An Lanntair, Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, until 28 April 2012

NO, I didn’t know what the word meant, either.

BUT now that I’ve looked it up, it seems to me a very appropriate title for Gestalt – It’s what’s in between that matters, the excellent exhibition now installed in the An Lanntair main gallery.

Gestalt means when parts identified individually have different characteristics to the whole (Gestalt means “organised whole”)
, for example describing a tree – it’s parts are trunk, branches, leaves, perhaps blossoms or fruit
. But when you look at an entire tree, you are not conscious of the parts, you are aware of the overall object – the tree.
 Parts are of secondary importance even though they can be clearly seen.

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

The Art, Space and Nature course at Edinburgh University brings together the disciplines of landscape architecture and fine art. Last year, the course made a connection with the Outer Hebrides and with An Lanntair in particular through the artist and tutor Donald Urquhart, who has a long-standing relationship with the Stornoway arts centre.

Responses to the field trip were first developed in the studio environment at ECA and then transferred as an installation in the stairs, corridor and bar space in An Lanntair. The installation used the spatial opportunities of that section of the building with great imagination. Perhaps that’s part of the reason the current 1^st year group have been given the main gallery space to explore.

This has proved an inspired act of trust. There is a spectrum of backgrounds, including architecture, in the group, and this might help explain why the six artists involved have installed an exhibition which does more to explore and use the shapes of space suggested by the high L-shaped gallery than most I’ve seen in An Lanntair so far. I can think only of Joe Mahony’s astonishing suggestions of a storm on Great Bernera as a show which used both the height and the floorspace to such effect.

But this is a quieter show and a group installation, albeit a very tight gathering of work and themes. Language is a central concern but so is the need to map or plot land and sound and culture, in different forms of line.

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

Deeksha Surendra presents only language. But her words are refined and so is the means of presentation. A hand-made painted box houses a small screen. Groups of words travel from right to left. The pace suggests a rhythm. This is the journal of a traveller and the pared-down style could be the reflections of a European visiting the east or a city person arriving on St Kilda. But this is an architect from India responding to her experience of the Hebrides, as the exotic. The phrases are also presented on simple postcards:

“clackety clack chip chop rocket, a weft and warp, a million colours to be seen”

The artist has an ear for phrases as well as an eye for lines:

“we were sailing the jubilee that day, a 76 year old built of wood, one that had done many journeys, one that was to do a wee one more”

The loom is the central driving force in Allyson Pattie’s response to Lewis and Harris. The only Scottish member of the group exhibits a soundwork and a weaving. Both have the Hattersley loom as the basis of the work. Its rhythm used to dominate rural Lewis and Harris. I’ve long been intrigued by the way the digital map of music is a form in its own right. I have used this myself in a publication, but Pattie takes her idea to an elegant expression which must have cost her dear in hours. Time well spent.

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

The digital soundwave of the loom’s percussion is woven, in shades of kelp and dulse, into a plain net of white. This makes for a long run of her new cloth along the wall. The sound sculpture includes silences. John Cage is to be celebrated later this year and there is perhaps a suggestion of his famous approach to the myth of silence in Pattie’s recordings within the spaces of Calanish and Rodel Church.

Lily Hsu has come to the course from New Zealand. She has installed a long raised line of blue along the gallery floor. The interpretative material consists of an A4 sheet on an adjacent wall. There is a map and a blue line from the Butt to Rodel. That same blue.

And then you realize that the idea of gradients and relief has been inverted. This is a sectional map – a slice of air. The blue sky goes deeper down between the ridges of the hills of Harris and Lewis. There is a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson: “The inimitable brightness of the air”. And let’s remember that RLS was from a family of great engineers. All the information is carefully noted on the elegant group information sheet:

“Measured length of 100.90km and width of 1.20km. Lowest point of elevation recorded – 460m.”

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

Another artist from India also uses lines of mapping. Anuja Kanani suspends two engraved rectangles of Perspex. I had to get on tiptoes to see that the shapes of lochs corresponded in each map. But the land was cross-hatched in one. In the other there were more diverse lines – the marks of fencing and demarcation – a history of settlements. I’m told that there was a third map – where the scores of peat cuttings gave yet more lines to the same mapped section. But to me these two seemed a complete piece – the natural landscape lines and the interventions of crofters.

This work came alive when a burst of April light shot through the corner window. It hit on the edges of the lochs and the lines became a map of shimmering on our landscape.

Mary Elizabeth Davis, from the United States, mapped out her own section of temporary occupancy on Luskentyre beach. This recalled, for me, an elegant tracing of a section of that shoreline by Sinead Bracken, now in second year ASN. But Davis went alone to the place and set up her tent which is now installed in the gallery space. It’s like a re-sewn space-blanket with panels of kaleidescope colour. A video installation shows the artist in a costume which is between a wetsuit and a jester’s tight garb. She records acts of shamanism. She is logging her own attempts to build her own myths.

A shelf is placed along from the video. Particular objects, recognized from the video are laid out – a bleached bone, cut and uncut quartz.

Seaworn materials are a key element of a sculpture by Wangpeng, who is from China. Where others in the group responded to the unaccompanied voice of the singer Mary Smith, Wangpeng’s work is built on the rhythms suggested by the Peatbog Faeries. Pieces of glassware are tumbled by the sea till they’re pebbles. These are collected and bound in white thread then suspended so they are like musical notation, interacting with curving rods of different colour. The suggested shape is like a natural bowl in the landscape, a lagoon or a lochan or a geo or a dip between tussocks of moorland.

I felt the artist’s wording was a fresh summary of his work but that it could also speak out for the whole group:

“Mountains and road, sea wave, wool and the music of peatbog faeries, they make up the rhythm of Lewis. I captured that rhythm by eyes, touch, ears. Now I ‘translate’ it into this.”

Standards of hanging, labeling and presentation are high. Care has been taken to note sources and to include Gaelic titles. The subtle guide has information necessary and sufficient for the purpose and not a jot more. The visitors’ book indicated that some visitors did not see that there was one available. Some other comments show that work of this kind can be challenging for an audience which has little experience of it to date.

It’s possible there could be hints here for some work on helping to further develop the audience for different types of exhibition and performance to run along with the excellent education outreach programme run from An Lanntair. And yet other comments revealed a liking and interest at least as strong as my own.

© Ian Stephen, 2012

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• An Lanntair
• Gestalt
• Ian Stephen