Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, until 7 June 2008

Ash Island

THIS EXHIBITION, or bits of it, has been touring since 2004; it’s been to Lisbon, Dieppe, and, more prosaically perhaps, Plymouth. But it hasn’t been shown on an island till now. Interesting, because it’s all about islands, apparently. The erudite and reverential intro to the catalogue tells us an island is ‘a bounded region which can isolate but also insulate its inhabitants.’

So – can we expect a Donne like metaphorical meditation on our common humanity? Ooh! Then – ‘all of the titles refer to British and Irish islands (although one is actually a peninsula)’. Wot? It’s not an island then, is it? And then – ‘Woodrow and Deacon never intended to associate the sculptures with these particular places: the titles were designated en route after they were made.’

Oh. Imagined islands, then. Names shoved on after. Made of lead, timber – some of it Tudor – and glass. I’m glad I headed, instinctively, to the beautiful open gallery where the sea feels as if it’s inside the room. The steady natural Orkney light bathes the sculptures, and makes it a pleasure to pick out details and textures.

‘Rough Island’ has a battle-scarred look, and the colour and weight of the lead doesn’t lend itself to levity. I find myself smiling, though – there’s a thing like a canoe with feet and great big paddles; above that a sail/flower object, mounted on what looks either like a gun casing or a tom tom. It makes me think of Easter Island, and ’50s filmic renditions of happy native peoples in grass skirts.

I recall the long explanation of the importance of lead to medieval folk, the directions towards Primo Levi, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, Mandeville’s Travels and other such worthy tomes, in Dr Stacy Boldrick’s catalogue notes, and think – no , Stacy. These guys are havin’ a laugh.

Three works called (en route!) Isle of Man are, honestly, sweet. The old wood supports lead stories on wobbly legs, sometimes hooved with bark. There’s a clear medieval theme – masons’ marks etched in the wood, figures caught in a calendar of activities, like ‘Les Tres Riche Heures’ – a couple in mid-saw cut, a hammer about to fall, a wine press twisting.

‘Man 11′ has a holed and punctured lead wood with deer and a dead man; his murderer still had the sword raised. I’m reminded of the Britains’ lead animals I had as a child, and I love the suspended morality tale being told. ‘Man 111′ is a simple memento mori – a wood cutter on one side, his skeleton cut down on the other. The medieval preoccupation with death was really grim acceptance of the ‘skull beneath the skin’ and in this sculpture there’s a suggestion that, whatever happens to man, the wood , the tree survives.

That’s medieval too, as you can see in any cathedral – that lingering sense, cut into stone or choir, of something magical and pagan, to do with oak and ash and rowan, flowering and seeding. In The Hidden Landscape, Simon Schama describes the persistence of Europe’s relationship with woodland, and the Green men, the naturals and innocents who inhabit it. There are echoes of all that here, and the exhibition began in Wiltshire, home to many a Druidical musing.

So far so nice. Islands certainly – and a fine play on words – Isle of Man. ‘Bait Island’ and ‘Ash Island’ investigate eels – another iconic symbol, best deployed by Gunther Grass in his meditations on German history and myth – resonating in Orcadian folk myth as the Stoorie Worm, a dragon-demon. There’s something annoying about how real and yet lumpish these lead eels look, and the netting draped about looks tricksy. Maybe this is because, on a real island, real eels and real nets are not obliging and do not inhabit the world of myth.

It’s the next room and I’m flagging. There’s a whole series of islands sitting on three lead legs. They look like camera tripods, or those monsters out of The War of the Worlds, and they’ve all got minotaurs on them pointing up to constellations of lead pocked through wood, sometimes in cruciform shape. How did the Greeks get in here?

There’s also a telescope theme going on – ‘Brownsea Island’ has one with a frog on it; and, of course, a compass. ‘Black Isle’, which is mounted on a tom tom with a bit of twine round it, and a lot of very visible caulking material (this would give the folk on the Black Isle a jolt), has a skull looking through one. The glass distorts the image in a clever way; illusion and reality, Gods and no Gods, perhaps. But it’s getting a bit samey.

The physicality of sculpture is always the great thing, and this exhibition doesn’t disappoint. The wood is marked and pencilled and grooved by time, ‘Amber Glass’ is a smooth shock after the coruscated leadwork. Lead itself forms plasticine shapes I’d never thought of, and had made me think in a whole new way about flashing.

The collaboration was a fruitful exercise for these two vastly experiences makers. I did come out, though, thinking that there’s too much grand seriousness about the art world; maybe, like the story of the Emperor’s Clothes, so aptly summed up by Danny Kaye as ‘the King is in his altogether…’ Woodrow and Deacon are having us all on.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

Pier Arts Centre