An Talla Solais, Ullapool, until 3 July 2011

AS I drove south to see the opening of the latest exhibition at an talla solais, I witnessed a spectacular double rainbow arching between Quinag and Loch Assynt.

On the way back, the sunset was a blaze of molten bronze over Ben Mor Coigach, casting spotlights on Elphin and transforming the sheet of rain over Cam Loch into a pink phosphorescent haze.

Frances Pelly – Grass Noust

Competing with the full force of Assynt and Coigach’s sky-painters were two mere artists, Frances Pelly and John Cumming, displaying in the tiny Ullapool gallery. It seems unfair to review their work without acknowledging these unmatchable pre- and post-exhibition displays.

When the warm-up act is Aphrodite and the encore is given by Neptune, any artist is going to seem, to put it bluntly, human. Satiated with colour on a huge scale, I found a contemplative quietness in the three-room display of sculptures by the two Orkney-based artists.

Much of the work is muted in colour – natural geological tones ranging from alabaster white to the dark cloud-shades of Caithness flagstone. Wood, copper and bronze bring some other tones into the spectrum, but the overall effect is softly-spoken.

Frances Pelly makes sticks into spell-casting sceptres. She binds them together with birch bark, grass stalks and copper picked up on a beach and hangs them from the ceiling to swing and twist. Like musical instruments or monsters, the shadows they cast seem to be as much part of their presence as their material forms.

There is much else in her work that is delicate: the Hoy sketches are strange suggestions of birds, air movements and clouds cast in what looks like papier-maché.

So, coming across a piece of stone sculpture, I found myself assuming that this must be by the other artist, and indeed many of John Cumming’s pieces are weighty stones, including several smooth, tactile skimming stones, some of which would need a huge hand with a giant’s power behind it to make them skim.

Yet some of the substantial stone pieces are also by Frances Pelly, who makes much of her living cutting memorial stones. She seems as at home carving sandstone as making pieces out of driftwood or grass.

Likewise, my presumption that a set of fuschia sticks with ceramic lumps like wasp galls, were another feminine work, was contradicted by the artist’s name. This time it was John Cummings conjuring the mysterious forms of ‘Dhans’.

His works play with appearances: making boulders out of wood (Cairn), pebbles out of clay (The Vaddel) and strange creatures out of turf (Poans). As the names suggest, John has his roots in Shetland.

In fact, both artists make rich use of the dialects of the Northern Isles, collaborating with poets and other writers in the works in this exhibition and more widely through the Hansel Cooperative Press, which promotes the culture, art and writing of the islands.

John Cumming - Tilfer

Short poems, haiku, fragments of text and groups of words are carved and rendered into wood and stone. Some of these pieces are playful and thought-provoking: John Cumming’s ‘Tilfer’ has ‘first there was an island, then there was a boat’ engraved on a boat-shaped arrangement of planks.

Works like this celebrate both text and texture: Frances Pelly’s ‘Seawords’ presents five words that traditionally should never be spoken on board a boat, together with their allowable euphemisms, mixing paint and engraving to blend the spoken words with their hidden meanings.

The haiku carved by Frances Pelly are a less successful blend of poetry with sculpture: although beautifully worked, I wonder whether the words, already compressed in meaning, are given the space they need on their dense, black slabs.

Both artists clearly take pleasure in making the link to Scotland’s ancient stone-carving tradition. Two of John Cummings works, ‘Wall Knot’ and ‘Man Knot’, are modern-day Celtic stones. (The latter, tragically, fell and broke the night before the opening and has been hurriedly mended.) Frances Pelly continues the Pictish tradition of carving nature’s transience onto rock, with works like ‘Leaf Stone’.

My favourite piece of all, Frances Pelly’s ‘Fall’, is a drift of ceramic leaves, ranging from white to charcoal, all individually crumpled. As if falling from an invisible tree, they are scattered down a wall and into a cluster at floor level – a gust of breeze made tangible.

This exhibition proved a peaceful place to contemplate – ‘da still point I da world’s roost’, in the words of poet Yvonne Grey – while outside the sky went psychedelic.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith’s website
• Mandy Haggith’s blog