Porteous Brae Gallery, Stromness until the end of August 2008

Teapot, Nurse's House, Stroma, Polaroid print (scanned), 2008 (photo - Alistair Peebles)

IT’S TWO for one up the Brae – two parties of makers responding to islands and each other, producing film, photographs, books, poems, sketches, sculptures, ceramics. Collaborative creative ventures can be fraught – the idea of isolating folk together with no escape until the ferry arrives takes me back to that Agatha Christie scenario where ten arrive and only one leaves.

The artists from these two retreats, however, are positive about their experience. John Cumming, who was part of the Triangle Arts Trust Workshop on Hoy in April, called the experience “if anything more enlivening, more productive” than his previous “invigorating” session at Tanera Mor.

The Hoy T Five – Cumming, Laura Drever, Frances Pelly, Amy Todman and Susan T Grant – present an interesting contrast to the four who were Instant Stroma – Alistair Peebles, John Glenday, Kathleen Jamie and Alison Flett – for a number of reasons.

Stroma and Hoy are very different islands; Flett Jamie and Glenday are wordsmiths first and foremost; Cumming’s determination to “pursue the spirit of trust and adventure” seems to inspire unexpected braveries in those he works with.

Peebles, the gallery owner, told me “it’s a coincidence that the two exhibitions are on at the same time but the gallery’s meant to be flexible in the way it takes up opportunities. Neither project was particularly designed at producing an exhibition as such, but the possibility was there. It’s delightful to see the different character of use that people make of time and environment.”

He’s right. After many a workshop or retreat, the final outcomes are squirreled away to become part of an individual show, or book. It’s much more interesting to see all the responses under one roof.

‘How to Leave a Sinking Vessel’ – by Cumming with Andrea Geile’s photos of the artist – is a deeply unsettling picture/poem. The prints are severe and grey; the figure looks like a corpse and the face like a death mask, utterly expressionless; the odd text (“pinch your nose with your fingers”) on white in formal black.

It’s only when I move to the ceramic sou’westered fishermen, lying haphazard on driftwood which seems to be floating them to safety, that I realise these are survival instructions from a sailor’s manual. The metaphor’s clear, and the warm pitted old wood suddenly looks as reliable as a lifebelt, supporting those water-heavy figures.

Wood figures large in Pelly’s meditations on flotsam and jetsam. She has a stillness and purity which is Zen-like – a split sycamore, the Orkney tree, filled with warm brown snail shells bound with willow, becomes a Japanese scroll. Her tender touch and sharp eye for texture make the tiniest shard of grained wood supporting dried seaweed or grass a poem in itself – a gentle reminder about simplicities.

She can do tough too though – Five Hoy Scapes in collage are cold and boisterous as our weather. A leggy pegged group of branches straddles the gallery floor like dancers on a night out. Her sketch books are fascinating. It’s a gift, to be so alive to the possibilities found in what’s lying around.

Amy Todman and Susan T Grant aren’t Orcadian, and it shows, in an odd way, because they approach the landscape as outsiders – there’s a sense that, rather than inhabiting, they are commenting, though Todman spent a year as a trainee at the Pier. Her delicate meditations on landscape, using – again – the natural world around her – are apt, as is her ceramic work.

She’s a very minimal creator, which focuses the mind. Susan Grant’s awareness of Scapa Flow’s war history is part of an ongoing engagement with “the visible process of social change”, “the original purpose of a space”.

She is an original and arresting thinker. The wax models of destroyers in the gallery window – complete with candle wicks – look like a birthday party gone wrong. They remind me of boy cousins who had Airfix models – war toys. Also, inescapably, particularly because they were cast to sit on the windows of the deconsecrated Hoy Kirk, I think of candles lit for souls, lots of them.

On the last night, the artists scuttled the ships; lit them on the old wood Kirk floor and watched them burn. Her video of this is poignant – the candlelight is lovely but the wax bubbles like burning skin. Her concern with architectures, and how often they become monuments to pride and folly, continues with a series of images of the crumbling remains of bunkers, lookout towers and rusting iron which litters the south end of Hoy. They hang there like a rebuke in the green landscape.

Hoy is bursting with the leavings of two big wars, as anyone who visits the Lyness Museum will see. It has a present too. There’s a school, a plethora of second homes for the bourgeoisie, a film club. Stroma is empty. It was finally deserted in the 60’s. The crofts remain – the artists stayed in the nurse’s house – but there are only sheep.

Peebles says it is ‘Instant Stroma, partly because of an echo of the song title ‘Instant Karma (a fairly random connection admittedly), but we became interested when we were there in the Japanese renga form and wanted to make a collaborative poem – but also because it was abandoned and yet still an island of the present instant, in terms of its potential for sea power, wind power, energy of all kinds.”

This sense of very recently lost history (unlike St Kilda, for example, there are Stroma reunions, names and families are remembered and traced) informed Peebles’ decision to use a Polaroid camera. “It was instant, and abandoned in favour of digital. I associate it with the 60s and 70s – it sits in my mind as contemporary with Stroma’s desertion. Practically anyway digital was problematic – there was no electricity. That made it an unencumbered kind of experience.”

It works. The pictures take me back to holiday snaps, bleaching in old albums. The lighthouse lurks at the edge of a field of seapinks, almost overwhelmed by nature running riot again now habitation’s gone. A teapot sits on a Raeburn. In an abandoned fishing boat, a toy parrot, vivid and gaudy, has been left pinned to a post. The images are about sudden emptiness, and what’s left behind.

Echoing these sensitive photographs, which have an eerie evanescence about them, John Glenday’s incantatory poem, with photos, ‘Stroma Houses’, a lament for the loss of a community, could easily be translated into a hundred languages.

‘House whose garden eats motor cars
House with a window for a door
House of the Sky Blue box bed’

The best of the Stroma project is gathered in Four Ninjuin Stroma Renga – a limited edition of poetry and images by the four poets, published by Nethertown Press. The traditions of Japanese haiku are observed – the seasons advance and the imagery is fresh and startling.

‘imagine this isn’t an island
but a loch, and all around us
the green world, breathing.’

It was busy when I was in the gallery. Get to it in a quiet spell. You’ll come away inspired to look again at the green world, breathing.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Porteous Brae Gallery