Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, until 5 April 2008

Work by Colin Johnstone

I DON’T know much about the system of booking exhibitions, but do suspect that the essence of a good gallery experience is variety. The Pier have provided this in spades; upstairs we see 20 years of the oil industry’s impact on Orkney, big gutsy lusty images by Sue Jane Taylor; downstairs Colin Johnstone takes is on a metaphysical journey into the meaning of identity, and what happens when it’s lost.

It’s entirely appropriate that the title of this exhibition comes from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the artist’s memory of a skull, a memento mori. There is something very Flemish and visceral about Johnstone’s take on death – he has looked at Van der Weyden, Grunevalt, Bosch, and like them, fills his work with texts, mottoes and proverbs, to help us understand why things go wrong, what sadness is like.

‘Jacob and his twelve sons’ combines the most delicate lettering with the texture of wood, spotted and stained; each son’s plaque, or tombstone, or coffin has a different shape, bent or holed or worked somehow, like the shapes the world carves out for us.

Three meditations on bravery in the face of tragedy, ‘Thus I strove to keep my heart above the water of fear’, compels the viewer, pulling you into a narrative that’s only half explained – the bosun’s whistle, beautifully worked and bravely centred, like a dragonfly, that delicate; the kit bag, its coarse fabric contrasting with the delicate creamy colour of its folds and seams – and the words, almost disappearing into the textured canvas – Drifting, Drowning, In the Sun.

The palette is cool – mauves fading to whites – for such angry work, but that only makes the sudden splashes of red, or shiny green varnish, more interesting; the words provide a physicality that can be really evocative – we feel the deer’s ‘little antlers’, empathise with the meditation on illness and loss etched on old 78 records – lots of metaphors going on there, about repetition and remembered snatches of a life – ‘Her last injection will be the good one…my mother’s orchid skin…a dressing soaked in water.’

There’s a spiritual iconography going on – Catholic kitsch features, a deposition in gaudy colours – but there’s also a great deal of gentle humour. You can see a jaunty Edwardian jockey – and then the ghost of a jockey cap , and you will know that’s exactly what one would look like! There is Kamikaze cherry blossom – flowers, we’re told, turn people’s blood crazy – and there are two spinning tops, garish 50s efforts which take you right back to seaside shops and sand pails – but they’re trapped in glass.

Still, they inhabite an organic life – they’ve got fungus sprouting from them. Moths, butterflies, clowns, childrens’ cautionary tales cover the walls, marred by blots, or holes – Jenny Wren! The little girl who beat her sister! Everything erodes, or changes form over time, in one way or another; there are transformations everywhere.

The artist is a romantic, hung up on the power of tales; and yet, he’s a northerner, toning everything down, controlling excess, delineating precisely. ‘Poor Icarus’ deserves serious contemplation; beautifully situated with the gallery’s natural light falling on it and the sea moving outside, it tells you what it’s like to be grounded. Johnstone has learned well the lesson that less is more; simple is profound.

The exhibition is his first in Orkney, though he has worked here for twenty years.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

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