Thinking outside the box — and inside it, too

Dave Rushton is something of a one-man band, and an enterprising one at that. One of the prime movers behind the conceptual art movement Art & Language, a former trustee of Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn (built by the German refugee artist in Ambleside, Cumbria, in 1947), and the founder of Summerhall TV, Rushton has established himself in the Dumfriesshire town of Sanquhar, where he founded the Merz Gallery, named in honour of his German “mentor”. Something of a handyman, Rushton has converted an old abattoir into what he playfully calls MoMA: the Museum of Model Art.

This is, in a sense, an autobiographical venture. Rushton first started making models as a boy, glueing together Airfix kits of aeroplanes, which he gleefully attached to ropeways, before blowing them up with fireworks. He’s moved on from this, creating a series of 1:24 scaled, painstakingly crafted interiors, which reflect his life and the places he has lived. The models are constructed environments contained in enclosed boxes, 6ft long, carefully placed on metal plinths, where viewers sit on chairs and peer through a horizontal slit at the spaces within.

One model is a tenement landing in Spittal Street, Edinburgh. Rushton rented a flat here in the 70s, where he operated a printing press. The adjacent flat was to be rented by the National Front but Rushton mounted a campaign to scupper the their occupancy, claiming the use of the flats as commercial premises was against the tenancy agreement. He won but had himself to move, “hoist by my own petard” as he puts it.

Another model shows the interior of a car factory canteen in Coventry, where Rushton once worked. Peering into the cavernous space, complete with realistic lighting and green and yellow decor, it is difficult not to be drawn in. It’s like being in a film set or, indeed, the place itself. Fiction and representation merge with fact and reality, blurring the line between the thing itself and what is used to represent it.

All of this, somehow, feeds the beginnings of a philosophical journey, where clever tropes and conceits set up numerous reverberating questions about the nature, meaning and purpose of art itself.