Popped over to Glasgow yesterday to check out the latest exhibition by Mitch Miller at Market Gallery in Duke Street. Mitch has spent the last six weeks making a massive dialectogram of Duke Street. Making a what? In Mitch’s words:
“Dialectograms are large, highly detailed drawings of places, taken from the perspective of those who live and work there, and the person who tries to interpret those perspectives (me). I have been working on dialectograms in various parts of Glasgow since 2009. I collaborate closely with residents, employees, owners, squatters punters and users of interesting spaces in Glasgow. From interviews, photographs, sketches and architectural plans, I try to get as much data about a placed into the drawing as possible. I invent symbols and signs to suit each dialectogram, honing and redoing the image until it begins to resemble something the people who know it best, will recognise.”
The work is stunningly detailed, a mixture of technical drawings, floorplans, social history, comics and whatever else Mitch can add to make a rich, textured drawing of a place. He is a friend and an ex-tutor of mine from Edinburgh College of Art but I would be fascinated by the work even if I had never met him. Mitch kindly let me take a few photos that I’ve posted below but I recommend heading to the gallery to check it out in person, but hurry as the exhibition closes at 5pm on Sunday 16th December. Mitch does hope to show the work again in the future when it should be even more detailed as he apparently has a huge amount of research that hasn’t made it on to the dialectogram yet.
Just realised there is a dialectogram of a fictional place on Mitch’s website, the bedroom shared by the two brothers in James Kelman’s Kieron Smith Boy. It’s brilliant, especially if you’ve read the book.
