Lewis Artists in Åland (3)

20 Jun 2009 in Writing

The Final Chapter

IAN STEPHEN concludes his repeorts on the Åland excursion with a missive from Stockholm

JON AND ME are on the final ferry. We join the ship at Turko after another pilgrimage. Kaise has given us the second instalment of the Turko tour. We spend time in a village within the city where old shops and sheds and workshops and businesses are recreated or restored. It’s all pretty but not twee and you are imbued with respect for a culture with a very fine sense of making.

The old Scots word for a poet is a makar. And Heaney’s translations of Henryson have just been published so the reminder is in the air. Whether it’s setting up type or conducting metalwork under a magnifying glass, you feel for the past lives of the people who’ve left these things behind.

Lewis Artists (photo - Ian Stephen)

We meet another retired makar on the ferry. A man who was a welder in Canada for many years. He told Jon and me clear stories, not too long, and we saw him again later, foxtrotting with his elegant partner. Of course we did not get so early to our bunks. Of course we’re rubbing eyes, disgorged into Stockholm. The first coffee at the bus station has little caffeine. I find another shop with free refills of a strong brew.

So I’m living on jangling nerves for most of the blurred day, our last day of the searoad movie. It’s a flight back to Scotland later in the afternoon. We note the time of our preferred airport bus. The last option one, too. Between us we navigate the Metro though we start off in an overground station. The architecture. when we surface, is not overwhelming but solid and fine and inspiring. There are masts and sails and reminders that the tall ships will visit here. But also the Volvo Ocean grand-prix, highly tuned modern seagoing racing machines.

There is a large film projection on a plywood board. A lot of spray. Second hand adrenalin – but every bit of it is going to be needed today. We’re still in a daze in the old town and fail to get off the tourist-orientated (in quite a classy way) main lane. It’s a relief when we find our way to the museum of modern art. Of course we have travel passes and were also going to go here and there. We both take a glance at the scale and scope and decide to stop here. Then decide to go for the last safe-option bus. This is a world class collection and the visiting exhibitions are stunning. And there is an associated museum of architecture.

Let me go back – because I’ve a traveller’s mind now that’s going back and forth with comparisons all the time. Kaise struck up a conversation in one of the old wooden buildings. There was an exhibition about change – the rebuilding that had to happen fast to house the folk made homeless by being trapped between two huge forces of empire and aggression. Post World War 2. We saw the construction of something similar to the pre-fabs and Swedish houses which also sprouted in towns of Scotland as far apart as Stornoway and Fraserburgh.

There was also a model which showed the cross section of a method of timber construction. It was very similar to the method used in the house I used to live in and the studio I developed. Jon was looking closely at insulation and expansion strips and considering how he might also build something similar.

And in this way, the last few days of our adventures in Finland and Sweden, I have the sense, all the waking hours, of things being inter-connected. The themes running through. Maybe it’s always like this but it’s only when your normal state is changed that you are aware of it. Ferry-lag plus coffee plus stimulation from the highest of exhibition standards.

I remembered meeting Philip von Schantz – an established Swedish artist – on a residency at Grez sur Loing, near Fontainebleau, France. He painted endless detail to make a photo-realistic bowl of blueberries or a pike. I wrote a poem from his conversation about fishing and it’s now crossed into yet another language in yet another country.

But Philip was really in Grez to write his memoirs – good timing not to leave it longer because he’s no longer with us. He was talking about the Academy researching and procuring international art to build a collection. We ‘re seeing it now, dead cove. Well it looks like you and your mates did quite some job.

It’s the summer show which sets the ground pulse. Clay Ketter presents slices of buildings and their surrounds, interior walls, roofs, parking lots. When you look more closely you see that they’re not ready-made objects identified and made different by context. (I’ve just revisited a few Duchamp works in this museum, including one of the famous toilets – so that’s the reference.) They are sculptures, but using the construction methods and the materials of industrial building techniques – the modern variations of prefabricated construction.

But I’m thinking of our absent colleagues. How Moira would share the fascination with formica or other industrial fabrics and finishes, claddings and paddings. As much as she would have loved the hand-made domestic materials we saw less than 24 hours before. And how Joe would have sensed affinity with finding unlikely applications for the manufacturing technology. And the placing of two near monochrome arrangements so they are like a positive and a negative image placed for counterpoint.

Again I refer back to the Yves Klein references in the performance-art section of the museum. These painted ladies rolling on canvas. I’m not suggesting our Moira should have done that, in her condition, but I think there is a strong element of performance in her practice – now it’s clear by comparison. Flashback further – a lecturer at Aberdeen University – the main man on Henryson and Dunbar, the great makers, as it happens. He used to quote Mathew Arnold – “criticism is comparison.” Back to Klein and his near monochrome paintings. I remember the blue. And you see the strangest of comparisons – how the tone of one Ketter work is so reminiscent of Ben Nicholson – but of course that’s really a construction too.

How another is like an echo of minimalism – but we can go back further than the American guys like Le Witt. Remember the Russian Suprematists. I gazed earlier at Black and White (Kasimir Malevitz in the Swedish tranliteration). Remembering the strange pleasure you derive from appreciating the balance. How Graham Rich who took part in a three-man show of art by boat nutcases (Green Waters, originated at the Pier Arts Centre) described the paint scheme on a Mirror dinghy used by my family as a Russian Suprematist mirror (International Orange and White 001 since you ask.)

When I stroll through to the architecture section the parallel themes are forceful.

Yes there’s a guide through periods so you find that the characteristic Swedish (and Norwegian and Finnish) red and white colour scheme – still on my former studio and house on Lewis – came from the residue of copper mining in the late 16th century. But a main theme is the issue of decoration. All sorts of contrasting quotes – different periods – different slants from devotees of organic adornment to Le Corbusier, show an ever moving sway of style. Moira’s territory again. Jon and me wish they were both still here – continuing the interplay.

I would show you some of the quotes. Would show you some of the boat pornography I couldn’t sprint by as we found the rear exit. Yoles and squaresails and tall ships and all the balanced work of makers which can make you miss your bus. But in the sleepy moments I pressed the wrong buttons on a camera phone, new to me, and lost the lot. The metro is slow. There is a complex interplay between the train station and the bus station. Tall Jon keeps his cool and gets clear directions. They work but there are seconds to spare till the girls selling the Ryanair bus tickets ask why we’re looking so stressed with an hour to spare. Because I’ve forgotten to change my phone from Finnish to Swedish time and it’s just as bloody well.

So the last images are a return to the pilot house. A calm haven in itself. We did see a tall ship sail by and I did a bit more (house) painting as our hosts departed for Sweden to begin sailing their new boat back. Feeling for my new friends equipped with paper charts and electronic ones. Trusting it will be a calm small ship. Trusting that all our individual domestic situations will balance out. That the links between Hebridean Islands and Finnish ones will continue.

Jon and me are disgorged again, this time into the Edinburgh evening. We’ll stay with the history of art professor – Murdo Macdonald – who will ask funny questions in an analytical way to make sense of our experiences. But I send a text and get one back. My son’s band is doing the end of course performance tomorrow night in Devon. So I get on the laptop while the conversation gathers pace without me. Cancel tomorrow’s flight, book new ones and arrange to meet the ex at Exeter. See the show and see Graham Rich, the Green Waters artist. It’s a lot of arrangements and it’s going to cost when time and money are tight. But something of the peace of the pilot’s house is still with me. I’m going to need it, next few months.