IAN STEPHEN considers the artistic resonances throw up by this thought-provoking exhibition

I CAME from a building in Orkney to one in Stornoway. The Pier Arts Centre was developed around an impressive collection of works and the home of the project is a building on a pier, already reaching out for connections anywhere out on the sea routes. I’d seen the orchestrated gathering of Roger Ackling works, fully discussed on these pages by Morag Macinnes.

Muilnean Beaga Leòdhais – The Norse Mills Of Lewis (© Ian Stephen)

I stumbled, after the two ferry ride, into the an Lanntair gallery. This is in a wholly new building, housing a project without a permanent collection as a basis, in a place without an apparent strong tradition of visual art.

On the face of it the present Lewis show is not what you would call contemporary art. It’s a documentation of ways meal was ground in this locality, mainly under Norse influence. This subject has long been a passion of Finlay Macleod and I was lucky enough to catch him to explain why it’s still important.

His conversation took the sea route and described the production of mill wheels in Norway and their transportation by ship to the settlements and colonies. He described a shipwreck which betrayed the extent of an industry. But when he nodded to an extant example of the production line, still fit for use but leaning back on a white wall, you could see why he argues that such elegance is art in its own right.

Indeed the tone of the show is that of a restrained aesthetic with some kinship to the exhibition available to our Orcadian neighbours. But whereas Ackling retrieves the vestiges of a wooden object and draws on it with burning rays of light, these millstones are driven by harnessed water to a fundamental purpose.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is of course mounted a bit off-centre in a superbly judged use of the unusual space that the L-shaped gallery offers. James Crawford, a longtime collaborator with Macleod on the restoration of several Norse Mills on Lewis, has built a model that appears to be full scale.

Despite its purely practical reason for being made, the machinery of these mills is a refinement of basic engineering which you could call minimal. I don’t see how one blade could be taken away. The angle of the feed of the corn, the size of the paddle in relation to the forces it has to cope with – all these things contribute to the design, the way the functions of a boat are part of the reason for its evolved shape.

Like a vernacular boat, which of course is of Norse origin in design, whether on Lewis or Orkney, the refinements which have contributed to the evolved pattern have not happened in one or two generations.

The largest shift was from a stone with a hollow in it, where the meal was simply pounded by another appropriate stone, to the realisation that running water is an unstoppable force and that engineering could make best use of it. These mills are sited in the areas where the landscape factors are correct. And of course the materials, being gleaned from what is available locally are harmonic in that landscape.

You still can’t help wonder, though, at how these works look similar to some of the land-art interventions by some of Ackling’s contemporaries, like Hamish Fulton and Chris Drury. And it seemed to me that practical objects such as the system of drystone storage cleits on Hirta are often more refined and sensitive works that the ones done as art – such as the weaker Andy Goldsworthy exhibition which occupied an Lanntair recently.

But so much of the impact of an exhibition – or practical or decorative or conceptual art – is in its presentation. There have been all too many lines of frames in an Lanntair of late. This display, curated by Jon Macleod, uses a sound knowledge of the space to full advantage. Like Ackling’s use of the interlocking galleries in the Pier, that means leaving blank walls and offsetting minimal plinths or installed works to use an area that is more than the sum of the distance along the walls.

Photographs by Leila Angus are held by crocodile hooks. Drawings of close-up details by John Love and architectural drawings of a Lewis cornmill kiln by Alick Matheson are placed in just the right position to provide their information. This is a well-researched exhibition. It gathers important objects, explains their context and displays them in a powerful way.

And there’s analysis as well as gathering. Another frame shows prints from manuscripts, Mogul, Kashmiri, Punjabi and Persian, to show designs of water-driven mill of striking similarity. Again it reminds me of the way a boat-shape will re-occur in different continents. People will re-shape and modify a design again and again till it becomes efficient and so elegant. Like stories, another work of art which tends to re-occur in similar forms from culture to culture. They show the ability of human beings to arrive independently at a similar solution.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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