from the council for work done on the selection of Napier's proposal. She said the society had invoiced the council for a further £2 500 compensation for Napier for work done to date.
The Laois county secretary, Mr Louis Brennan, says the council did not commission any artistic work. Nor did it enter into a contract with the Sculptors' Society of Ireland or make a commitment for any expenditure to begin on the project.
Mr Brennan says a selection committee was set up to make recommendations to the council which had the final say in the project.
A landscape work, called A Passage Through Time, is now planned for the Togher interchange and the council was evaluating a suitable site for public art which would not be dangerous to road users. He says the council is willing to have further discussions with the Sculptors' Society of Ireland or Napier.
Napier says he is disappointed that the project was dropped and finds the reasons given by the council "not credible". "It was advertised as a collaborative process between the artist, the motorway engineer and the landscape architect but it never developed into one. One feels that at some level somebody didn't like the proposal," he says. "What confidence would anybody have in applying for a reconstituted competition?"
IN Belfast, Napier was recently appointed integrated arts co-ordinator for a £40 million redevelopment of the Royal Victoria Hospital. He will coordinate a team of 12 artists to "write something about what's human" back into the building, rather than simply painting wall murals. The artists, who will be invited to apply for the project in March, will research the site and collaborate with the architects in devising their works.
"What I'm interested in is people dealing with context and some kind of appropriateness to what they are going to do, and the realisation that the hospital is a particular kind of provision and has a particular kind of vision, and it's adding values to the environment, as opposed to just decorating it," he says.
"The whole sense of it is to make it a collaborative process to try to articulate something new for this city and I think that's a terrific opportunity in many ways and I think the Royal Victoria Hospital is a very special and particular institution... It's potentially as big as people's imaginations are and I think that's great, absolutely great."
