Richard Demarco

Richard Demarco was born in Edinburgh in 1930 of Italo-Irish ancestry. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1953. Before he co-founded The Traverse Theatre and Gallery in 1963, he taught as the Art Master at Duns Scotus Academy, Edinburgh. Together with his fellow-founders of The Traverse Theatre and Art Gallery, he founded The Richard Demarco Gallery in 1966 and now directs The Demarco European Art Foundation.

As an artist, he is represented in over 2,500 art collections, both public and private, including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and The Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Government Collection, and the National Gallery of Lithuania.

For his services to the arts in Britain, he was appointed an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1984, and in 2007 he was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE). His contributions to contemporary international art have been recognised by his receiving the Polish Gold Order of Merit (1976), the Caveliere della Repubblica d'Italia (1988), the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres de France ((1996). In 2007, he was awarded Poland's 'Gloria Artis Medal' and in 2010, he received the Grand Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic and the 'Bene Merito' from Poland. In 2012, Richard Demarco was awarded The Order of Merit for Culture from Romania.

Most recently, Richard Demarco has been awarded the Medal of European Citizen of the Year 2013 by the European Parliament.

LECTURE

The Road to Meikle Seggie
The Road to Meikle Seggie is both a reality and a metaphor for the work I have embarked upon since my role as Kingston University's Professor of European Cultural Studies in the 1990s and The Edinburgh Festival programmes I inaugurated from 1972 through the nineteen seventies, eighties and nineties, in collaboration with Edinburgh University. These programmes were conducted not only in Edinburgh in the form of master classes but in the form of expeditions into the heartland of Scotland's cultural heritage leading to those areas of Europe which have influenced that heritage.

Meikle Seggie is the name of a farm but more importantly it is also the name of a lost village which has slipped off all modern maps, like countless lost villages and communities all over Europe.

The Road to Meikle Seggie is intimately linked to the title of the Demarco Gallery's experimental Edinburgh Festival academic programme. This programme was entitled 'Edinburgh Arts' because it focused on every aspect of the arts offered by the Edinburgh Festival's programmes, thus linking the visual and performing arts with literature and even with the interface between art and science, particularly that of anthropology and archaeology.

LECTURE

Room 13
The art and teaching of Joseph Beuys made clear his controversial statement that 'Everyone is an artist'. By that, he meant that everyone is born to be creative.

Ample evidence of this exists at primary levels of education. However, there is little evidence of it at secondary and tertiary levels of education.

This is doubtless due to the fact that human beings are assessed through a highly questionable examination system with a heavy emphasis upon rational processes of thought and all things quantifiable and measured. All this is found within well-worn pathways leading to the well-known, rather than the unknown and unknowable.

Now information takes precedent over creativity, involving new and as yet unexplored methods of investigating all aspects of the universe.

Room 13 has proved to be a phenomenon; it has succeeded against all the odds and flourishes now world-wide, far from its origins in Scotland's Highlands, particularly in the Soweto Townships in South Africa. Room 13 is obviously inspired by Joseph Beuys. It should not be forgotten that he was inspired by the world of Room 13 – in the reality of Scotland's West Highland landscape, the world in which history is co-mingled with mythology in a land of Bardic poetry, the land of 'Tir Na nOg' – The Land of the Every Young – where time stands still and eternal truths are expressed in story-telling.