Kevin McKenna interviews Gaz Mac: 'Chance moment changed my life'

“He took it home and showed it to his son whose bedroom in East Kilbride I ended up painting. I did the work whenever I could get the odd day off from the buses,” he says. “Because of that chance conversation I ended up going to Cardonald College.”  

That brief encounter at the journey’s end of a corporation bus did more than introduce Gaz Mac to his destiny. It also set in motion a chain of events and opportunities leading to the flowering of SWG3, the ground-breaking art and events complex down at Yorkhill, the unsung district of Glasgow that runs alongside the Clydeside Expressway and which usually gets overshadowed by boutique Finnieston.  

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How to describe the scale of this bristling space? You’re tempted to reach for a word like ‘sprawling’ but such a word implies something unlovely and indiscriminate. There’s certainly chaos here, but it’s the sort of glorious chaos that disrupts old orders and challenges tightly-controlled formulas.  

Together with Andrew Fleming-Brown (aka Mutley) they set up on the old Clydeside Galvanisers Yard nearly 20 years ago. Further back in its history it had been a cooperage. Since then, this place which once thrummed with the creativity of older industries, has become one of the UK’s best-known hubs of living art. The old industrial yard has become Yardworks, a place where gifted young creatives can bypass the formulaic elitism of the art school and realise their gifts.  

Gaz Mac acquaints me with the concept of the ‘graffiti jam’. This is where throngs of graffiti artists can bring their carry-outs and paint the walls to the drum and base beats of invited deejays. “We held our first one not long after we acquired this place and, when I saw how successful it was I decided to stay and I’ve been here ever since.” 

SWG3 now provides studio space to a community of artists and creatives. Some of them are street artists, others deploying older forms of expression such as photography and sculpture. “I’ve got room for 125 artists here, but there are another 500 desperate to get a space here.”  

Effectively, what he and Andrew Fleming-Brown have created is an alternative Glasgow School of Art. But this is one that provides opportunities to young people whose gifts didn’t quite extend to getting ‘A’ passes in their Highers or who thought that ‘good draftsmanship’ was being proficient at jumping over black and white counters on a chessboard.  

Gaz Mac (Image: free)

“I remember going to the Glasgow School of Art round about the early 1990 after a friend of mine said that they were hosting an open day where kids like me could bring our portfolio. 

“I walked into this room in the Mac building and there were three of them sitting there, two men and a woman. I felt like an alien. My portfolio consisted of cardboard tied up by shoelaces and with all my grafitti. 

“And I remember the woman openly laughing in my face at the state of my presentation. I didn’t know how to present myself because no one told young people like us how to present ourselves at times like this. To them, we were just scum from the schemes. It was just snobbery and these places are still full of it.” 

We talk about how difficult it can be for young people from comprehensive schools in Scotland’s edgier neighbourhoods to access the country’s elite and most sought after university courses. Lacking polished vowels or internships at daddy’s friend’s legal practice or a year out feeding yaks in Kathmandu, too many are deemed not to be the right sort.   

“We now have a graduate programme. We go round universities and art schools and pick out students we think can benefit from being here at SWG3 and we give them a design studios and desks.”  

He wants Yardworks to embrace all facets of art, but without ever forgetting it’s fundamental mission, to provide opportunities for those who either didn’t know they had an artistic gift or had been discouraged from realising it. He talks of the 14-year-old who turned up one day and said he wanted to be a painter and decorator when he left school. “That wee guy is now 19 and working with me. He’s a trained graphic designer now.” 

Down below us in the yard itself two young lads, perched on hydraulic lifts are covering over some vibrant wall art with black paint. I ask Gaz why they’re doing that. “Well, that’s been up for a wee while now, so it’s time to paint something fresh and give someone else the chance to display their talents. I try to encourage everyone not to get too precious about their murals.  

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“We try to keep everything fresh. Opportunity, opportunity, opportunity.” He repeats it like a mantra. He points to the spray-painters on their platforms, creating space for someone else’s art. “See that big guy,” he says, “he’s a fantastic environmental artist. And see Eric over there: he did an amazing wee project at school. He comes from Cumbernauld and he was whitewashing abandoned, knocked-off motors and then painting his own designs on them.  

“What we’re trying to do here is about realising people’s dreams: people who maybe just wake up and say ‘I’m dying to paint that,’ or, ‘I’d love to paint that on a wall’. If they come to me with that Idea I go: ‘great; what’s stopping you’? 

“Some of the graduates to whom we’ve given studio space will tell you they’ve learned more here than they ever learned in four years at art school. You’re out there on the streets trying to sell your talents; working at it, you know in that working-class way, just trying to get a job wherever you can. And so they become more diverse and more intuitive to what’s actually happening in their neighbourhoods and their communities and in their own city.” 

The old process of galvanising is designed to protect steel and iron by placing them in a zinc bath to prevent rusting. This old yard which extended the life-span of metal is now applying something that might be described as punk galvanising: nurturing and reinforcing the artistic gifts of those who might otherwise never have had the chance.   

Gaz remembers old conversations with the galvanisers when he and Andrew Fleming-Brown first moved in here. “I got to know them really well and they showed me how the galvanising process worked. So I said: ‘Can I paint some of your walls?’  

He still chuckles at their response. “Aye, batter in wee man.” It could be painted as a mission statement in big, fat, curly 10-foot letters over the entrance to SWG3. Except they wouldn’t use a phrase such as Mission Statement in a place like this.