Porteous Brae Gallery, Stromness, until 23 August 2007

John Cumming.

ALISTAIR PEEBLES has the slightly stunned expression of a man who is living in interesting times. He’s just been to read his poems with the Shore Poets in Edinburgh, under the auspices of the George Mackay Brown Fellowship; he’s cogitating the possibility of a new small press for Orkney – not before time, as we’ve lots of writers who need a platform; and he’s curating a neat little gallery, situated in Stromness, on Porteous Brae, where the fish shop used to be.

Once upon a time, when I was wee, I used to have to go to this shop for haddock on a Friday, and my mother would say, “Mind and watch in case Margaret has her thumb on the scales.”

The space has been reinvented now, and there’s no sense that you might be sold short. In the back shop, there’s a book-binding file, a breath spray which will make you understand modern art instantly, a Brae Badge or an Alec Finlay pencil to buy – fine offbeat postcards, and work by local artists.

The current exhibition (there’ll be a new one every couple of weeks) is the result of a Triangle Trust Residency on Tanera Mor in the Summer Isles. John Cumming’s work is well known here – he engages, and baffles, and engages again. You always have the sense of a dynamic development – even when sometimes you’re left behind.

But the new element for him has been the sense of co operation with the other 19 artists participating in the workshops at Tanera Mor. Shiltron is a barrier of spears (it’s what did for them at Bannockburn). The horse, it’s said, will withstand all manner of arrow showers, but even the bravest one draws the line at the Shiltron.

And indeed, these turf formations Cumming has created, which sit on the gallery floor, have a dugged look about them – like Highland cattle. I first saw them from above, in the artist’s garden, surrounded by stones; there, they looked like some sort of Buddhist meditation, cut through by Scottish-ness.

In the Gallery, they lose a little of their majesty – they need to be appreciated at a distance, and one finds oneself worrying about who is going to water them. But then – excellently – the animated film takes over, and we see them dotting about the landscape like Wombles, or grass skirts with no ladies in them – and, from being mulish and stubborn, they become lightsome, and frolicking.

It’s a funny and clever transformation tale. Then, you realise, we are being invited to meditate on Scottishness, landscape, and identity. And on who is going to be doing the watering.

There’s a lot of Zen about, in this space. Triangle’s philosophy of allowing creative folk from various disciplines – in this case, poets, instrument makers and visual artists – to come together and see what happens works like the principle of expanding savouriness in Chinese cookery.

The more you put in and the longer it simmers, the richer it will be. There’s a 50’s melanine cup feel to the watercolours; they’re fine, but they pale in comparison to the ceramics, in raku clay, sawdust fired, which are smoky, peaty, earthy and sexy.

You want to pick them up and feel them all over. They really inhabit the territory Cumming talks about – “the tideline…the twigs and branches that the sea had cast up.” I’m less grabbed by a blurry film of folk holding their breath until they can’t any longer – of course you’re busy thinking ah, it’s a metaphor about stress, or extremes, or something.

Then you think, well really it’s just a lot of folk with time on their hands holding their breath and making us all watch it so we can search for the Deep Meaning. Round the corner, though, I’m grabbed again about a meditation on the life and importance of the puffin – inconsequential, then deep, then a bit ditzy.

That pretty much sums the whole exhibition up, in fact. Sometimes ditzy. Sometimes deep. Sometimes pointless. But you pick up your messages and go back down the Brae and the tough wee turf with the twigs shot through it sticks with you. Then you think – it’s a good thing the fish shop’s been reinvented.

© Morag MacInnes, 2007

Associated Page

• Tanera Mor Workshop
• More images from the Schiltron exhibition