The Beat Goes On

ALISTAIR PEEBLES reports on the latest activities of the Pier Arts Centre around Orkney during the extensive refurbishment at the home gallery in Stromness
 

BUILDING WORK continues at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, where significant change is now visible. In the meantime the gallery’s staff, displaced to temporary offices at the South End of the town, continue to make an essential contribution to artistic life in Orkney, and further afield.

The Pier’s own Collection is still on tour, and having visited Tate St Ives, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, it will be on show at Aberdeen Art Gallery in November this year for three months.

More locally, and following its successful collaboration with LUX in presenting Margaret Tait’s films at Orquil Gallery in Rendall during the recent St Magnus Festival, the Pier is to return to the venue later this month to exhibit a new suite of twelve prints by Alan Davie.

The suite, entitled “Etchings 2003”, was commissioned and published by Edinburgh Printmakers, and produced by the artist in collaboration with master printer Alfons Bytautas.

The Pier continues to collaborate as much as possible with other local organisations, hoping to maintain its regular participation in their activities in spite of the closure.

Alfons is no stranger to Orkney, having exhibited here and given classes at Soulisquoy Printmakers in the past. He is highly regarded in the UK as a pioneering expert in new etching techniques. One of the great advantages of these new techniques is that the artist can work with great spontaneity, not on the plate itself, but on the “True-Grain” film positive. This is then used to make a photographic exposure on the plate, which is etched, inked and printed in the usual way.

Born in 1920, Alan Davie is recognised internationally as a major figure in 20th century art, and considered to be the greatest living Scottish artist. He is no stranger to the islands either – his work being represented in the Pier Arts Centre’s Collection, and last featured in Orkney on a large scale with his Festival exhibition at the Pier gallery in 1998. The show at Orquil Gallery will run from 24 September till 22 October.

The Pier also continues to collaborate as much as possible with other local organisations, hoping to maintain its regular participation in their activities in spite of the closure. Support for the Folk Festival, St Magnus Festival and Shopping Week has been included in its schedule this year, and Orkney Science Festival (1-7 September) will see the gallery work with the organisers to turn the street itself into a showcase for their featured artist, Slovenian Teja Krasek, in “Symmetry through the Street”.

Teja is just one of a number of artists and groups of artists to appear during the Festival, with the main local feature being “Wedded”, a new installation at Stromness Library by the family-collective Christil Trumpet.

© Alistair Peebles, 2005