The HICA gallery's location, at Dalcrombie, Inverness-shire
The Highland Institute for Contemporary Art (HICA) was established in 2008 by the artists Geoff and Eilidh Lucas.
From 2008 – 2016 HICA operated as an artist-run gallery, occupying part of a farm building at Dalcrombie, in the hills close to Loch Ness in the Highlands of Scotland. This remote setting provided a very particular context, both for exhibitions and HICA’s concern with researching the history and re-considering the theoretical and philosophical basis of Concrete Art.
Geoff and Eilidh Lucas devised HICA to exist, overall, as an artwork in its own right: HICA took the form of a gallery in order to test responses, as a ‘concrete’ example, and moment for consideration of the meanings it aimed to explore.
Through all its aspects HICA sought to consider what a consistent and current understanding of a ‘concrete’ art might be.
The first five years of the gallery project, from 2008, formed an initial investigative period. The various insights gained from this time prompted the development of a new phase of the project under the title of HICA-HQ, which ran from 2014 to 2016. HICA-HQ saw the testing and clarifying of conclusions drawn from the earlier period.
In the summer of 2016 HICA left the Dalcrombie space. HICA is now maintained as a more dispersed association of artists that works to further develop the ideas which formed the basis of the HICA gallery, and to promote artistic experiment in this area. In particular this work continues through connection to the EQ gallery and project, HICA’s partner space, based in France.
HICA’s current form reflects a consideration of the ‘quancrete’, a term developed as part of HICA’s research and proposed as relevant to understandings of Contemporary and Concrete Art activity. ‘HQ’ stood for ‘Highland Quancrete’, while EQ may be taken to mean Espace Quancrete, or Europe Quancrete, while also referring to the Emotional Quotient as the emotional or aesthetic response implied by a quancrete approach as basic to involvement in the world.
To contact HICA or join HICA's mailing list please click: [email protected]
For more on the work of Geoff and Eilidh Lucas, please see www.geoffandeilidhlucas.eu