Robert Montgomery is a Scottish contemporary artist well known for his work in public space. He makes light works, billboard poems, fire poems, paintings and watercolours that brings text art closer to the language of poetry.

This interview first appeared in Issue 04 of The Beautiful Truth. Get your copy here.

Your work has appeared in public spheres from Times Square to underpasses in London’s Shoreditch. What made you want to get your work out of galleries and onto the streets?

I’m inspired by Roland Barthes’ idea of the dominant types of speech in a society. Today, these are the languages of advertising and the news media; they are entirely materialistic and treat us only as consumers or demographics – preying on and enhancing our anxieties.

I wanted to see what would happen if you replaced the place where advertising normally sits, ie billboards, with poetry, with a voice that is emotional, vulnerable or of someone in crisis. Some of my billboard artworks are romantic, like MEMORIES OF MEDITERRANEAN FLOWERS, while others can be quite critical.

Art can be a middle-class privilege; it’s not something everyone has time to do or see. But I realised: you can reach anyone at a bus stop. I wanted to have an audience of ordinary, everyday people and treat them with the respect that the media hasn’t afforded them before.

You used to work in advertising and publishing. How did that inspire you?

We’ve endured a century of advertising that sells us a consumerist lifestyle, and we have accepted it as the only way to live.

During my ten years in the advertising and publishing industries, it became clear to me that the internet was operating primarily as an advertising medium. Digital media owners quickly realised that you make more money the longer you keep people on your site, and the best way to do this was to make people argue. This has, in turn, created more polarisation in our society.

The mechanics of digital media are like an assault on us; information is disseminated so fast and is flattened. There seems to be no tonal difference between a meme, gossip and the tragedy happening in the Middle East; it’s difficult to understand the right level of sensitivity towards anything. Digital media has infiltrated our psyche and put us in a collective state of emotional trauma.

How can we combat the emotional trauma of digital media?

We haven’t yet worked out an armour against the assault of digital media. Should we sometimes shut off our consciousness for our own sanity? I don’t know the answer to that question. But there is something in constantly reminding ourselves that we’re in the real world, on this planet. My light piece YOU ARE STILL ALIVE speaks to this.

A lot of your art is quite hopeful.

I am constantly trying to find hope. Recently, I was contacted by the Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Thangam Debbonaire. She asked if she could get a line from one of my pieces tattooed onto her arm: “Love is the revolutionary energy that annihilates the shadows and collapses this distance between us.” I told her it would be an honour. Seeing humanity in every person – that’s the pole star that we must not lose sight of.

How do we find space for poetry in the city?

That’s the fundamental difficulty of capitalism: how do you keep space to live amid the constant struggle for money?

I think of cities as sacred burial grounds that hold ancient magic. I love the idea of tapping into the collective unconscious, recovering this lost magic, and re-enchanting the city with it. We have to go on an archaeological dig to find what makes the city human.

The light poem BECAUSE THE CITY ITSELF IS SACRED attempts to re-enchant the ancient spiritual history of London in an area that now houses the new Google headquarters – a contrast between the big sheets of grey glass against the sky.

What is the role of art in a polarised world?

At this point, politics is horrendously combative and a completely unsuitable system for tackling the ecological crisis. It requires community-based, multiple-decade-long plans.

Can art single-handedly fix it? No, but it can be part of the wider conversation. In the early Renaissance, medicine was considered one of the arts, along with poetry and music. Medicine was the art form that worked; it saved lives, healed pain, and created civilisations by giving people longer lifespans. Bringing this to the ecological crisis, the people who are really working in the care system for our environment are the heroic figures of our time, not artists.