Top artists produce work from the ashes of Glasgow School of Art fire

"This is where the urinals were," says the Turner Prize-winning artist as our eyes adjust to the darkness. I can just about make out a row of lockers. Not touched since the day fire tore through Charles Rennie Mackintosh's masterwork almost three years ago and rendered it the building site we find today.

"I remember coming in here when I'd not long started at art school," Gordon says. "It was 1984 and I was 17. I met Alastair Macdonald, who taught first year studies, in here, and I started to apologise to him for being late. He interrupted me and said, 'Listen, son, you're at art school now. You don't need to apologise.'

"That was a great thing to hear. It stayed with me. It was like being given permission to just get on with being an artist."

The Mack, which was completed in 1909, has been sealed off to the public since the summer of 2014 as the painstaking process to restore it to its former glory makes slow but steady progress. The restoration is expected to be finished by the end of 2018. Undergraduate students should be back in the building by 2019.

The fire broke out in the basement on the afternoon of May 23 as fourth-year students prepared for their final-year degree shows. Firefighters were on the scene quickly and around 90 per cent of the grade A-listed building was saved. However, Mackintosh's wood-clad library in the west wing, one of the world’s finest examples of Art Nouveau design and a treasure trove of rare and archival materials as well as original furniture and fittings, was almost entirely destroyed.

Like most alumni, Gordon remembers the profound sense of shock he felt when he heard about the fire. Like many other graduates he was quick to offer help.

We are in the Mack on this cold and damp February morning because Gordon is one of 25 high-profile artists who have created an original artwork from material recovered from the fire. Gordon's creation, A Given, has an estimate price of between £8,000 and £12,000 in Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on March 8. All proceeds from the sale of the work will be donated to The Mackintosh Campus Appeal.

“I agreed to make something and was sent a small section of wood that came from the art school's famous library, which was very badly damaged," Gordon explains.

"I am famous for over-committing to things so it sat in my studio in Berlin for ages, on my desk, next to a classic 1960s ashtray that a friend had given me. The irony!

"It reminded me of my times in the library, where you either craned your neck in order to look up very high, or bent your head to read a book. There is a natural cruciform figure in the wood. When I looked at the pieces of wood, I moved them slightly and realised that it was, indeed, a cross.

"I wanted to use extreme heat in order to make something that would not burn so I decided to cast the wood in bronze.”

Gordon came to prominence with his 1993 work 24 Hour Psycho, in which he took Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film and slowed the frame rate down to extend its running time to 24 hours.

In Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, his passion for music and football merged in a work which frames the movements of footballer Zinedine Zidane from 17 cameras in real time over the course of a single match between Real Madrid and Villareal at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in Madrid in 2005. The soundtrack is by Gordon's friends, the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai.

Gordon, who was born in Maryhill and grew up in Dumbarton, won the Turner Prize in 1996, followed two years later by the prestigious biennially-awarded Hugo Boss Prize for outstanding achievement in contemporary art. Just 10 days ago, the 50-year-old father of two was awarded France's highest cultural honour at a ceremony at the French Embassy in Berlin.

He lives in the German capital with his partner, Israeli soprano Ruth Rosenfield, and their eight-year-old daughter Lily. His 14-year-old son from a previous relationship lives in New York.

The ceremony to make Gordon a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters was attended by close family members, including his mother and father, who still live in Dumbarton, where the family moved when their son was in primary three.

Gordon is the second Scot to receive the award after actor Sir Sean Connery and the whole thing has clearly tickled this one-time punk. "Yes, you need to bow before me," he jokes. "I command it!"

He was first notified of the award five years ago but, as he explains, it took recent political events for him to finally decide he wanted to be given the award in Berlin.

"With the election coming up in France, I thought that with Marine Le Pen in the running for the presidency that I'd rather receive the award under the current administration. Who knows how things will go in the election in April?"

Gordon is a regular visitor to Glasgow and has been much exercised by the independence referendum and last year's Brexit campaign.

"I came back to vote in both," he says. "It has been fascinating watching it all unfold from Berlin. The first thing people there want to ask you is your view on Scottish independence."

His pro-independence position is clear. "Regarding independence, I have a tattoo on my arm that reads, 'We never said no.' It's a tribute to like-minded individuals."

He believes Brexit will harm Britain and Scotland. "I think it could be really interesting if Scotland remains part of Europe."

Gordon is famously one of the busiest artists on the contemporary art scene. At the start of February, he was in Gstaad in the Swiss Alps creating a major public art project with French artist Morgane Tschiember; next week he is installing a major group exhibition at the Serpentine in London and he's also preparing for the prestigious contemporary art event, Dokumenta, which takes place every five years (this year in Athens and Kassel in April).

He is in Glasgow for a couple of days ahead of the screening of his latest film work, I Had Nowhere to Go, at Glasgow Film Festival, a portrait of Lithuanian-born, New York-based Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde cinema. Much of the "action" in the film takes place against a dark screen.

"The only problem I have with it all is the timing," he complains to me. "It starts at 3.15pm and there's a Patrick Thistle match on at almost exactly the same time. It's very frustrating to be here in Glasgow and to miss a match."

After scouting for locations for his next film, he says he will be starting to film soon in Glen Etive in the Highlands, so he should be back in his homeland for more matches in the coming year.

As we walk and talk our way through Mackintosh's maze of steps, stairs and studios, I ask Gordon about his religious background. Going back to the early days of his career as an emerging artist, there has been a tension between good and evil, light and darkness in all his work.

At a major exhibition of his work in Tate Britain in 2010, biblical texts were an integral part of the show. On a lintel in Edinburgh's Inverleith House, which faces an uncertain future as a contemporary art venue, there is an artwork bearing Gordon's text: "I still believe in Miracles."

"What religion do you think I was brought up with?" he asks as we examine ancient layers of students' paint on a Belfast sink. Catholic? "No, Jehovah's Witness," he retorts with a wry smile.

I tell him about growing up in a manse in Ayrshire with a father who looked upon it as an intellectual treat to take on the Jehovah's Witnesses who regularly knocked on the door.

"That would have been viewed as a result," he says. Later, I read in an old interview that his mother became a Jehovah's Witness when he was five years old.

It's only the second time he has been in The Mack since the fire and Gordon is keen to make the most of the privileged access. In some of the studios, charred "remains" of beams and bits of masonry are laid out on the floor like a big incinerated jigsaw puzzle. "I wonder if I could buy some of this stuff," he thinks aloud.

Gordon was a student on GSA's groundbreaking environmental art course from 1984 to 1988. He only spent his first year in the Mackintosh Building before moving with his course-mates to a partially-derelict former girls high school around the corner from the Mack.

Gordon and his fellow students, including Christine Borland, Martin Boyce, Nathan Coley, Roderick Buchanan, Ross Sinclair and Jacqueline Donachie, are all now names in the international contemporary art world but back then they were part of one big gallus Glasgow art gang.

"It was a place of real freedom. I haven't lived in Glasgow for nearly 30 years but it all feels really immediate," he says. "I feel both nostalgic and melancholic at the same time."

Gordon stops at several points as he remembers exactly who he was with and what happened at that spot. We push the door open on Studio 20, with its brass fittings declaring the fact by way of Mackintosh script numerals, screwed on to on the black pock-marked paint on the double doors.

"This is where I used to work," he says. "On this very space we're standing on. My mate Graham Fagen [who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2015] used to work over there, his wife Elspeth over to the side ..."

Later, Gordon leads me into a bone-chillingly cold space with white painted brick walls. "This was where we had our life drawing class. I remember being in here one day in 1985. It was all very quiet with everyone working away drawing the model. I motioned to Graham at one point that I had some news. The Clash were playing in the Rock Garden that day.

"The only sound was several bits of charcoal dropping on the floor as everyone headed for the door down to the Rock Garden in Queen Street."

Today, as a grown-up Douglas Gordon poses for the photographer in among scaffolding in the burned-out shell of Mackintosh's library, the only sounds are the fluttering wings of a passing pigeon and the hum of traffic on the nearby M8.

At a packed-out screening of his film later that afternoon, Gordon tells the audience that the 94-year-old subject of I Had Nowhere to Go, Yonas Mekas, called him on the day he received his Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters award in Berlin.

"He told me, 'Just keep dancing, Douglas.' It's that spirit you find at Glasgow School of Art. It's all about keeping that spirit alive."

DOUGLAS Gordon is among a wealth of internationally renowned artists who created new works from materials recovered from the fire that engulfed the Mackintosh building at Glasgow School of Art in May 2014.

Those who contributed to the project, which will see the works auctioned at Christie’s in London on March 8, reads like a who’s who of contemporary art, with Simon Starling, David Shrigley, Jim Lambie, Martin Boyce, Anish Kapoor, Sir Antony Gormley and the Chapman brothers among the participants, many of whom studied at GSA. All proceeds from the sale will go to the Mackintosh Campus Appeal.

Each artist was sent a different piece material retrieved from the fire, from charred timbers and debris to books and pieces of furniture. In response, they created a diverse and imaginative array of sculpture, painting and drawing.

As well as Gordon’s bronze cross the body of work includes Kapoor’s wood fragments in a red Perspex box and Sir Antony’s charcoal and latex drawing on paper. Grayson Perry, meanwhile, was sent charcoal and created a glazed ceramic urn with the words "Art is dead. Long live art" emblazoned on the front.

Speaking about his involvement, Perry said: “[GSA] is the most famous art school building in Britain. It’s also the masterpiece of Mackintosh so it’s a double tragedy.

“I was very excited when I received the box of charcoal. I had an idea almost immediately and the idea of making an urn was an obvious thing to do; the idea of memorialising or celebrating the difficulty – honouring the wound. It’s something I’m trying to do – move on and make the most of it.

“I really like the idea of using the charcoal from the fire. I thought it was very clever and fresh.”

So far the appeal has raised £18.5m of the £32m target.