Gunnie Moberg: Three Island Groups

11 Jun 2008 in Orkney, Visual Arts & Crafts

Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 2 August 2008

Gunnie Moberg

THE UNTIMELY death of this beautiful, gifted woman shocked the three island groups she loved. Everyone had assumed that Gunnie would always be around capturing the images we sometimes saw ourselves but did nothing about; that she would always be stopping an airport bus to snap an archaeological site buried in blue plastic and black tyres, or hiring a plane to turn the Stromness harbour line, or Skara Brae, into intricate, unexpected sky geometry.

Her last exhibition has come home to the Pier, a little depleted – originally there were 60 works but many have been sold. On 19 July there will be a Gunnie Day, where folk are encouraged to bring mementoes which celebrate her life and art.

Mine will be a picture by my father, Orcadian marine artist Ian MacInnes. Once he was painting a steep close, on a hot summer day, and Gunnie came and complimented the work-in-progress. She said she had always wanted to paint, like her mother, but couldn’t somehow feel satisfied with what she produced.

My father pointed to the brutally modern handrail bisecting the flagstones, mathematically central, out of kilter with the Mediterranean colours and ramshackle 18th century houses. “The great thing about painting,” he said, “is that I can leave out what I like” (he was essentially a Romantic – and the handrail is not in the finished picture).

Gunnie looked, particularly at the pattern the shadows cast by the rail were making, the black on the ochre sandstone. “I could do something with that,” she said.

There you have it in a nutshell. Gunnie was a Classicist; what was there was what you represented, with elegance, wit, and impeccable technique. But what she saw was not what others noticed, and often what others saw and then discarded. She had an inspired eye.

When she was asked about how she approached the task of choosing the pictures which were to be hung in the Scottish Parliament, she said she wanted “simple statements of place, closely observed details that would be immediately recognisable to Orcadians and Shetlanders.” Another nutshell. There is nothing pretentious about Gunnie’s photography, and therein lies its strength.

I’m drawn first of all to her signature – stylish, a confident curl of the ‘e’, a Swedish ‘g’ neatly stroked across. It has her clear blonde gaze written all over it. Just the first name, too – that intimacy says a lot. Then to the work. She finds beauty in the most unexpected things – ‘Talc from a quarry in Unst’ is a symphony of grey and white textures. There’s a sense of deep stillness – a world away from the gritty dusty quarry world we expect to see.

In contrast, ‘Sand Dune, Sanday’, which one might find a predictable subject, turns out to look just like an ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s selection – vanilla and chocolate chip, I rather think. Never thought I’d see coarse marram grass and think of seaside treats.

In ‘Curing Sheepskins Aith’ there’s a pebble dashed hut with (probably) an asbestos roof, and a line of framed sheepskins, three white, the last one moorit. The more you look, the more drawn in you are by the dance of shapes – the hard wood, the stretched wool – and the clash of textures, stone against softness. In the car, driving by, you’d have just thought – Oh, they’re curing, and driven on. Gunnie stopped.

She doesn’t shy from the controversial. ‘Grindadrap, Famjin, Faroe’ has men knee deep in a bloody sea, curiously arrested in heroic positions like figures on a Greek vase. The slaughter of the whales doesn’t seem frenetic, but curiously inevitable. It reminded me of Breugel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’.

George Mackay Brown, who owed Gunnie a great debt – she was a staunch friend, but more than that, she helped the agoraphobic poet travel – would have approved of this rendering into the heraldic and mythic of an ancient tradition.

Meditations on time surface again and again, poignantly now. Her ‘Bronze age trough quern’, squatting centrally, unexpectedly looks like a brooch; look again and there are two neat daisies, symmetrical as tin tacks, pinning the picture to the wall on each side.

‘Maeshowe, chambered cairn’ is typically unexpected – no picture postcard stuff here. The wind has shifted the crop, and it dominates the landscape, making you think about settlement and sustenance, long patterns of habitation. In the distance, the burial mound sits, as it always has, regarding generations of farmers.

‘Stone Wave, Gjugr Faroe’ – black and white and all the more powerful for it – reminds me of Victorian images of St Kilda or Lyme Regis. There’s a man poised, standing, to give a sense of scale perhaps, who looks for all the world like an early palaeontologist regarding this incredible rock formation, the beautiful sweep of it.

The best Classical art, ironically I suppose, does what Wordsworth says – it gives us emotion recollected in tranquillity. Photography is art, no doubt about it; and this beautiful meditation, caught on a misty cold day, with the stone wave curling as if it’s about to crash and break into foam, is haunting, elegant, sad.

Two ‘St Magnus kirks’ – the one in Egilsay, from the air, casts a long shadow which looks for all the world like the outline of her bigger sister, in Kirkwall. Lemon stone tower, snaking white fences – it’s startling. As for the much photographed Orkney cathedral – who could have more to say about that? But she does. She points out patterns, patterns, like knitting. By focusing on the rise of the roof, she gets the essence of the place – that it’s massive, and yet light, full of quiet space.

There’s the fragility of Outskerries salmon nets; the sweep of a Faroese kirk roof in front of a waterfall; positively noirish vertical and horizontal shadows at a boat station – not to mention the proud plaited ribbons on a horse’s arse.

There’s a midsummer cow from Sandness in Shetland rising out of a mist. Best of all, there’s Buttercup. ‘It is me, Buttercup, going to a wedding dance’, we are told, and there indeed is the soft big cow, that big-eyed head and dainty feet. Mary Fraser is all dressed up, with her corsage, hat and veil, invite in pocket, an inadvisable necklace and her best shoes.

But, in all the stramash of prettying herself up, she has forgotten to feed Buttercup. The animal noses her shoes, for all the world saying, whit on earth is du dressed up lik dat fur? Whar’s de wellies? It’s a perfect picture, full of stories, serendipitously caught.

No – serendipitous is wrong. It was lucky, maybe. But Gunnie had the eye to catch it and keep it. What a pity we couldn’t have kept her a bit longer to catch more things in our islands for us, show us things we walked past and never noticed.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

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