An Lanntair, Stornoway, isle of Lewis, until 16 May 2009

Grinneas Nan Eilean

THE TEMPERATURE rose on the day of the opening of the open exhibition for fine, applied and indeed any art produced by Western Isles residents. This meant that I had a serious date, priming the flanks of a community-owned boat so I got to the party a little late. Often a good idea. Several people, a glass ahead of me, gave of their opinions.

The Newton painter, an experienced and dependable practioner, drew the line on the high but not all that long walls of an Lanntair, and gave his own solutions of just how to hang that huge and disparate body of work. He said the maximum number of entries per artist should be reduced and a cleaner hang found, with partitions used if necessary to increase the linear space.

The Uig engineer and one of the finest craftsmen I know pointed out his own new departure into painting and talked me through the works which had hit him. He remembered the start of this annual show, in the old town hall and said it was all working fine except it should be in the summer to show our residents’ response to their own environment to our visitors.

Of course there is no reason to assume that the residents will choose to make art which relates at all to the place they live ,although of course it is, without prejudice, the finest and most varied of damp desert-type landscapes in the world. But it is amazing how much of the work on show does respond to this environment.

There are established artists doing pretty much what you expect them to do. There are others, making some departures, others just finding their personal response. New residents and new artists.

I wouldn’t like to hang this show. But I’d like to commend the efforts made to keep it democratic and find enough space to let individual works say what they have to.

There is a workable strategy. A gap as you move up the stairs is filled by a large and strong David Miles canvas. Highly coloured works sit on one wall and works that need to be seen as a series are grouped together. The well-lit space in the hallway is the photographic collection. Seascapes are close enough for comparison.

Let’s zoom into some details. It’s not possible to describe everyone’s work so just look at this as an idiosyncratic tour.

Iain Brady’s curving distortions sweep energy into reliefs broken by a trademark seabird image. This type of work is now his own personal map of our coastline. Ruth O Dell’s timeless drawing is behind her impressionistic studies of the close bonds between humans and the animals they keep, still a key part of the way of life for many on these Islands.

Jon Macleod and Catherine Maclean both have stories behind their visual images. Macleod’s screenprints contain language-like fragments of decaying libraries beside subdued imagery. Maclean’s constructions are mysterious fragments which only hint at the stories they carry.

A line of the plastic shells of shotgun cartridges is spaced over the end of a roll of tape. The colours and composition work with each other but it’s difficult to say exactly how they relate. But they do. Her trademark nails and staples become very near minimalist sculpture. In fact I wondered if she might take that venture even further to the sparse ground.

Mairi Morrison can show a small subdued study of a human-built structure out on the moor or she can let go to drama. Her shipwreck scene also has the quality of a sculpture. It made me think of a poster for an opera still to be composed or a cover for a book to be written.

Geoff Stear shows three very spare large paintings and the most sparse of all seems to me the most successful. They have the washed out tone of terrain bleached by wind. G E Coutts paints on board and it’s very close to monochrome in one, with paint applied to look a bit like Japanese inks. Just that splash of colour in another, enough to lift attention.

Simon Rivett’s work shown here seems to me like a development into a new simplicity but still prompted by fascination with the way light hits hills. S Tod does go for ink only and the speed of the medium is an effective way of catching our fast clouds. This is the eye of someone who spends many hours seeing light across moor, either from a car in transit or from activity that lets you linger in landscape longer than is usual.

In complete contrast, the artist signed as Rille shows several works reminiscent of Alan Davie but with their own wild quality – signs of someone who has found a love of the medium of paint and can’t help but let go into it. It seems to me that the medium is expressing something from the unconscious rather than studying what you can see any day. And the work looks good beside a bold but disciplined demonstration of the quilter’s art by Deirdre Macdonald.

The show is very rich in applied art. There is painted ceramic work, metalwork, demonstrations of the ancient art of the felter but in contemporary design and colour. Timber is another favoured medium. Here it’s possible that the design element is a bit less developed than the gift of seeing particular qualities in the wood. There is no shortage of the skill and confidence to work the material.

Uisdean Paterson has translated two of the Lewis chessmen to timber but in a detailed study that makes so many recent attempts look very crude. Here, accuracy is the aim. Whereas Ian McHardy makes witty interventions in driftwood so there is an Easter Island look about some of them. This is carried into full shamansitic idiom by Simant Bostoc. His staffs of dark bog oak carry symbols highlit in gold leaf.

For me the work of applied art which combined innovation with skill and feel for the materials was the mad Tibetan headgear shown by Netty Sopata. Harris tweed meets with Thai silk in a hand-stitched simple strong shape. The two fabrics are joined and there is just enough contrast, just enough association for the dissonance to work.

The strength of the photography section was no surprise after several very strong recent showings of local work in the foyer and bar areas. Some photographs here are based almost completely on strong clear observation. Duncan Macsween’s Frozen Seaweed simply catches a stunning winter image. Barbara Myers takes a very similar subject and catches the astonishing green caught under ice. Three separate images caught by Suzy Harper are composed in one frame so the details give you clues to a whole interior world.

In other photos, the technical challenge of realising a subject seems to be what prompted the main interest. That’s sometimes no bad motivation, whether the subject is out in the landscape in shifting light or if it’s a series of contrasting objects arranged on a shell. We could be studying domestic animals or our human interventions in landscape.

And in the photography, as in the paintings, drawings and works of applied art, the work sometimes leaves you with the feeling that an artist has spent years working within rules and then has taken the chance to break free. But it’s not really freestyle – the understanding of structure is behind the work. There’s a tiny Kenneth Burns piece which takes seascape down to one close detail. And there’s a Colin Myers photograph of a breaking wave which slows the exposure just enough to emphasise the sense of its structure.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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• Ian Stephen