No stone unturned

LEAN, tall, soberly suited and looking every inch a Tate curator, Simon Groom, newly appointed director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, shows me into his office.

"You're the first journalist to talk to me since I got here," he says, and if his tone is a little apprehensive, it's hardly surprising.

Richard Calvocoressi is a hard act to follow, having built the gallery from a reasonable provincial collection into one of the prime destinations for modern art, particularly Surrealism, in Europe. How, as they say, do you follow that?

For the past four years, Groom has been head of exhibitions and collections at Tate Liverpool, helping to transform the image of that outpost with a similarly emphatic style to Calvocoressi's imprint in Edinburgh. His wife Sorcha is a curator on the Liverpool Biennale. "She's going to see that through and then join me up here," he says. "I've found a flat in the east part of the New Town, though perhaps I should be living somewhere with more street-cred. Pilton?"

That Groom should be familiar with Edinburgh's social geography is hardly surprising, having studied at Edinburgh University in the late 1980s. What may surprise some is that his degree (a first) was in English literature.

His degree was followed with a first job with the British Council, working in Japan. There is something essentially didactic about Groom. He has the air of an academic, or at least that of a popular English master. The sort of teacher who might capture the hearts and minds of his pupils by explaining passages of Shakespeare or Austen with references to film noir or the Kaiser Chiefs.

Groom's career has been fired by restlessness. The position in Japan had only been for a few months, but bizarrely, during that period he developed a fear of flying. The result was a somewhat Orwellian progress which reveals much about his character. Opting to leave by land or sea, he found himself in Taiwan and subsequently, by a circuitous route, aboard the Trans-Siberian Express. Eventually he landed up in Florence for three years, latterly living in what had once been Napoleon's uncle's house in San Miniato.

"At the time, I thought, 'Does it get any better than this?' I would wake up and throw open the shutters to an incredible view. I was teaching a subject I loved, living in a beautiful country. I suppose if I'd been 45 rather than 25 then I'd have stayed forever."

Italy had awoken a latent passion for art. "I read every book on art history that I could get my hands on and thought, 'No I still don't know enough'." The clear answer was to return to academia and back in London Groom enrolled at the Courtauld Institute to specialise in Renaissance art. A friend suggested that he might be better suited to modern art, and within five years he had gained a PhD on the specialist subject of Michel Tapié and Art Informel.

A chance encounter with Brian Robertson, the ex-director of the Whitechapel, prompted a lasting friendship, and he suspects that it was as a result of Robertson's recommendation that he soon found himself exhibition organiser at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge. The ethos of the collection and that of its creator, Jim Ede, onetime curator at the Tate, was that you cannot separate art from the rest of life.

"That's been the biggest influence on me," says Groom. "Before that I suppose it was Ulysses and Calvino which persuaded me that there might be different ways of looking. The real lesson of Kettle's Yard though was that something as humble as a stone actually had a place in the world. Every single thing I've done since then has been about finding the relevance between different worlds – literature, science performance, poetry, things as apparently unconnected as art and accounting."

While Groom is clearly aware that great strides have been made by the National Galleries of Scotland over the past decade, he believes that there are still possibilities in how they use the collection. "Firstly, I obviously want to add to it," he says. "Specifically work by artists working in Scotland. We need to be able to buy them as they're on the rise. I also want to attract international artists across to Scotland. Culture is vital to the economy of small nations. A nation is only confident when it engages on an international level. And for that reason, we also have to bring the best of what's happening abroad up here. Artists who can form a dialogue with the sort of exceptional talent Scotland has produced in recent years – Nathan Coley, Simon Starling, Martin Creed."

On a wider scale, he views the gallery as a national resource. "I don't want it to be simply a venue for a changing exhibition programme. I want to use it for lobbying, agitating, forming collaborations with artists and providing advice. I want to host artists' conventions, to commission one-offs. But firstly there has to be a more powerful lobby to ensure that we are properly resourced and funded. People, and specifically those in power, need to understand that this is about more than art. It's about the way you perceive a nation. About 'branding'. Look at what the cultural sector did for England in the 1990s. 'Cool Britannia.' That's how powerful it can be."

He is aware, of course, of the 'Glasgow Miracle' and still sees Glasgow as pivotal to contemporary Scottish art. But he is also keen to encompass the rest of Scotland: "One of the first things I intend to do is go out there and meet all the artists and dealers and people in the Scottish art world that I can. I want to hear from people about what they think. I know that I will only be able to do that right now, for the next few months, until I become associated with the galleries."

How, I wonder, will his experience at Tate colour his tenure? Could that huge success story provide a blueprint for the future of the gallery? "Tate Modern is the most visited gallery in the world. It's managed to attract huge additional support and create a world-class collection. Having another organisation in Britain like the National Galleries that has a voice and can at times rival that of Tate is vitally important. You need to jolt people into the awareness that the art they are enjoying doesn't come from nowhere. We are surrounded by incredible opportunities. It's about partnerships."

Presumably among these might be closer collaborations with Tate, most pertinently on the planned share of the Anthony d'Offay collection of modern art. For once Groom is cautious, although he does smile: "We'll know for certain what's happening with the d'Offay collection by March."

On another forthcoming project he is more open: "I'm very conscious that 2010 is the gallery's 50th anniversary. I'd like whatever we do to celebrate that to look back over that period but also to imagine what the next 50 years might bring. It's a very exciting moment to be here."

With Groom's arrival, that moment just got more exciting. Perhaps his restless gene has finally found a home.