Jacques Coetzer
Room to Roam
Deveron Arts was tasked to commission an artist to collaborate with the community of Huntly in the re-branding of the town. Jacques Coetzer from Pretoria/South Africa was selected and embarked on a process of collaboration and engagement with the townsfolk, assisted by his wife, Leán and young children, Jan and Juliana. (This - he thought - was particularly helpful because the branding till then was Huntly, The Family Town). Right at the onset of the project, through a schedule of one-on-one meetings arranged with some key figures in Huntly, he joined the social arena of the place. It soon became clear that the town’s identity was one of diversity and of old and new. Jacques started to visualise a constellation of nodes, ranging from physical attributes like the town’s rural setting, the interdependence of the villages in the district and Huntly’s historic architecture in contrast with the new supermarkets. The social spectrum ranged from fairly traditional Scottish elderly folk to a sizable number of foreign migrant workers. This branched visual template led him to a very iconic Scottish symbol, the stag’s antler, as a basis for a logo. The almost over-used icon was reworked into a contemporary vernacular to make a stand in the ‘supermarket aesthetic’ imposed on Huntly in recent years when two retail giants claimed their consumer territories at the main entrances of the town. The antler motif was also included in a new version of the Huntly coat of arms, to revive the area’s historic roots. A breakthrough in the quest for an apt motto/strap-line was made with the rediscovery of the poem Room to Roam by eighteenth-century Huntly-born writer, George MacDonald. The poem was set to music by Mike Scott, lead singer of the folk-rock band The Waterboys in nineteen–ninety and Scott agreed to join the project and interact with local musicians to turn the song into a town anthem. Through this musical interaction over a span of four months, Room to Roam was gradually put out into the public sphere. At a final town event, mainly driven by local musicians, the identity was handed over to the community.
This project was commission by Aberdeenshire Towns Partnership www.atap.org.uk in collaboration with Aberdeenshire Arts Development.