Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 31 December 2009

IT’S OVER a week ago now, openings night in Stromness. That’s the Christmas exhibition openings, not to be confused with late-night shopping, Christmas tree lighting, Norwegian linking nor anything else on the festive spectrum on this fertile archipelago.

Pier Arts Centre Christmas Open exhibition (© Ian Stephen)

It’s not just farming that thrives here, judging by the wide range of creative arts revealed. I’ve been back now to study the work more closely and it’s been a real pleasure to get a glimpse of the vitality of inventive makers.

There were some strong signs before even entering The Pier. I’d met one Jean Tulloch who was taking a course in felting and was working away at a large scale piece, bristling with invention but within a structure.

The a diversion into the Waterfront Gallery revealed a profusion of made objects. You could don gloves to turn the pages of a timeless artist’s book by Denise Campbell, a sea poem, continuing the tradition of using the texture and colour and typography on the page as part of the meaning of the work.

I was caught by two monoprints hung close. If I said a puffin and a seascape you would not get a clue of the fresh approach of Mirran Hall, who also shows in the Pier. You see so much work that is a bit like the Alfred Wallis pieces you’ll find upstairs in The Pier’s permanent collection – but these two works stood out from a whole range of competent pieces, by their boldness and clarity.

One great thing about the redeveloped Pier Arts Centre is the opportunities presented by the different rooms and corridors. These are fully exploted in a skilful hanging. Somehow, a huge number of works, in all styles and sizes, just doesn’t seem cluttered.

A corridor provided a minimal way in. Breathing space with work which has a meditative feel to it – akin to the Alan Johnstone drawings you’ll find permanently installed up the stairs.

Heather Aberdein presents a series of two coloured drawings with continuity broken by mounts so there is a triptych in each frame. The lines and bodies of colour don’t quite meet, but suggest a way from one to the other, so you get the feeling the whole work could continue. Maybe she’ll find a long corridor to keep it all going.

At first sight Colin Kirkpatrick’s harmonic drawings on board look like they could have come from up the stairs down. A closer look shows a playful balancing of ideas. Those who know his work will recognise the motifs, cattle-skull and planet. It’s contemporary art in the sense that the concept is crucial, but it happens to look grand too.

Jean Malone frames a shawl that can pass through a wedding ring as per tradition – but this one’s in copper wire. What you might call a twist in a story you think you know. And Isla Holloway also uses metal, but not very heavy stuff. Pins are nailed over a small grid of squared paper. One arrangement comes close to being a circle and the other an oval. In one work a connecting white thread also falls short of being a line and in the other a stone is trapped. A different way of drawing.

Unlike Pukka’s [that’s the aforesaid Colin Kirkpatrick to his friends – Ed.] work I couldn’t try to discuss what the concepts behind these are, but I’m intrigued. Ordinary objects are arranged so you stop and look again. Perhaps that’s also what’s happening in Colin Johnstone’s interventions on a worn and stretched catalogue – presented as another layer of its own self.

In presentation and medium it’s completely unlike Rebecca Marr’s photographs from island visits. But the crisp stems and sharp strands of down in a photograph of bog cotton are caught to let you look again at something any islander has often seen. In another room, Dana Collins applies scientific scruntiny to the same subject.

So we are now in a room of flora and fauna. And there is another room of fish and birds. All of them contain arresting works. Again a subject that you think can hardly be interesting any more is celebrated with a fluency that stops you short.

Take the elegance of the lines in Anna Meadows’ long look at Kirkwall harbour, lit with sweeps of watercolour. And these rooms lead back to one where we’re well into freestyle mode. In Peter Brown’s lines and paint on canvas you can see the light hitting the landscape still. But the titles are clues, a way in – ‘Between Day and Night’. And Laura Drever’s ‘Marwick’ still has the recognizable shapes of stones.

So we’re not into the abstract but maybe the light is also filtered through an open mind before it manifests itself in the work as surely as the rays of the sun are channeled by Roger Ackling to burn their lines of marks.

Patty Boonstra’s oriental prints find a peaceful balance in energetic lines. Fluent marks just fall into the suggestion of a figure with folded arms. The tone of these takes us through into a more distant room – the pier side of the gallery. John Struther’s ceramics are well displayed here. Again, there is something of a homage to the Gardiner collection, but there’s a dash of signal red, or burned orange to emphasise the fact that a natural geometry is modified by the human hand.

Amongst the large range of skills demonstrated in other fine examples of applied art, Morag Ewing’s jewelry has a presence beyond its size. These are works which impress by their quietness, whereas Peter Rowland’s carafe and beakers, though simple in shape, were surely made for a surviving Norse Earl.

It’s a huge contrast to John Vincent’s welded horseshoe cactus which could well have appeared in an installation by the aforementioned Kirkpatrick. In a room of landscapes and contructions, Alayne Dickey dares to marry the elements. She works in wire, threads, copper strips and glosses all in a resin with a sheen. Amazingly she still keeps it simple, so when you step back you see the fall of a much loved hill.

Vera Sperling also coats surfaces in an astonishing collage coating on a café chair. It’s as smooth as good latte but with at least one extra shot of espresso. And if we go upstairs we meet some of the human figures who might occupy an object.

The paintings and drawings here show a continuing energy. I thought of the Stanley Cursiter portraits you keep coming across, building to building in Orkney and you realise of course that interest in the human will never date. How it’s expressed will be shifting all the time. A bit like how wind works with tide.

Bold figurative painting alternates with smaller scale monochrome works in a balanced showing of shared concerns. There’s one work in this room which is like a coment on how we must celebrate what we see, Alasdair Peebles shows a flat plain landscape photograph, but in it there is what appears to be a trailer. Landscape paintings are being unfolded out of it, right by a piece of field still to be ploughed.

There is no shortage of skill or originality in the visual arts as practiced in Orkney today, judging from what’s on show here. And an open show must always yield some surprises as well as sharing the work of seasoned campaigners with the interested public.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Waterfront Gallery
• Ian Stephen