The Arts Diary: Gavin Evans | Another Dean gallery | Appealing design

WANTED: about 100 naked people, in Marchmont, Edinburgh, on Wednesdays between 7pm and 10pm – though not all at once.

The professional portrait photographer Gavin Evans’s (clothed) subjects in the past have included David Bowie, Björk, Sir Ian McKellen and Daniel Craig, and for five years he’s been pursuing his Touch project from the Institute Gallery on Roseneath Street, where he shows and curates.

“[Touch] came about from me purchasing a small digital pocket camera,” he says. “I wondered what I could use it for, and I have been playing with the notion of personal space. I started including my hand in the photographs, and I asked all the participants to take my hand and place it in the photograph with them.”

He has produced perhaps a thousand images for the project, all with his arm and hand stuck in. Subjects have included 85 Big Issue vendors in Glasgow, whom he noted almost always kept his hand at arm’s length. He has also photographed the Argentinian artists in the show Fuerzabruta, which came to the “black tent” at the Fringe a few years back. About half, he noted, put his hand in their mouths.

For his Fringe 2012 exhibition, Evans is going one step beyond. “It has always been in the back of my mind to ask the further question, which would be for people to reveal themselves and remove the last vestige of protection of their personal space, which is clothing.”

He’s putting out a call for 100; he’s done 15 nudes already, and calls them “the best results I’ve ever had”. He’s keen to bank the images before the Fringe, though may continue during the festival, where nudity, as we know, is frequent in comedy and serious theatre alike. He asks those interested to e-mail [email protected]. No jokes about keeping your hands to yourself.

Another Dean gallery

Nearly 20 years ago the Glasgow artist Douglas Gordon unveiled 24 Hour Psycho, an art installation that became synonymous with the artist’s work. It involved Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho slowed down to run at about two frames a second, over 24 hours. Gordon won the Turner Prize in 1996. This month, as part of Basel 2012, the contemporary art fair that is a giant date in the European art calendar, the Gagosian Gallery is showing a 2011 work drawn from 1955’s Rebel without a Cause.

Henry Rebel: Drawing and Burning was made in collaboration with James Franco, the American actor best-known for his role as Harry Osborn in the Spider-Man films, and actor Henry Hopper, whose father Dennis Hopper had one of his first roles in the original film alongside James Dean.

In Gordon’s film, Henry Hopper enacts two scenarios cut from the film’s original screenplay. In the first, he gives a performance as a young man burning alive from the inside. In the second, he repeatedly draws on his own body with a red marker, in what’s seen as a metaphor for trying to obliterate his own identity.

Appealing design

Last November this column detailed architect Richard Murphy’s designs for a “stealth Broch”, a generous new-build five-bedroom home, cunningly concealed within a circular stone wall in historic landscape near Earlston, in the Borders.

It won the blessing of Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud, owner of a 15th-century farmhouse in Somerset, who wrote it up as “a beautiful example of landscape and architecture fully integrated”, saying it deserved to get built.

Historic Scotland’s Dr Iona Murray, who apparently deals with scheduled historic monuments, also described it as a “sensitive and carefully considered development”, though the agency’s approach to development has been under a bit of scrutiny of late.

None of this washed with Scottish Borders Council, who turned down the planning application for “Knock Knowe”. The design team, including landscape architects Urban Wilderness, have relodged the application, with an appeal hearing on Monday. They claim it will restore a planned late 18th-century landscape, and may seek to get some of the estimated £360,000 cost of the landscape restoration from the National Lottery. The BBC, they say, has been filming the project as a case study for a documentary on the Scottish planning system to air in January 2013.