Transforming the Built Environment

ALISTAIR PEEBLES reports on Marian Ashburn’s ‘Cupola’ in Stromness

Marian Ashburn © Alistair Peebles

AFTER A YEAR of planning, a fortnight’s work, and for a few days only, the long gallery of the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness was transformed last November into a scaled-down version of the Pantheon in Rome – a pillared cylinder beneath a tall cupola.

This trompe l’oeil installation was designed and painted by local artist Marian Ashburn, and it showed many of the qualities characteristic and highly prized in her more conventional (that’s to say two-dimensional) paintings and drawings.

Her previous subject matter has included Italian architecture as well as the architecture and space of her native Stromness.  If now, as she says, she is planning to move on to other source material, it’s fitting that the turning point is marked with those two areas of interest being brought together in such an imaginative, thought-provoking and surprising way.

'Cupola' by Marian Ashburn, Pier Arts Centre, 2004 © Alistair Peebles

Her previous subject matter has included Italian architecture as well as the architecture and space of her native Stromness.  If now, as she says, she is planning to move on to other source material, it’s fitting that the turning point is marked with those two areas of interest being brought together in such an imaginative, thought-provoking and surprising way.

‘Cupola’ provided a remarkable interpretation of the gallery interior, one that was marvelled at by all who were lucky enough to see it in the brief time before it was struck, like a stage set, to make way for the next show.  That next show was in fact the last of the annual Christmas exhibitions to be held at the Pier before the Gallery closed for its own architectural transformation and redevelopment.

It was no coincidence that the idea should have come to Marian at this stage in the Pier’s history – and it’s an idea and now a memory that we can set in the context of the major works soon to get underway there.  Marian has been around long enough to have known the present buildings in their previous life, and while we’re talking about transformation, real or illusory, it may be worth recalling that the room which she painted was previously a coal store, and before that a recruiting base for the Hudson’s Bay Company – and of course the pagan Pantheon that she painted inside it was itself made into a Christian church in the 7th century.

“Marian told me that it was the proportions of her own sitting room at home on the outskirts of Stromness that gave her the starting point.”

That church is named Santa Maria Rotunda. The appearance of roundness in a projecting pier gallery gives rise to thoughts that something female is perhaps being asserted, or at least stated.  I’m not quite sure how to understand the significance of this as regards the experience of being inside the space – certainly it felt shadowy, ambiguous, joyful and mysterious, and it asserted itself, so to speak, as a filled environment – quite different in so many ways from the careful clarity of the usual cuboid whiteness, testingly austere as that environment perhaps necessarily is.

Cupola by Marian Ashburn, Pier Arts Centre, 2004; detail © Alistair Peebles

I never had the chance to see Anish Kapoor’s hugely female installation at Tate Modern, for example, but distinct as those two works may be in all sorts of ways, they do share a concern with intense colour, the vibrant energising of a masculine post-industrial space, and also, as I say, roundness.

Marian told me that it was the proportions of her own sitting room at home on the outskirts of Stromness that gave her the starting point.  “It’s like living in a pancake,” she said, and so she had begun to wonder how to create a feeling of height.  Thus the cupola, and therefore the circular arrangement of pillars.

It’s interesting in the context of the previous paragraph that the concept began in a domestic space, but let’s move on to another quality suggested by “roundness” (and by the idea of transformation) which I think is a vital characteristic of Marian’s painting and drawing generally – the idea of seeing around things, or as she herself memorably expressed it, “catching the buildings on the brink of moving.”

“When you’re drawing from life, you can move and suggest what it’s like to look from a different angle – the origins of cubism lie in that.”

The built environment is where Marian has always found the subjects for her painting.  After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art, she was initially drawn to Renaissance Italy, the source of most of the painting, sculpture and architecture that is close to her heart.  Her enthusiasm was fired early on when as a pupil in Stromness Primary School, a student teacher spent a lesson describing the glamour of exploration and discovery at that time.

Stromness, she felt, had been given “blanket coverage” by other local artists – “it was hard to see it in your own way” – and the delicacy and lightness of the architectural forms she found in Florence seemed to answer her need for a sense of space manageably and meaningfully structured.  (She still feels she could never deal with more open landscape.)

Later, of course, she returned to Stromness as subject matter – with a clearer understanding of its potential, and a sense of excitement in “getting solid, massive structures right, just as with the delicate pillars and twirls of Florence.”

When Marian described her approach towards her work as getting as close to what she saw as possible, I could understand what she was saying.  She has very acute powers of sensitive observation.  But when she continued to say she tried to make the pictures as “deadpan” as possible, it seemed she must be talking about some other painter.

How could that intention possibly square with even a glance at these mobile, animated streets?  It was when I pressed her on this that she voiced the phrase about trying to catch the buildings “on the brink of moving”.  It’s the observer that’s on the brink of moving, of course, but it’s that power of observation and representation that she has as an artist that transfers the sense of movement to the buildings themselves and gives them life.  As she went on to say, “When you’re drawing from life, you can move and suggest what it’s like to look from a different angle – the origins of cubism lie in that.”

Prosaically and motherly enough, it was walking around Stromness with a pram that allowed her to notice these qualities in certain parts of the town.  “As you move around,” she said, “the shapes change in relation to you and to each other, pre-empting the change in perspective as you move in relation to the feature.”  She mentioned a couple of places in particular – the bottom of Church Brae, and the Back Road as you come south past the hyperbaric chamber.

Graham Place, Stromness, Marian Ashburn © Alistair Peebles

For someone whose aesthetic sense is so attuned to work derived from single-point perspective, this is an especially interesting response. Perhaps her collaboration with local drama groups on stage design, as well as giving her the confidence to work on a very large scale, has strengthened her skill in tapping into the expressive power of the multi-point perspective required for that work.

“She’d like to make paintings of some parts of Kirkwall – a much more highly ornamented town than “what you see is what you get” Stromness.”

For another perspective on things, a view of part of her world through the eyes of another keen observer, here is an unpublished poem of John Aberdein’s, with his own e-mailed introduction.

“Marian’s painting, as from a vantage at the top of the lamppost by the Library, looking down on the freshly-desecrated, no-parking-marked street, but of course not desecrated in her transforming painting, and celebrated as such in this poem.”

Dundas Street
(after Marian Ashburn)

A harmless bluesnake
With two yellow bands
Has swallowed the wheelie-bins,
Dustmen, vans.

Raxing and relaxing
Its back-cobbles, it basks
Flagstone flanks
Under an azure sun.

We rest our eyes
On the snake-emptiness,
The snake’s fullness,
Having eaten a street.

Were it to bother
No doubt next would be
That cream-washed house,
That raspberry facade.

But why wake,
What are the demands
On a harmless bluesnake
With two yellow bands?

The endless upheaval and accidental ornamentation of a town too awkwardly made to accommodate all its motor cars – and which of them is not?

Although she has been “lying fallow” for some years, Marian has four large canvases stretched and ready.  She’d like to try portraits, she said with some diffidence.  I told her I could imagine folk beating a path to her door.  She’d like to make paintings of some parts of Kirkwall – a much more highly ornamented town than “what you see is what you get” Stromness.  Her description of one corner in particular, and the unregarded palazzo that adorns it, had me beating my brow when I next passed by.  It really is as she sees it, and I for one can’t wait to see what she makes of it.  (Incidentally, readers in Tain may be interested to know how much she admires the renaissance façade of their own St Andrew’s Kirk.)

One of the first things that Marian said to me after this show was in regard to an exhibition at the Loft Gallery in St Margaret’s Hope last year.  The work of Carol Dunbar and Morag Tweedie had to do with rents and tears, seams and the fullness of empty spaces.  Marian had noticed a gap in the carpet there, and saw how that became worth noticing.  As she said, “The art on show alters your perception of the space.”  How true that is of the work she did at the Pier Arts Centre, and how true it is of the way you see the spaces you’d taken for granted, that she moves into art in her paintings.

© Alistair Peebles, 2005