Reflections is a site-responsive sculpture exploring the Old Royal High School’s architecture, designed to cement Edinburgh’s reputation as the ‘Athens of the North’ in a time of emerging national identities and imperialism and later hailed as an unfit seat for Scottish parliament by Donald Dewar who condemned the building as a ‘nationalist’s shibboleth’.

Archival sound and poetry work commissioned by Kirsten Millar explores the role of the building as a historical spectator. James Barrowman’s poem ‘Three Tragic Fragments, on the theme of invention’ sits in conversation with sound taken from the archival film A Broken Mosaic (1957) produced by the Calton Group. A Broken Mosaic documents the impressions of Edinburgh by a schoolboy looking over the city, both in memory and from the vantage point of the Old Royal High School.

This work was created as part of Hidden Doors 2022.