Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 18 August 2012

THE PIER is hoaching with folk asking where the toilets are and why there isn’t a café.

UPSTAIRS there’s a chap looking after a visiting celeb. He waves his hand at the walls. ‘This is a local photographer,’ he says. ‘He’s not bad.’

It’s festival time, of course, and it hits me how lucky I am to be able to view work here all year round, in all sorts of light, in lots of space. It’s different, seeing a video installation amidst a press of people. The two artists on display have both been energised by Orkney; both have ‘local’ connections and international reputations; both are women.

Work for Christine Borland's The Grey Room

The sex is important, I think, because I think there are things women know more about than men, things which engage them creatively in different ways. Christine Borland is moved by Barbara Hepworth’s womb-like sculptures – all those warm womanly buttocky curves. Typically, though, Borland investigates deeper – right into the interior, scanning the work, turning it inside out, making shape out of negative space.

She has talked about ‘working figuratively, but not in life drawing’ and that’s what this is about. Her interest in medical science, dissection and anatomy isn’t clinical, but warmly engaged with the need to connect experiment to consequences – the Orcadian installation piece Hoxa Sound (2001), which is sited in two identical WW2 searchlight posts facing each other, is a good example of this.

It’s two prosthetic legs – a child’s – cast in steel which, it’s said, was recovered from the rusting sunken warships in the Flow and recast for medical equipment. The legs themselves, a rich rust brown, look tough and vulnerable at the same time; a celebration, maybe, of civilisation wresting a bit of good out of bad.

A Madras Loom leads us into the big sweep of cotton lace that’s the Grey Room installation. This beautiful instrument is from Borland’s home town, Darval. You can feel the maker’s love for it, the precision of the man-made joints and frets and mechanics. Your history brain starts humming – industrialisation, lace towns, rural craft, urban despair… but it’s only a tiny bit of the story – this was the room where women hunted the material for flaws, to darn them, where they repaired the machine’s mistakes.

Your eye is drawn to the big red dots in the big cotton weave, and sure enough, there are runs and snags – it’s like a magnified spider’s web, wrecked by bluebottles struggling. In the corner there are two wee seats, their cushions (nicely ironic this) patched with parcel tape – and two message bags hung over the chair backs. The play on scale is subtle and engaging – how tiny the tears that machine made were, how minute the repair – how enormous this cotton bale is, gushing all over the Pier’s ‘high’ room, flowing into corners – women’s work, from the tiny corner, fussy, never ending, crucial, unremarked. It’s a fine piece.

Christine Borland - Cast From Nature (film still)

I pass over the video work – one isn’t moving much and I like the physicality of the lace too much to spoil it by looking at a flat screen – and the wee room’s too crowded. It’s into Orkney Clay Body (male and female) – another celebration of layers and discoveries. There’s a series of potters’ tables, nicely used, coffee-cup circled and battered – and on them, rough cast pots.

They’re lovely, because they’re barely a step away from the making hand – unwieldy and lumpy and busy holding themselves together. This is, really, the human body and what it’s for – making, gathering, feeding – all in one. We’re just stuff, beautiful stuff mixed with mystery. To enlarge the point – developing the streak of irony which I’m finding most engaging in this artist – we meet Venus of the Whins.

There’s been hoo-ha amongst archaeological circles about a couple of finds from local digs which look human – the Westray Wifie, and the Brodgar Beuy. Potter Andrew Appleby produced his own find, which is here captured in a glass case beside the official report which dismisses it as ‘entirely geological in origin…shows no modification to its overall shape or surface.’ It looks as anthropomorphic as the Brodgar beuy; but that was found in very different, high profile circumstances.

Well! Something geological which is unmodified – I’d say that was a first. Of course it’s modified, by time, history, Orkney, Appleby, Borland, the glass case. Archaeology isn’t just mud; it’s Divine Imperfections, mediated by – in this case – woman’s work. I’ll go back to this show.

Christine Borland - Detail from Orkney Clay Body

But it’s upstairs, to Gunnie Moberg’s portraits of festival folk. This is a fascinating little journey – perhaps more evocative (as the chap who heads my review seems to suggest) for ‘local’ people. The much missed photographer is in her element here – catching people unawares – charming them – for she was very charming – into unguarded relaxation, and then capturing their essence for us.

It’s also a history of the growing awareness, confidence, and knowingness of the St Magnus International Festival, as we now call it, and of Gunnie’s own sense of her role as photographer to the great and good. The early work, in black and white, is fresh and exuberant. There’s Seamus Heaney caught in mid-crack, whisky half-cock, in ’82, the year they all danced at Brodgar on Midsummer Night; there’s Crichton Smith, never quite losing the teachery gesture – there’s Robert Alan Jamieson looking like a young Viking.

Gunnie Moberg - Maya Angelou,1991

Naomi Mitchison and G M B mirror each other, hands and knees crossed. Maxwell Davies hunches over Isaac Stern in that eagle-concentration posture that’s so familiar, Edwin Morgan is all tooth gaggle, a smile on legs; Jessie Kesson is defiantly dressed in an assortment of the wrong things, because clearly it’s not important. Perhaps the most evocative portrait, because there’s a lot of Gunnie in it, is of the Faroese writer William Heinesins at 90 – the knitted chair back, the beautiful hands, the busy eyes …

Later portrait,s in colour, seem no less searching and informative, but more formal and solemn. Perhaps as the Festival grew up, it put away childish things and daft behaviour as the weight of history grew, and Gunnie, a faithful recorder, reflected it too.

A fine pair, then, uncovering layers, investigating history and legacy and presenting us with the results. Digging the garden will never be quite the same.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• St Magnus Festival