Best in show

“I have a very personal and immediate connection with this piece of art because I helped make it to the Turner Prize-winning artist’s very precise specifications.

After having the vinyl text made to his exact instructions, we drew around the outline of the letters and coloured them in – directly on to the gallery wall – with a biro.

You can see the pens lying at the base of the work because Gordon’s requirements also stated that each one, which had to be a blue Bic by the way, should be simply dropped on the floor when it ran out to become the misery of the artwork.

Two of us carried out the work for a couple of hours a day the week before the show opened. It wasn’t too bad – we’re both fairly tall and while we needed a ladder to do the “I am” lines, we could actually sit on the floor for the “misery” bit.

All this had to be done, of course, while maintaining the day job, which is fairly typical of anyone who works in a small cultural heritage organisation. This morning, for example, I was trying to fix a faulty credit card machine while the other day I had to get a bird out of the museum cafe.

The exhibition is with us as part of the Artist Rooms scheme designed to enable small regional museums and galleries to show the range of work of an artist.

Gordon is probably better known for his video installations but this work is one of an 80-part series, which includes one vast text piece that names all the people he has ever met.

The show also provided us with the valuable opportunity to tap into the Generation programme, which is celebrating contemporary Scottish art this year.

Thurso is the most northerly town in mainland UK, with a shrinking population standing at around 7,000. The museum opened five years ago in the old town hall building and brought together the old library, a collection that hadn’t been displayed for years and the contents of the nearby Dounreay facility visitor centre.

We tell the story of the area from fossils to Picts and Vikings to the development of nuclear research.

We have around 70,000 visitors a year, including people who are en route to Scrabster for the Orkney ferry and a lot of “end-to-enders” arriving in the top corner of the country. There’s a lot of local support so we like to keep things fresh for those people, too.”

Artist Rooms: Douglas Gordon runs until 1 October

Beki Pope is the centre manager at Caithness Horizons