Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, Orkney, until 29 October 2011

YOU HEAR the Irish lullaby very quietly before entering “Lullaby” in the temporary exhibition gallery at Orkney Museum and so just for a moment before seeing the installation, you are able to shift gear from what is the rest of the museum, and your awareness of what is to come is heightened, writes Clare Gee.

Sheena has created quite simply the most beautiful and most moving exhibition I have seen in a very very long time, and she has done it with a level of simplicity that belies the depth and layers of the subject that has inspired it.

Sheena Graham George - Lullaby (photo Clare Gee)

I must be upfront at this point and say that in my day job I have overall management of the arts, museums and heritage service for Orkney Islands Council and therefore manage Orkney Museum.  So this could be seen as me being positive about a show just so we can get more folk through the doors – although the rain and gales at the moment are doing a better job of that than I could do!

In reality I am writing this with another hat on (we swap hats quite regularly in Orkney!), as a fellow visual artist, as a viewer, and as someone who has closely followed Sheena’s work on this project for the last two years.

15,000 butterflies have been cut out of the pages of children’s books, and have been pinned to the walls of the gallery in a wonderfully beautiful way. The butterflies undulate and swarm, some drift away from the rest, some are alone.  They all look white, but move in closer and you see the delicate change in colour, and delight in recognising the books that have been used – Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland – characters you love from your own childhood emerge and then disappear again in this mass of life.

So, taken on its simplest level, this is a beautiful piece of artwork.  It works well in the space, which not being a white cube gallery has a level of warmth and humanity about it that some spaces don’t.  The butterflies are lovely to see as a whole and it’s fun to pick out words and images that you know.

But this exhibition has other depths if you choose to spend the time and have the inclination to be subsumed by it.  And I guess this will be different for eveyone who comes in to the gallery because everyone has had different lives, different experiences.

Sheena Graham George - Detail from Lullaby (photo Clare Gee)

The exhibition has emerged from a long term interest Sheena has been developing and immersing herself in, since a residency on Achill Island in Ireland in 2009.  She became aware of Cillini, the non-consecrated Catholic burial grounds for still born and unbaptised babies and children.  This discovery has led to a long and detailed research for Sheena and some incredibly sensitive and thought-provoking pieces of work.  Lullaby is the most recent and the first to be shown in a public space away from the residencies Sheena has undertaken.

If you view the exhibition with the knowledge of its history and motivation, it, for me at least, becomes quite overwhelming.  Each butterfly describing a life, a precious life, each one different and individual.  I read it on the level of all the children buried in the Cillini, but also of individual children known to me that had had very short lives, the people I know who have lost children; this exhibition can be uncomfortable and difficult as well as beautiful and celebratory.  And it is this balance of the individual experience as well as the world experience that makes this an incredible exhibition for me.

There were other links I made with the piece, I liked the fact that this exhibition is within a museum setting, and the butterflies all pinned individually remind me of natural history collections displayed in museums; again, that notion of precious individual species resonated with the notion of inividual lives being celebrated, although it also raised the question of how butterflies used to be ‘collected’ for museum display.  Individual butterflies being sacrificed in order to research and celebrate the entire species.

I also loved having the opportunity to reminisce about children’s books – how important they are to development of individual children and again, I felt the exhibition celebrated childhood through the written word as well as the visual.  I loved the sheer space created by piece in the gallery, the lack of clutter, the space to just look and contemplate, smile and cry.

One final point – the piece has been exquisitely made and displayed.  It is a show of the highest possible quality in every sense.  Sheena has described the installation of the exhibition with the support of the staff of the museum as a genuine collaboration.  The piece moved from being hers alone to a wider experience, and this has clearly been positive for Sheena and the staff at the museum, and the dedication and motivation shown by all benefits us as the viewer.

I would urge anyone who has not seen this show to go before it closes on 29 October.  Everyone who experiences it will have a different response to it, but this is art work of the highest quality, which deserves to have the largest possible audience.

© Clare Gee, 2011