KENNY MATHIESON sees some familiar paintings in an unaccustomed setting in Edinburgh.

ANYONE WHO KNOWS the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness will be familiar with their collection of British – in fact largely English and largely linked to the group of artists associated with Cornwall – abstract art bequeathed to the gallery by the late Margaret Gardiner.

Symbols in a Landscape (© Alan Davie, 1994, Oil on board) photographed by Alistair Peebles

That formidable lady celebrated her 100th birthday last year. But passed away recently. She gifted her collection of some 67 pieces to the Pier Arts Centre – and the people of her beloved Orkney – in 1979. She did not consider herself to be a collector, but she was a lover of art and a friend of many of the artists whose work features in her collection.

The collection has been credited with inspiring a flowering of artistic activity in Orkney. As might be expected, it is an idiosyncratic collection reflecting the particular tastes and chance captures of its former owner, rather than a carefully crated collection.

The work includes paintings and sculpture by such canonical figures as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Terry Frost, Naum Gabo, Alan Davie and the Cornish primitivist Arthur Wallis. It is stylistically very much of a piece, reflecting her taste for the St Ives school of rather muted abstraction, and has been temporarily displaced from its Stromness home by the major refurbishment work going on there.

That circumstance has been turned into an opportunity to allow some of the works to be seen elsewhere. The exhibition has already visited what might be regarded as its spiritual home in St Ives, and has also been seen in Cambridge prior to its lengthy stay in Edinburgh.

This is an important and pleasingly idiosyncratic collection even in the partial form reflected here, and this exhibition will provide an opportunity for wider exposure – and in a different context – before it returns to its rightful home in 2006.

© Kenny Mathieson, 2005