New Film Captures Robert Montgomery’s Glowing Poem at Bon Accord Baths

Robert Montgomery’s work at Bon Accord Baths only ran for five days back in April, open to the public for the festival’s opening weekend. If you missed it, this new film from Nuart Aberdeen is as close as you’ll get for now.

It captures the thing that was hardest to describe in person: the sound. Every footstep and breath in that space bounced off cracked tile and Art Deco arches until the empty pool felt closer to a chapel than a swimming bath. Then the camera finds the words, lit from within, four lines stretched across an eleven-metre-wide frame, reflected in the tiles below like the pool had never really drained at all.

“I am not at all religious, yet this installation feels like a cathedral of ordinary hope.”

— Dr Susan Hansen, Nuart Plus coordinator and co-curator

From the whole festival to one room

A week ago Nuart released a film about the festival at large. This one narrows to a single piece, curated by festival director Martyn Reed and built by Montgomery as his most ambitious collaboration with Nuart so far. It was also the festival’s first indoor installation, a departure from the murals that usually make up the programme.

Montgomery trained as a painter at Edinburgh College of Art before moving to London in the early 2000s, where he began making what he calls visual poems: text and image combined, first on paper, then out on billboards and hoardings. He took the language of advertising and used it to say something gentler, or angrier, depending on the piece. This one read like a plea for migrants and travellers, framed as a lesson taken from the sun and the earth.

A building that did half the work

Long closed and left to decay, the baths brought their own atmosphere: peeling paint and that echo you only get in a huge old public building. Montgomery’s frame sat inside all that decline and somehow didn’t feel out of place. In one still from the film, two figures stand in the empty pool below the text, one seated with a cello, both dwarfed by the words above them and doubled in the wet-tiled floor.

Montgomery’s work travels further than most contemporary poetry manages. His piece “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You” has been shared online more than 200 million times, and his output sits in collections from the Albright-Knox in New York to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. He’s represented the UK at biennials in Kochi and Yinchuan, and recently featured in the Louvre’s “La Suite de l’Histoire” exhibition.

The baths are closed again, but the piece itself isn’t done. There’s word it will find a permanent home somewhere down the line. We’ll of course let you know when that happens.