Inverness is the place to find some of the most interesting public art projects in Scotland

12.17PM Within 20 minutes of getting off the train, I’m sitting in a cafe with award-winning dance filmmaker Katrina McPherson, half (with her partner Simon Fildes) of the production company Goat Media, based in Glenferness, Nairnshire. They shot their latest film, This Is The Place, a collaboration with leading Chinese choreographer Sang Jijia, in Glenferness village hall and on Dava Moor, against the backdrop of the Cairngorms. It has now been shown all over the world, winning awards in San Francisco, New York and Italy.

Next weekend, This Is The Place will be shown in Inverness as part of Sublime, a packed programme of films being screened in a multi-storey car park in the city’s Rose Street. It is the kind of event which is typical of IOTA, combining work by international artists (Francis Alys, Nicholas Provost), Scottish-based artists with international reputations (Katy Dove, Duncan Campbell, Simon Yuill), local artists, Gaelic shorts, live music and classics such as The Philadelphia Story.

Christie says: “There are practitioners like Katrina who have an international portfolio and are based in the Highlands. They might be better known in Dundee, London or Utah, but they live on the doorstep. We are keen to provide access to that work, and to send a message to emerging artists that it is possible to live here and have an international career.”

McPherson enthusiastically agrees. She directed films for the BBC and Channel 4 before moving to the Highlands 11 years ago, but location is no barrier to her involvement in the international world of dance film. Filming Sang Jijian, who is ethnic Tibetan, against the backdrop of the Cairngorms, she knew at once she had captured a performance resonant with ideas about landscape and belonging. “We knew as soon as we saw the material that we had this really special performance. At screenings, people often ask if we made it in the Himalayas.”

1.05PM Rose Street Car Park. The recently refurbished eight-level space has already played host to a ceilidh, gigs and art projects under the umbrella of IOTA, as well as a performance by Scottish Opera. It boasts remarkably good accoustics and a 360-degree panoramic view from Level 8.

Supervisor Phil Barron is keen to expand the repetoire further. “Because it’s such a big building and it’s publicly owned, we felt it would be a nice idea to use the space for other projects. I think if you’re going to make buildings viable you’ve got to make them try to help as many people as possible. We want this building to be an asset to Inverness and encourage people to interact with us.”

Lorraine Wilson, curator for Sublime, believes the car park is the ideal venue for attracting a mixed audience. “It’s a neutral space, everyone is coming to it from the same starting point. Someone who might go to a cinema but not a gallery, or someone who likes Gaelic music but has no idea about contemporary art, could come together in this unusual place.”

1.54PM Quick stop to admire the new porticos at the Victorian Market in the town centre, the culmination of a long-term IOTA project to raise the market’s profile, working in partnership with its 42 traders. The idea for the porticos, inspired by Victorian lace, originated from a project with socially engaged collaborators B&W Cart, and was realised with the help of Catalan desginer Ivan Flores Clemente, local graphic designer Gordon Robin Brown and Alister MacInnes of graffiti artists DUFI.

2.40PM The Crown Wall, the 275-square-foot retaining wall by the city’s Eastgate Centre, now transformed by an ambitious three-panel art work by Edinburgh-based Mike Inglis. “Some public artworks are more public than others,” says Christie. “This one felt like the whole city was watching what was going to happen.”

“They were!” adds Inglis. “Everybody had an opinion. It was about including people, taking their concerns into account, but at the same time going beyond that and bringing out something of the essence of the place.”

He spent a year working on ‘Cathedral’, which explores ideas of beliefs and values, urban and rural, historic and contemporary, story and myth. The characters in it are based on photoshoots with local young people. “I had a sense that I needed a figurehead, someone to celebrate and sum up the city.” That’s when he discovered the story of “Forty Pockets”, a down-and-out who subsisted on the generosity of local people in the 1950s. The old man, in his bulky coat, occupies the centre of the picture, next to local landmark, the Greig Street Bridge. “He represents a side to Inverness which I found here, it’s a very charitable, hospitable place.”

The reaction to the work, which was unveiled in the spring, has been overwhelmingly positive. At first, traffic on Crown Road regularly slowed down as people took it in. Inglis says: “I thought Forty Pockets might be the project’s downfall - ‘We’ve paid all that money and it’s that old drunk tramp guy’ - but people seem to love that it’s him and that the hospitality he was offered says something about them.”

3.31PM Quick stop at Ig:lu in Church Street, a new arts space created by Graham Hanks, who runs the local free listings magazine, ICA: “We needed more space, so when we moved to this building we kept the top floor free for people to come and use it for creative events.” So far, it has been home to an international exhibition compiled using phone app Instagram, the first ever show by Inverness-based Facebook sensation Chris (Simpsons Artist) and a variety of gigs, including - despite its small size - “noisy, crowd-surfing, sweaty metal”.

4.10PM Culloden battlefield, where IOTA is currently collaborating with the National Trust to create art which helps to engage the local comunity. Artists Catherine Bertola and partnership Graeme Roger and Kevin Reid have been working for the past six months to develop ideas at the site.

But, as Kathleen Boal, outreach manager at Culloden points out, this is a place of many senstivities. “It is a site that evokes very strong feelings. Some people have very clear ideas about Culloden is, or what it should be. Having the right artist to be able to work with those sensitive issues, but challenge things as well, is very important. Doing something at a culturally sensitive site using contemporary art to explore history is a very exciting thing for us to be doing.”

Graeme Roger, who is from Elgin, says: “There’s a weight of responsibility about Culloden. In the playground, we used to play games based on killing English people - until we grew up and realised that battles are more complex than that.”

Walking over the windswept moor in the autumnal sunshine, one begins to understand the challenge facing the artists. The vast burial trenches named clan-by-clan hold the remains of many hundreds of Jacobite supporters. And not only was Culloden a bloodbath which had sweeping implications for Gaeldom, it is also extensively interpreted already in the National Trust’s state-of-the-art visitor centre.

Roger & Reid have made performance and film works on battlefields all over the UK and United States (their new film Trail of Tears gets its premiere as part of Sublime), but this may be their biggest challenge to date. Roger talks about ideas which range from flash mobs to kite cameras, composing a new pibroch and assembling a mass of guitars. “We are interested in the motion of these sites, how the past lingers, rather than explaining what’s going on, or looking at the politics of the site in any way. There are too many ideas attached to the site for us to pick out one to symbolise it. But it was always a place which was of obvious interest to us, a real chance for us to push our practice.”

l Sublime is at the Rose Street Car Park, Inverness, tomorrow until 24 September. Entry is free. For more information visit www.invernessoldtownart.co.uk.