Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, until 26 April 2008

Rough Seas, etching - Sue Jane Taylor

SINCE it first opened in Aberdeen’s Maritime Museum in 2005, Sue Jane Taylor’s exhibition ‘Oilwork – North Sea Diaries’ has toured the country. The final venue before some of the work goes on permanent display in the new 20th Century Gallery at the National Museum of Scotland in July is the recently extended and renovated Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.

Orkney is a fitting venue for Taylor’s work, not least because of the islands’ role in the Scottish oil industry – the nearby oil installation at Flotta has been an important part of Orkney life for over thirty years. But the oil industry, by popular consent, is now in decline, and many of the fabrication yards and other sites associated with the industry are now, almost incredibly, part of our industrial heritage – forgotten, dismantled, and redundant.

Taylor’s involvement with documenting this vastly important industry began over twenty years ago when she travelled on a supply vessel serving the oil platforms in the North Sea. As her fascination with the industry grew she documented the life and work of places such Kishhorn, Invergordon, Nigg, Ardersier and the UIE construction yard in Clydebank, as well as venturing to various offshore platforms including Piper Alpha, which was destroyed by fire in 1988 with the loss of 167 lives. Taylor seemed the obvious choice when a memorial to those who died in the Piper Alpha disaster was commissioned and her sculpture, in Aberdeen, is a fitting tribute to those who died.

Whatever your views are on the oil industry, there’s little doubt that Taylor’s work as an artist takes its rightful place in the long historical fascination of British artists for industry and engineering. The work of Muirhead Bone, Stanley Spencer and Steven Campbell are just three examples of artists working in this tradition.

This show, which represents a small selection of work from the original exhibition, gives an insight into Taylor’s working methods and includes notebooks, sketches and maquettes as well as a number of etchings and pencil drawings. Taylor is fascinated by structures and the human figure, and her skill in depicting both is self evident. The colour etching, Rigger, completed in 1987, is an image which tends to stay in the mind; it is generic as well as specific and shows a noble, hooded, moustachioed figure in a safety suit. The figure resonates with a kind of heroic glory and is indeed a testament to the bravery and endurance of the men who work in extreme conditions to bring back the ‘black gold’.

‘Looking up at Santa Fe 140′, another colour etching, from 1984, shows Taylor’s interest in the massive, ingenious engineered structures built in the fabrication yards around the Scottish coast. The odd perspective of the study, seen from below and slightly askew, adds to the sense of this as an imposing and slightly threatening structure. Like most of Taylor’s images, it’s big, bold and confident in its lines and execution. As if to counter-balance this sense of monumentality, there is a smaller, quieter image here, easy to miss on the stairwell. ‘Offshore Flower’, from 2005, is an abstracted image – a spiral, a vortex and pattern somewhere between the organic and the man-made.

Elsewhere in this small collection of work there are other images of the men whom Taylor photographed and drew in her extensive periods of study of the oil industry. These images combine the literal and the metaphoric. One, ‘The Oilman and the Stag’, from 1989, shows man and nature not only pitted in opposition but also connected by some mystical bond. The stag and the tree, symbolic of nature and its fragility, are juxtaposed with the image of the ‘oil man’ clutching a knife which he has used to kill the stag.

The image, which alludes in part to the ground-breaking play ‘The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil’ by John McGrath which toured Scotland in the 1970s, is therefore freighted with emotional and political sentiment. Its companion piece, ‘Oilworker’, from the same year again depicts the juxtapostion of man and nature. The symbolic ‘oil worker’ holds a bird and fish while in his right hand he proffers a spiral of black gold. At his feet a delicate flower awaits his crushing boot.

Such allegories, although easily decipherable, are powerful statements and testify to Taylor’s compassion, not only for the men who are merely small, dispensible cogs in the machinery of big business but also for nature, the perennial victim in humanity’s need for wealth, fuel and power.

© Giles Sutherland, 2008

Links

• Sue Jane Taylor
• Pier Arts Centre