MORAG MACINNES finds quiet at the core of the work of Thomas and Laurie Clark

YELLOW AND BLUE is a pleasingly minimal title for this pleasingly minimal exhibition-cum-installation. Thomas A Clark puts works on walls; he’s just recently done an installation at the New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow, attempting, Alistair Peebles the gallery owner explains, “to bring the outside inside.”

If the calm that exudes from the work here is anything like what’s in Stobhill, the patients will feel tranquil and serene – the simplicity of this couple’s approach is refreshing. Clark also writes chap books, with titles like ‘In Defence of Quiet’ or ‘A Walk in the Water Meadow.’

Tom and Laurie Clark at Woodwick House (© Alistair Peebles)

His new book, ‘The Hundred Thousand Places’, (Carcanet) is to be launched in the Pier Arts Centre on 17 October, and when I tell you it’s described as “a single poem that travels across seasons, through a variety of Scottish highlands and islands landscapes, from dawn to dusk,” and that walking through such landscapes “is part of a slow unfolding of time and distance, to commit yourself to an adventure,” perhaps you can get a sense of this maker’s perspective on things.

On the white wall of the Brae, next to a window looking over stone and water, in elegant blue perpetua titling, is the legend:

You are invited to sit here
For a while and remember
A quality of evening light.

In another window, by a vase of purple flowers, is a plaque in yellow, which reads:

To place
Among other
Colours and forms.

Postcards in pure colours make remarks like:

THE CLEARING
OPEN DAILY
FROM DAWN
UNTIL DUSK

the company
that one thing
keeps with
another

Ian Hamilton Finlay springs to mind. So does Alec Finlay, whose rengas have the same direct translucent quality.

The eye is drawn across to two books concertina’d along shelves – yellow and blue, buttercups and harebells. This is Laurie Clark’s work. Her illustrations are on the front covers of Clark’s poems too, giving, them a clean crisp elegance – she takes as much care with her line as her partner does with his typesets.

She says, of her flower drawings: “All individuals of a single species are particular. Every drawing of a wild plant is different. One idea generates many shapes and colours.” Very Darwinian – and indeed, there’s a Victorian feel to these painstaking, delicate pencil drawings.

In fact, you have to look very close to detect differences in colour. But in the act of looking close, you are reminded how seldom we inspect not just a book of flowers, but flowers themselves. And if you are beginning to think this is all very solemn – on the opposite wall we see three of a number of pencil studies of an iconic Scottish cardboard box – Bluebell matches.

As we squint to see whether the mountains or the flowers have shifted subtly, again I think about Zen Buddhist thinking, Lao Tzu’s reminder that we should “study the uncarved block” and thus find the form within… and I wonder why so many artists and poets now are displaying a craving for a return to nature.

It’s Romantic, of course; but also formal and controlled in a way that is Classical and restrained. Perhaps it reflects a sadness for what’s threatened – the wild places, the climate sensitive species – but also a desire to tell, rather than show, a reluctant populace what they are missing, in the hectic rush that’s Western life.

My companion at the viewing betrayed a reluctance “to be told what I have to think about by letters on a wall.” I disagreed; she thinks about these things anyway; these exhortations and meditations are for those who haven’t, who need to be told to sit down and think.

I suspect, then, that the most challenging things for Clark are large installations, in public spaces – and they are always the most important works now. Not only can they command funding – they allow us to see our heritage in a very different way. As Alistair Peebles said – “when you have a poem at the top of a street, it has a very different effect from a blue plaque telling us what’s perceived as historical fact. I have no problem with blue plaques – but there are more ways of approaching what we see than that.”

Clark will also come to your house and do a customised installation – he has made one in Woodwick House in Evie, one of the additional locations at which their work wil be shown as part of this project. He responds to the feel of the place and makes you feel something. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet; but I do buy a beautiful purple booklet called ‘in defence of quiet’ and enjoy the first two observations –

this will be a quiet time
measured by a turning of pages

we need to act in defence
of quiet because quiet itself
is without defences.

This charming exhibition is precisely that – a celebration and defence, of quiet.

Links

• Porteous Brae Gallery