Tim Cornwell: Tartan-clad Scot is a driving force for art

The Edinburgh University graduate is proud of starting her career as a bus driver – steering a publicly funded travelling gallery round Scotland and engaging people who’ve never been to galleries. She was head-hunted for the Sydney job from a leading gallery in Birmingham.

In an interview in London – where she had come to receive her OBE for services to contemporary arts wearing her trademark tartan – she said she hesitates to speak out on Scottish art matters, nervous of butting in.

But she raised serious concerns about the direction of Creative Scotland, warning in no uncertain terms the “jury is still out” on the new culture agency’s approach.

The huge Frieze Art Fair has turned London into a global gathering point in October for the contemporary art world. As well as Macgregor, Scotland’s presence here includes artists like Charles Avery, whose stunning drawings fill a prestigious London gallery just a few years after he emerged as a new name in Edinburgh.

One of those in town for Frieze is Magnus Renfrew, a St Andrews’ graduate who has been director of the Hong Kong International Art Fair since 2007. This year, it featured 160 galleries, half of them from Europe, showing work for the lucrative Asian market.

Macgregor was appointed to Sydney’s MCA in 1999. The gallery, on Sydney’s harbour-front near where the First Fleet landed, was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy, kept afloat that year by a £500,000 one-off grant. The Australian media, echoing British press derision of pickled sharks and sheep, labelled it “the museum that nobody goes to”. Macgregor, who says she’s never lost the bus driver’s sense of the public – opted for a broad programme to win over the sceptics.

She featured the aboriginal artist Tracy Moffat, whose powerful photo-based work included Fourth, about people who came fourth in the Olympic games, and a show of war photographers who worked with the potent Australian author and journalist John Pilger. The contemporary art coming out of Australia, in my view, has a genuine originality that makes it some of the best in the world.

The museum’s major overhaul includes a strikingly modern extension to the building, tearing down an earlier fake sandstone one put up when the museum opened in 1991. Macgregor – in common with the hugely successful building overhaul at the National Museum of Scotland – opted for a local architect. Two new rooftop venue spaces will bring income into the business plan for the project, funded about half and half by public and private backers.

Macgregor’s career is now firmly overseas, but her family is all here. She was approached over running Dundee’s V&A project, but there was too much happening in her current job.

“I’m watching creative Scotland with great interest,” she said. “I think the jury is still out, very much so. I think Scotland has just produced such amazing talent,” she said, having has worked with a lot of Scottish artists – Callum Innes, Douglas Gordon, Christine Borland and others who’ve appeared in her Sydney gallery. She has huge admiration for the new star, Carla Black, and the drivers of new talent around Glasgow and Dundee’s art college and galleries in particular.

But as someone who has worked with and watched public arts agencies in Scotland, England, and Australia, she is worried that Creative Scotland’s amorphous new portfolios have brought the danger of losing specialists able to make the right calls on picking artists and ideas to back, something that has helped Scottish talent make waves worldwide.

Embracing a bottom-up approach, can lack a sophisticated understanding of good artists and ideas at the top, and how they interact with and inspire the public, she suggested. “I think quality is missing from the discussion and it needs to be there. It comes down to judgment, and you can’t tick a box.”