Review by Peter Urpeth
Sail Loft Exhibition
11 Nov 2005 in Outer Hebrides, Visual Arts & Crafts
An Lanntair, Stornoway, until 2 December 2005
Moira Maclean's exhumed wallpapers.
MANY MOONS BACK Samuel Johnson held that “when men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land”, and over the years the truth in that statement has barely waned.
While the material qualities of Johnson’s ‘sea-life’ may be changed forever, in spirit nothing has changed. To this day, once acquired it is very hard to shake off – and Lewis men know this as well as any. The losing of the urge for the sea would be like trying to stop the tides themselves.
The liking is for the draw and break of a life given to the perpetual experience of movement and change; of going on from port to port; the new and the revisited; the experience of endless horizon – the experience of vastness and elemental power, it all finds its way into the blood.
But even the most hardy and committed of seamen have to come a shore at some point! Hence, in one way at least, the outcome of the Sail Loft Project has been to make a permenance out of the artifacts and accoutrements of that restlessness – and to render new and unfamiliar the once stoic surety of domestic interiors.
This exhibition works because it combines the opposites and the extremes of its own materials.
This project, in its grasping of what remained in that building (the former Sail Loft in Stornoway), records and preserves in spirit the unique interface between permanence and impermance, restlessness and the settled way, as though the thoughts and feelings of men could somehow cross the material barrier from mind to matter and drench the physical with the salt of memory and experience: life the hard way, without vanity.
Under the sensitive and watchful eye of project maestro Ian Stephen, the team of artists, including Lewis’s own Moira Maclean, Carina Fhinn from Sweden and Mikko Paakkola from Finland, set to with the materials yielded-up by the Sail Loft and with materials associated with its life, and the result is an exhibition of stark and engaging drama mixed with fragility and constant surprise.
First then, the paintings of Mikko Paakkola – paintings and hybrid works on sail cloth that are vast in scale – an Atlantic storm of oils and grit textures that brood on opposite walls of the new An Lanntair gallery. Their theme is that of the sea and its elements.
A catastrophic storm hangs silently on the horizon but is it looming or waning, is it coming or going, have we survived its force are we in its path? Somewhere in its threat of cloud is Turner’s ghost and Blake’s vision, and in the roughtness of those dark bars of colour there’s Rothko and his emotions, the destructive density not of lead but of mercury.
And for all the ambiguities of time in Paakkola’s work, this exhibition works because it combines the opposites and the extremes of its own materials. Moira Maclean’s exhumed wallpapers (delicate as the wings of pinned butterflies) mixing with the coarseness of Mikko’s sail cloth – and how fickle the vanity and pride of the land life looks in that company – the beauty queens and coy pin-ups with the dirt wash of Baltic mud.
Think not of this as three or four artists. Think of it as an installation – a completeness through and in its parts that tells a story in the recovery and reinvention of artifacts.
© Peter Urpeth, 2005
