The Loft Gallery, St Margaret’s Hope, until 27 June 2007

Salt in the Bread Broken by Erlend Brown (photo - Alistair Peebles).

A PART apart, indeed, I was thinking, as I drove the longish road to see this exhibition for a second time. Several people I’d asked, including some who live across these causeways or barriers, hadn’t yet been able to visit it.

This was a shame, I thought, though the gallery’s shop was quite busy on both occasions, mostly with tourists, and there was a fairly steady procession of viewers up the spiral staircase to the gallery itself.

How different it might have been sixty-odd years ago, say, when an exhibition in the ’Hope by an artist of the standing of Erlend Brown would doubtless have aroused widespread interest and public discussion.

Sixty years ago this year, according to Erlend’s passport – a copy of which formed part of the (perhaps rather tersely worded) panel of information – he was born in Kirkwall.

The panel also lists details about important exhibitions, dates, places (Kirkwall, Aberdeen, Stromness, Edinburgh, Hombrechtikon, Zurich, Glasgow) and it presents three passport portraits that catch him at different points in his life.

Clear-eyed youth, rather wild-seeming fifty-year-old and, in a photograph taken of him very recently, possessed of an air of relaxed urbanity. Pages stamped by officials in New York, Jamaica and Israel have also been copied and collaged together with the rest.

Collage and assemblage are key strategies in Erlend’s approach to making art – but I was wondering as the miles ticked by if it was possible to describe these islands themselves as having been collaged together. (Churchill was an artist too, after all, though better known for watercolours.)

One is driving over history, certainly, in going from St Mary’s to St Margaret’s Hope, and like history, collage gathers together the disparate bits and makes them first a contingent and then perhaps a necessary whole.

Something very like bare contingency still clings to these barriers, however. Perhaps that’s why we don’t refer to them as causeways: at some level we actually prefer to think of them as barriers. And then there’s the apt anomaly of the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm: artifice and invention; displacement and exploration.

Erlend too is an artificer, a maker of things. Everything counts, however roughly it might at first seem to have been included in the composition (as in the reverse of the hinged panels of the Lighthouse triptych, or the scars of breakage on a bit of painted wood in the admirable assemblage “Backpacker”), or indeed however adroitly everything fits (as in the positive and negative shapes in the triptych).

A deliberate but still edgy roughness is characteristic of much of the work on show, and like everything else, including the components that are much more finely carved, this is calculated (in the best possible sense of that word) for its effect. The title “A part APART” refers also to the physical construction of many of the pieces – where part of it is still in a sense separate from the rest.

The colours are wonderfully well handled, and satisfyingly distributed across the room – orange, blues, browns, occasional greens, yellow, cerise and cardinal red. The substrates are specified exactly in the labels: BFK Rives, cartridge paper, carved mdf, canvas; as are the techniques: photec, mezzotint, aquatint, acrylic, oil etc, as though to help anchor shifting ideas in the material facts.

Erlend has operated for many years at a high level of accomplishment in his art, and we’ve seen work no less skilful and interesting from him before, but this kind of work – in paint, assemblage, printmaking – has not really been seen often enough in Orkney in recent years.

It was interesting to learn of the coincidence that this exhibition arrived in Orkney on the same ferry into Stromness that was carrying home a large part of the Pier Art Centre’s collection. (Erlend was of course the first curator of the Pier Arts Centre, from 1979-1990.)

Transition and occupancy – the passports, names of places, etc, and works such as “Intent on Tenting”, “Backpacker”, with its bundle and breadboard, the Georgically-entitled “Salt in the Bread Broken”, with its own breadboard mirroring (as it were) the backpacker’s, and the slips, boat shapes, shearing shed and U-turns – these are themes that most impress the viewer.

One thinks not just about an individual’s history and how that’s rendered in a shared visual experience, but about all the material – emotional and physical, historical and imagined, calculated and accidental – that has to go into a piece of art if it’s to tackle not just the way something looks but how life feels, and say something interesting (and often funny) about the ways we all have to take to get from one place to another.

If you do make it to the exhibiiton in its final days (it runs until 27 June, one day longer than initially advertised), then leave plenty of time for your journey to the ’Hope, and to absorb what you may yet find it worth travelling to see there.

© Alistair Peebles, 2007