Critical texts are being commissioned at key stages in the project’s research and development. Please visit again for essays that will be added as they are received throughout the two-year project.

Angela Kingston is a curator and visual arts writer currently based in London. Here she looks at the developing research within the project by introducing work and ideas in progress by the artists and collaborators. Angela is a co-editor of the Functionsuite end of project Publication due for completion winter 2005.

Functionsuite core artists Kate Gray and Anne Elliot were commissioned to write this essay by the online magazine STATIC (www.static-ops.com). The essay looks at the Functionsuite project and comments on the ‘them and us’ relationship between the hospital community and artists currently working in that context.

Justin Kenrick is a social anthropologist currently lecturing at Glasgow University and a researcher with the Functionsuite project. Here he examines the role he has within the project by introducing his past work and areas of interest and positioning his methods of research in the context of Functionsuite’s aims, which are to engage and enable mutually beneficial practice-led research and art work.

Moira Jeffrey is a writer and art critic based in Glasgow. Commissioned for the first newsletter of the Functionsuite Lottery-funded project she looked at some of the works made during the project’s pre-lottery funding year of 2002–2003. Jeffrey covers the possible origination of character Long John Silver; Psalm, a collaboration by Paul Rooney and Louise Holden; and watercolours produced by Glasgow-based artist Jane Topping while artist in residence at the Wellcome Trust research unit in the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.

Free Style by Francis McKee was an essay commissioned for the publication and exhibition of the same title: My Father is the Wise Man of the Village – explorations in collaborative practice part of the FUSION project. FUSION was the precursor and experiential armature from which Functionsuite was developed. Copies of the publication with accomplaying DVD can be purchased directly from Artlink, the Fruitmarket Gallery or ordered from your local bookstore.

Co-published by Artlink and the Fruitmarket Gallery, ISBN 0 947912 18 5.