You can take the boy out of Dundee but culturally speaking, you can’t take Dundee out of the boy and Clive Gillman, about to become director of Creative Industries with Creative Scotland, certainly would not want you to.
“DCA has been part of a new era for Dundee,” Clive explains. “It is now a city that defines and reinvents itself through the arts.
“It’s about creating a city at ease with itself, recognising the right to be ambitious.
“The new job for me is not about leaving that behind but putting what’s been done here in a new context. It’s about doing Dundee on a national scale.”
That’s not a thing that can be forced and Clive is keen to point out that he and his cultural colleagues here in the city have been very much part of a bigger artistic and social picture.
“One of the defining moments of my time here was the City of Culture bid.
“I was in Liverpool at the time its bid for the European City of Culture title was being put together and I would always argue for something like this because it ups the ante.
“There’s been a willingness, an open-ness about seeing and engaging with ideas, not imposing stuff we think people should like because we say so. Dundee is good at that.”
It is not just about DCA, although it has had a major role to play in attracting international attention to the city the Unesco City of Design title, for example. And the former head of the V&A, Sir Mark Jones, said that without DCA there would be no V&A Dundee.
Clive underlines the importance of collaboration.
“One of the things about Dundee that’s often talked about and envied is its ability to collaborate cultural organisations sitting down with the council, the university, community groups, all with aspirations to build creativity within the city and harness that for the people who live here.
“The size of the city allows that, too. That makes Dundee a microcosm of what can be done nationally.”
It’s been an interesting decade for a man trained as an artist who also came to the conclusion early on that culture and the arts had to make a difference to people’s lives.
“I had worked in Dundee, teaching at Duncan of Jordanstone and had admired DCA from afar. When I came to the job, it was very much with the approach ‘Let’s see what the possibilities are’.
“There was no big plan. I’ve never worked on the the basis of seeing a career stretching out ahead of me.
“When I joined it was five years old, a difficult period in the evolution of an organisation or building the initial honeymoon is over, a certain familiarity has been built up and the challenge becomes about how to keep people coming, how to keep them involved with the place, how to motivate staff to motivate audiences. It’s just trying to do everything better.
“We have to listen to what people want locally but still challenge them with brave, bold things that otherwise might not be on their radar.
“Contemporary art can be quite challenging and difficult to ‘get’ but one of the main joys of being here is connecting with local communities and their creativity,” he says.
There’s a story that not long after starting work at DCA, Clive bumped into broadcaster Stuart Cosgrove in the cafe, who told him he was taking on the best job in Scotland.
“I go into a lot of arts venues and some are great but others fail to share why they’re doing what they do. It’s a bit cheesy to talk about core values but it’s about being bold, open, meaningful and magical. Doing that here has shown me what’s possible.”