Orkney Museum, Tankerness House, Kirkwall, Orkney, until 27 February 2010

I LIKE literate art; works that inhabit lots of references comfortably, competently, and in an understated, not a show-offy kind of way. The school of ‘see me, see what I can do with ironic postmodern references to baffle you poor viewers plus a bit of ecology thrown in for relevance and to net me loads of dosh’ is not for me.

The Language of Saints exhibition (photo - Orkney Media Group)

I like to feel I’m being taken on a walk by an enthusiast who reckons I might share delight in some of the views on offer, and might also have read some of the same books, and mused on the same sorts of existential angst.

This is what I get from Colin Johnstone’s work. It’s always thought provoking, odd, and beautiful. The new exhibition is called The Language of Saints, and you might be forgiven for thinking it’d be heavy with Catholic imagery – rosaries and plastic models of the Virgin with flashing lights and internal alarms. Fortunately, Johnstone is too subtle, and much too intelligent to inflict this upon us. Instead we get a visceral investigation into language, communication, the value of the printed word and the symbol.

The theme for the show may lie in the quotations from E M Cioran, from a meditation called Tears and Saints. He describes ‘seeing the invisible’, and talks about ‘the teaching of the long dead saints…the lack of their meaning today.’ ‘Thoughts lie in absence, and in people and things no longer with us’, we’re told; and then: ‘what does it mean to make art now?’ It’s about the importance of seeing – of having an active eye. The implication is that this is something we’ve lost.

Perhaps this could be a negative point of view – that once upon a time art allied itself with the sacred and had, as a result, direct communication with ordinary folk, in the days when it told stories and turned church walls into comic strips for the illiterate. It was a servant, a handmaiden, a step ladder to understanding. And now, with no shared meaning – or perhaps a multiplicity of meanings – we’re adrift, without a symbolic artistic language to guide us.

This is what Johnstone is grappling with. The saints are there – familiar ones like Francis, Jerome, Luke – and some I’ve never heard of. The challenge is to reinvent iconography. Here we have stained paper, ancient sellotape, brown and dried out, holding down clumsily dried and preserved flowers, looking for all the world as if they came from a child’s Nature Diary.

Empty circles direct the eye to nothingness, like looking through a microscope – and other circles contain exquisite Victorian engravings of animals. Saint Christopher has a depressed-looking, but beautifully tinted, Bengal Lori. Jerome has a red legged partridge. The flowers have lost all their colour; sometimes they are on the back of the paper, so all you see is a vague impression, a hint of the juice and vitality they once had.

Saint Lucy the virgin is slightly battered – her cream paper is discoloured; she gets no flowers. St Stephen has a bosky black side to him; Saint Luke seems to have secrets hidden behind him. You want to come back and back. The juxtaposition of the Victorian prints – so Darwinian, obsessive in their perfection and cataloguing (each one has a number and a tag) and the faded flowers can’t help but make you think about what’s permanent and what fades.

Dodos come to mind, and Huxley and monkeys, and Darwin’s own struggle with evolution and faith. It’s even instructive that I’m wondering – which animal was associated with Luke? Who was Rose of Lima and why has she got such a fine crown? That’s the point – some sort of easy commerce with the world of the fantastic has been lost.

PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE, the shop sign says, in a Dickensian lettercase, black and peremptory. But handle we must; the Bible dictionaries, the manipulated book illustrations. Language is everywhere, being disturbed – the three studies of Shaker herbs, for example, are elusive and yet full of meaning; the Pitcher plant, we’re told, is Eve’s Cup, Adam’s Flytrap. Is this a real Shaker herb? The simple design inhabits Shaker philosophy, so different from the iconography of the saints – but the words are rich and complex, bursting with a back-story.

There are table display cases here – again a kind of referring back to the old way of showing things in museums – and they’re full of richness. This is the artist as archivist and chronicler, saving things – sometimes a reptile, sometimes just a bit of a tail or a beak, sometimes an empty space.

‘Boy Gathering Fungus’, for example, plays with texture in a most assured way – a mushroomy growth clings like a butterfly to a bit of wood; the richness of a Masonic scarf, Lincoln green, the Ancient Order of Foresters, hints at ritual, and at the same time feeds the senses – makes you think of spring, grass, renewal – and then there’s a tiny skull. None of your Damien Hirst stuff, just a small memento mori. It’s a complete poem in a case.

There’s much more to enjoy and ponder over in this fine show. Johnstone deserves to be better known. We need artists who are looking hard at the past and reminding us of some of the wisdom and simplicity we’ve lost.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Orkney Museum