Shetland Museum, Lerwick, until Friday 6 August 2004

French Fancies, Acrylic 80 x 50 cm by Brian Henderson

The Veer North Exhibition in the Shetland Museum Gallery is a real eye-opener in more ways than one. First, it’s interesting to learn that there are enough practising professional artists in Shetland to form themselves into a group and secondly, the range and diversity of the work is exciting.

Veer North had its origins in an earlier project promoted by HI~Arts when Marcus Wilson, the visual arts marketing officer, came to Shetland just over two years ago. A meeting of artists who were invited to meet him sowed the seed which led to the constitution of the group.

At the time of that meeting, painter Ruth Brownlee was already investigating the idea of a web-site for Shetland artists. She, Peter Davis and Roxane Permar are among the founding members who got involved from the start. According to Roxane, Veer North now has a “stable” of twenty artists whose membership demonstrates a commitment to their professional development.

This first exhibition is only a “taster” of what’s to come next month when the group will occupy a much bigger space to display their work in the former Shetland Woollen Mill premises in Scalloway.

The “taster” certainly got me hooked. I’ve been back a few times since the opening because – in what is a relatively cramped space – it’s difficult to appreciate individual works without a return visit or two.

Coming into the gallery, my first impression is of the contrast of hot and cold colours around the walls.  You can almost taste the salt spray in Ruth Brownlee’s mixed media “Summer Gale” and feel the dampness in Peter Davis’s watercolour “Cloud over Whiteness”. Mike Finnie’s gouache “Red Desert” and  Jennifer Perry’s acrylic “Red Sea Sand” evoke the heat of a dry landscape.

These aren’t the only contrasts. Howard Towll’s three monoprints have captured the quickness of gannet, crow and avocet, and they hang alongside Mairi Macdonald’s charcoal of dead birds on a beach.

Veer North doesn’t only include painters. Andrew Graham’s “Reckless Wren” is made of steel and John Cumming has been working in oak. There are also ceramics, silk and a wood/photograph exhibit.  Perhaps the most unusual is Roxane Permar’s DVD of a project she was involved with in Newlyn in Cornwall. Earlier this year, hundreds of people made 1,100 tin rosebuds to commemorate the 1937 journey of the fishing boat Rosebud from Newlyn to London, with a petition signed by nearly 1,100 people calling on the government to prevent their homes being demolished. With archive footage and oral history recordings as well as the film of the art project to watch, it was an absorbing element of the Veer North show.

My own personal favourite is “French Fancies”. Brian Henderson has painted a table-top with the cakes in question, cups, coffee pot and cartoon characters, among them Tintin himself. I’d like to hang it above my mantelpiece and invite every guest to invent their own version of the story in the picture. It’s characteristic of Brian’s paintings that they capture a fragment of a tale.

Brian is one of the Shetland-based artists who’s exhibited outside the islands – as have Roxane, Ruth Brownlee, Peter Davis, James Thomason and others.  The group plan future links farther afield, with Sutherland in Scotland and Faroe to the North already showing interest.

This exhibition has demonstrated the depth and breadth of which Veer North is capable. Next month’s exhibition will be a bigger challenge. It will also be the launch-pad for the website www.veernorth.org.uk.  Watch this space.

© Mary Blance, 2004