The artist will lead an informal walk and talk at the Pier Arts Centre on Thursday 16 May at 7.30pm. Admission is free and booking is not necessary.

Shearer commented ‘I am pleased to be able to talk about my work in the exhibition. I will be discussing aspects of drawing and the development of ideas – how I document material and take it forward to the printing process through looking at sketchbooks, drawings and prints, as well as talking about the processes involved in printing.’

In addition, as part of the Pier Arts Centre’s focus on drawing this spring, Curator Andrew Parkinson will be giving a presentation entitled Hoy – Artists’ source, influence & inspiration at the Hoy Outdoor Centre, Friday 17 May, 8pm. No booking is necessary and admission is free. For information on ferry times contact Orkney Ferries on 01856 872044

Alongside Charles Shearer drawings ~ prints ~ paintings A Parliament of Lines, a touring exhibition curated for the City Art Centre in Edinburgh is on display. The exhibition showcases the work of 14 artists, working at an international level, who have all passed through the Scottish art school system.

A Parliament of Lines and Charles Shearer drawings ~ prints ~ paintings will be on display from until 8 June 2013. The Pier Arts Centre Collection is on display all year round. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10.30am – 5.00pm. Admission is free.

The Pier Arts Centre
Victoria Street
Stromness
Orkney
www.pierartscentre.com

Peedie Pier comprises drawings, paintings, prints and sculptural works that have been selected by the art teachers who visit the schools each week.

The exhibition will include work from primary and junior secondary schools and will be on show 9-23 February. The children range from primary 1 to secondary 4 and are from Papdale, Glaitness, St Andrews, Evie, Dounby, Stenness, Orphir, St Margaret’s Hope, Burray, Firth, North Walls, Sanday, Stronsay and Westray schools.

A second exhibition will feature work from Stromness Academy and Kirkwall Grammar School and will be on display from 2-16 March 2013.

One of the teachers involved in curating the exhibitions, Shona Firth, commented “The joy of making art is twofold. There is the personal satisfaction felt in creating something unique and on occasion the pleasure of sharing it with a willing and hopefully appreciative audience.

This peedie selection of artworks comes from the hands of some of Orkneys younger practitioners through the network of art teachers who bring their knowledge, skills and enthusiasm to our schools.”

The diversity of media and form in the exhibition gives the viewer an insight into the pupils’ creative imaginations while showing their increasing self-awareness and confidence.

The exhibition also highlights the important role played by the art teachers in nurturing the children’s skills and ideas. Under their leadership and guidance the pupils enthusiasm and personal choice emerges, whilst engaging with curriculum-based work.

Mrs Firth continued “For the teacher the joy of making art is more than twofold. There is also a huge amount of pleasure to be had in teaching it.”

Carol Dunbar, Education Officer at the Pier Arts Centre added “We are always pleased to showcase the young talented artists being nurtured in Orkney. Showing Peedie Pier alongside New Ground – Orkney’s Art Graduates gives the Centre the opportunity to display work by Orkney’s younger generations throughout all stages of education. I hope our visitors seeing these exhibitions will be as pleased as we are to see the level of creative skill coming out of Orkney’s schools.”

Peedie Pier and New Ground – Orkney’s Art Graduates 2011 & 2012 will be on display at the Pier Arts Centre until 16 March 2013.

The gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday 10.30am – 5.00pm. Admission is free.

The Pier Arts Centre
Victoria Street
Stromness
Orkney
www.pierartscentre.com

Source: The Pier Arts Centre

The level of talent on show at all concerts, which was held at Adelaides, was extremely high. The six winners of the Danny Kyle Open Stage 2013 are:

Mulk – Aberdeen

Harry Gorski- Brown, Hayden Hook and Finlay Jamieson make up this trio, bringing a fusions of gypsy , jazz, folk, improvisation, classical, fund and world ! With their own compositions make up this new and vibrant trio.

www.facebook.com/mulkx

Gria

Hailing from Shetland, Orkney, Lewis & Northumberland this recently formed band – have a cultural musical inspiration combining Gaelic and Scots and English traditions.

www.facebook.com/GriaBand

Graham Low and Jack Kirkpatrick

These accomplished young musicians from Orkney wowed everyone on the Open Stage at the Orkney Folk Festival , Graham also takes part in ‘The Gathering’ .

www.facebook.com/graham.low.1

Taylor & Leigh – From Edinburgh

A blend of Nu-Folk-Country Blues and blisteringly hot play across the length and breadth of the UK, their music has also been used to promote Ken Loch’s film ‘Aye Fond Kiss’.

www.soundcloud.com/Talorandleigh

Genesse

Beldina Odenyo singer songwriter, originally from Kenya now resident in Glasgow goes under the name of Genesse and brings her culture and travels to us in her poems and songs.

Elliot Morris

The 23 year-old singer-songwriter from Lincolnshire began playing electric guitar when he was 11, but launched his solo set at 17, just a year after starting to explore the possibilities of the acoustic instrument.

www.elliottmorris.co.uk/

Source: Celtic Connections

West Side Cinema will offer alternative screenings in the relaxed and informal venue of Stromness Town Hall. Programmes will include shorts and features, fiction and documentary, international and classics, as well as on line content, and will often tie in with established local festivals.

Themed music, candle-lit tables, a relaxed and social atmosphere and patrons can bring their own refreshments. The venue has recently been refurbished with a high definition projector, electric screen and a new sound and lighting system.

The cinema is open to the general public (in accordance with BBFC certification).

Become a member

At £5 per year your subscription will help with operating costs. You’ll get access to the on line Trailer Park to view trailers for possible future screenings. Pick your preference from the menu or offer suggestions of your own. There will also be a monthly ‘members only’ draw for a pair of tickets and other prizes.

West Side Cinema is a not for profit enterprise and any profits will go back into programming. Any size of donation is welcome. Support your local cinema and put Stromness and film on the map.

Source: West Side Cinema

The Cowboy and the Spaceman by Colin Kirkpatrick will be followed by The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow by filmmaker Mark Jenkins and audiences will get the opportunity to ask both directors questions about their work in a post screening question and answer session.

The Cowboy and the Spaceman, takes up the well known economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding’s image of Spaceship Earth, and contrasts the archetypes of cowboy and spaceman. Commissioned by Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen in 2006, the film highlights some of the ecological and ethical issues surrounding stewardship of the earth’s natural resources.

The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow is a creative docu-drama inspired by memoirs of service men and women based in wartime Orkney. The short film was commissioned by the Pier Arts Centre in collaboration with the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership.

Thirty three local people took on roles as crew, actors and voice-over artistes. Filming took place in many locations around the coastline of Scapa Flow, and in the Cromarty Hall as a studio for interior filming. The original soundtrack for the film was composed and played by Orcadian James Watson.

Andrew Parkinson, Curator at the Pier Arts Centre said, “This is a great opportunity for people to see two films by Stromness based filmmakers/artists. We screened both films earlier this year and it became clear that we would need to arrange further screenings to satisfy demand. We are very pleased to be showing both films at Stromness Town Hall and hope that we will be able to accommodate everyone that would like to see the films. I’m glad too that we will get to hear a bit of the background to both films from the directors.”

The double bill of screenings will take place at the Stromness Town hall at 7.30pm on Saturday 17 November. Admission is free but booking is essential – contact the Pier Arts Centre on 01856 850 209.

Source: Pier Arts Centre

CAPE FAREWELL was created in 2001 to ‘ instigate a cultural response to climate change’.

IT’S NOW an international not-for-profit organisation based at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre in London. There’s also a North American foundation in Toronto. So it’s pretty big and important.

For artists, it may be a lifeline; it commissions work! But a particular kind of work – it exists to ‘bring artists, scientists and communicators together to work collaboratively and independently to consider the relationships between people, place and resources in the context of climate change.’

Gulls illuminated by fishing boats in Canna Harbour, courtesy Cape Farewell

I’m quoting here from the Orcadian, pretty sure that this information is on Cape Farewell’s own website, and also to be sure I get the detail right, because the evening was – I’ll avoid hurricane metaphors – a whirlwind of information, slides tumbling after slides till they blurred into each other, voice after voice, often going very quickly.

There were six presentations – after the first four, and a sumptuous spread laid on by the Cape Farewell folk, we had a sort of intriguing offshoot about the Galapagos – Calouste Gulbenkian sponsored residencies there and the results can be seen in the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Representative Adrian Vasquez just happened to be here in Orkney – so he and our own Kate Johnson, from Heriot Watt University’s International Centre for Island Technology, an expert on the social impact of industrial change on culture in islands, added their tuppenceworth.

Nobody asked any questions. Orcadians are quiet at the best of times, but I think they were just reeling from info overload. Clearly the conversation the organisation wants to have with the people here will happen in more domestic surroundings, in slower time.

‘Slow art’ is the key to the ongoing project Sea Change, specifically about Scottish islands. Creative people join scientists on board a boat, with no brief other than to observe, experience, think – and see what happens. The framework, of course, is clear – this is about climate change, about renewable technology, about, not to put too fine a point on it, how we can negotiate a whole new world.

The scientists are steaming away – as Kate Johnson put it, ‘it’s like being in Silicon Valley. There’s funding for research, they’re young, they’re learning things, about engineering, about physical and natural science…they’re excited, very excited.’ But, she said, ‘ what is not being examined is the social science effect of what is being proposed here – Orkney being the world centre for the development of wave and tidal energy. Industry – heavy industry – brings its own problems and conflicts with the local population.’

Cape Farewell puts creative makers in the mix, giving them space to react too – but gradually, involving people. ‘Art making’ said Associate Director Ruth Little, ‘ is a social practice, a conversation with places and people. Islands are profound metaphors; archipelagos link unique communities… journeying is a way of extending the edge, the line between people and culture, discovering new things, living with uncertaintly, recognising the past and bringing it flexibly into the present.’

John Cumming talked about the process as he had experienced it. He travelled through the Outer and Inner Hebrides in 2011, with fimmakers, oceanographers, sailors, writers – and some of the results of his experience were on show. His short talk was perhaps the most enlightening part of the evening, passionate, poetic, but also hitting some nails on heads.

‘It was an amazing journey… I didn’t want to make propaganda… I wanted to keep my integrity; so I thought about other people who had made sea journeys. There was no private space on sailing ships. You wanted your own things, tokens, tools, scrimshaw, things for self-maintenance – so I used the idea of Ditty Boxes, which sailors took with them full of such things. It was past present and future in a box. Boxmaker Cecil Tait created beautiful boxes for me to fill.

Ditty Box by John Cumming and Cecil Tait

As a Shetlander I wanted to reflect on the warming of the seas. I knew as a boy that when the voices of the arctic terns stopped, summer was gone; so I approached Fionn MacArthur, and we’re working on a sound collage, giving a voice to the older fishermen, to save lost voices. It has been a profound experience, and it continues.’

The work itself is arresting – the boxes themselves work as a metaphor of course – what we keep safe, under a lid, what we save, what’s precious, for the box that’s life. The craftsmanship is lovely – magical names – ice birch, quilted maple, chestnut, gently gleaming and warm. Inside – soapstone and alabaster, grey and white, jostle sphagnum moss, netting tools, twig catapults, stone eggs, beeswax to caulk lines – all the goods tackle and gear of a vanishing world, re-imagined in sculptural form. There’s a home-stitched bag, whapped like a fishing rope, full of sand. It’s all tactile, evocative, melancholy and really beautiful. Like the best art, it leaves the viewer full of new thoughts. It’s poignant, because it’s mostly about loss – loss of simple industry, loss of our connection through work with the forces of nature.

Also fascinating, because it was a tale of commitment, vision, hard work, love, craftsmanship and of course, of substantial funding – from the days when Shetland had more money to spend – was Allistair Rendall’s tale of the restoration of the Swan herself, the boat at the centre of it all. That was an evening’s worth all on its own. Another grand metaphor too – a sturdy craft resurrected, remade, journeying full of hope and young folk.

Director David Buckland made it clear that the artist’s role, amongst other things, was to engage with the issue of climate change, and foreground it. Art is good for getting press coverage, which in turn raises awareness. I was going to say, raises political awareness, but politics wasn’t mentioned until the very last moment – when Kate Johnson remarked in conclusion that that was what it was all about really; ‘identifying conflicts and how to work through them.’ Indeed, the Galapagos section brought the problems of island culture versus industrial excitement and investment right up close and personal.

Think Galapagos and you think, I’m guessing, turtles, and other funny friendly animals who have never encountered people, except Darwin and David Attenborough, so trustingly lay their heads on humanity’s lap so it can do what it will with them. Not so, said Adrian Vasquez. He said: what about the people? Thanks to eco-tourism, Galapagos now has a population, to sustain the needs of the cruise liners and adventure tours…but it’s very hard to live in a tourist destination. (murmurs of recognition and agreement from the audience.) There’s tension between the locals and the scientists at the Darwin Institute there.

Kate Johnson’s statistics, and information about the collapse of the sea cucumber business also rang true for the audience. It was uncomfortably like a model for small island industry everywhere – the herring, for example. A timely slosh of cold water. Fast change is painful. There was far more to talk about here too, and no time to do it – yet. But islands have to get together and look at what happens to them when big meets tiny. We have to learn how to handle the next few years well, artists, community leaders, wave energy triallers, Chinese investors, fishermen, everybody. Together.

So – with what felt like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, as the song says – somethin’s gotta give. Will it be the rampant new industry, or the shores and shallows of the old islands? Or – as Cape Farewell hope, will art and science move hand in hand, learning to embrace each other and island communities as we all struggle to accept what’s coming?

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Cape Farewell

In 2005, KENNETH WHITE delivered a series of three lectures on the Geopoetics project in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. The third, ‘A Sense of High North’, was delivered at Kirkwall on 31 October 2005.

BONFIRE is architectural ideas competition and participants are invited to establish own limits and interpretation of Judges Statement, to present most inspiring, thoughts provoking and innovative architectural design.

Papa Westray (locally known as Papay) is 4 miles long and 1 mile wide and representing all Orkney in miniature: sea cliffs, sandy beaches, green undulating fields. The island has 7000 years of dramatic history of human inhabitation, fragile environment of the present and uncertainty of the future – the world in miniature, where new ideas can arrive and to be presented in greater clarity

At this stage no specific site for design proposals is defined and participants have opportunity and freedom to explore our island (please use Google map for information) and suggest the site, or to focus on the BONFIRE design itself.

In global scale it is hoped the competition will contribute to the debate about tradition and present role of an architect. Also such debate can be important in local scale as an opportunity to address issues of heritage and landscape with a help of most bright and adventurous architectural minds, to give confidence in interaction with an ancient landscape and heritage applying new architectural, technological and philosophical ideas.

They are expecting a great variety and quality of architectural ideas to promote through BONFIRE publications and travelling exhibitions; and looking forward to bring the winning BONFIRE design(s) to the completion for February 2014 and their following events.

Submission Deadline: 12 December 2012

For further information on how to submit an entry visit www.bonfire.papawestray.org

Source: IVANOV + CHAN

Eventually they  are planning to build artist’s studios, exhibition and performance space and house for the island’s art collection.

REBECCA Marr is more than a photographer.

YOU drop by this starry little exhibition on a dreich day, between getting the mince and posting the bills – and come away buzzing. It’s not just the quality of the work – which is very fine – but the ideas behind it, the comments visitors make, and what I can only call – though I hate the word – the ambience created by her enthusiasms. Folk linger and find themselves discussing everything from colonial architecture to seaweed pudding. Brilliant.

Rebecca Marr - Vertebrae photogram

There are delicate bones on the windowsill. They’re from harbour porpoises. There they are again on the wall, transformed. She’s gone ‘back to basics’ in her photographic technique, inspired by Anna Atkins, a Victorian botanist and photographer considered to be the first woman to illustrate a book with photographic images, using light sensitised paper exposed to the sun. Atkins’ own story, and her images, are amazing; Marr’s grafting of her techniques has borne interesting fruit.

It’s chancy work, ‘hard to get the tone right, you’re working almost in the opposite direction from modern digital , in your dark room – it’s photography without a camera, really, just exposure.’ She shows me stones imprinted with seaweed shapes. ‘It’s the same process, really.’

There’s a lovely texture to the porpoise vertebrae studies; they’re milky and refined, as if she’s got the essence of them distilled. At the same time, though, they become ‘other’ – like galaxies, or candlewax.

‘I like ‘findings’ – mementoes of walks, or random gifts – these are feathers from my hens’ (the twinned quills dance along the paper like tipsy ladies) – ‘and I like to get to the essence of things – or rather, let the things reveal themselves.’

She’s been on the Birsay shore collecting seaweeds – and investigating the whole social history behind them at the same time. Context matters. Place matters. Recipes and remedies matter. As you look at the collographs – pure shape, again, bladderwrack , sugar kelp – you’re aware of a whole back story, of kelp pits and abandoned drying dykes.

There’s an old aerial photo of a small bit of North Ronaldsay (where the sheep graze on the seaweed, and in turn make a fine Orkney product..) – and beside it, close ups of lichen on plants, crusty and organic.

‘It’s telling you of itself – you look from above, you look close, and there are relationships.’

Rebecca Marr - Smoo Cave (digital photograph)

There are straight digital images – studies of Smoo Cave which are complex and deep; there are bright reds, surprising pinks – shocking even – and a beautifully intricate blue and black washed piece. ‘It’s nice not to be confined by a theme,’ she said – and indeed, there’s a lovely Victorian energy here, a whole hearted response to nature as a force of its own. I can almost feel Anna Atkins at Marr’s shoulder, conferring and applauding.

More than an exhibition, this – a sort of delighted forwardmoving force. More soon please; the nights are drawing in.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

DEREK Williams was a chartered surveyor from Cardiff.

SOUNDS like the start of a particularly British psychological thriller, doesn’t it. Maybe a Ruth Rendell. But Derek, who looks from his very 70s pic like an amiable chap, collected modern British art – and he had a good eye.

There are forty works from his collection here, and they are fascinating for all sorts of reasons. For a start, as curator Andrew Parkinson rightly notes, the paintings roughly match the Pier’s own, timewise – but ‘represent a very different approach to the British landscape and abstract painting.’ So you can bounce between the two collections, picking up threads of connection – Hepworth to Henry Moore, Nicholson to Piper’s abstract phase, Alfred Wallis to his representational.

John Piper – Still Life with Window and Ship (1932)

There’s also a meditation to be had about landscape as a source of solace, or a reminder of unpleasant realities, and another about the function of abstraction in art – the early abstract works here are almost maidenly in their timidity. How very far we have travelled, you will think – and to what end?

But to the beef of it. I am coming to look forward to the narrow corridor which sets you off on the Pier journey, because it’s always hung so teasingly – to draw you in and surprise you. There’s Victor Pasmore’s student stuff – a bit laboured and watery, next to an engaging, almost twee study of Pink Roses. Look closer and you can see the abstract planes dying to escape the merely representational.

Turn your head and all of a sudden we’re in European expressionist country. Josef Herman brings all the rich colour, texture and cultural weight of history to his study of Three Welsh Miners, robotic yet earth bound, faceless, timeless. Another theme weaving through the exhibition – and reflected in the young Piergroup’s selections upstairs – has to do with people in the here and now, inhabiting landscape and living inside an imperfect, sometimes cruel world. Herman’s stunning Mother and Child, thick impasto jewelled with subtle light, reminds me of something Sienese – or of Roualt – but it’s part of the post war urge to revisit tenderness, in the wake of brutality.

This is present too in the Henry Moore next door, a sexy ovoid in a shell, and more poignantly in Graham Sutherland’s ’65 silver crucifix, planned for Ely Cathedral but, bizarrely, rejected by its authorities. Sutherland of course was famous – notorious, perhaps – for his brave modernist work in the bomb blasted Coventry Cathedral. This tiny piece is just as powerful – Christ in human agony, yes, his ribs jutting – but translating as we watch into a flying soul, the crucifix metamorphosing into butterfly wings.

It’s a worry, having Lowry anywhere. He’s cursed by his own democratic popularity, his postcardfriendliness, the man who ‘painted matchstick men and matchstick dogs and cats.’ But The Doctor’s Visit is a gem. It’s social history, of course. I could make an acrid joke here about doctors, cuts, and the likelihood of their ever visiting again in my lifetime, but I won’t; I’ll merely note that the painting has a Dutch/ Scottish genre feel about it.

It bursts to tell a story, about the pale beautiful invalid looking so directly at us, the shadowy mother behind her, the neat poverty of the mantles and lace and rugs and down at heel suits. Look closer and you’ll see a very modern pull towards the abstract – those imprisoning horizontals and verticals, the tightness of the angles, cut by the pallid ovals of faces.

He escaped to Sunderland in the 60’s, and produced a fine study of Men Fishing which is another inspired choice; not the painter we thought we knew, but a sadder, more profound, more technically subtle artist. The red capped men with their lines are swamped by sea, sky and a towering black rock with a black lighthouse on it. The paint is rough, like the sea and sky; it feels as if a storm’s about to destroy any attempt at quiet contemplation.

Old Salford Street Scene (‘part of a private beauty that haunted me,’ he said) has a touch of American gothic; but much more than that, it’s a clear nod towards abstraction once more – windows, domes, railings, all enclosing hidden, human concerns. Lowry looks in – Ceri Richards looks out, listening to the music of things. He’s vibrant, playful, Matisse-ish, Picasso-ish, as optimistic as his signature. Loose, busy, full of harmonies and surprises – the yellow doorknob! The owl! The stork carrying a bundle – not babies, of Welsh flowers, for Dylan Thomas’ requiem. Good too to see mixed media as well as oil, because he’s a scribbler, and ink suits his nervy verve.

More clever juxtapositioning in this big room – opposite Lowry’s muted moments, we’ve got John Piper’s cool, collected studies. Of all the artists here, he’s the one I thought I was most familiar with – as a War Artist, a Shell calendar artist, a romantic who had a go at abstraction. I am fond of A Ruined House, Hampton Gay (1941) – the trees are blasted, the ground’s blackened, the elegant lines of the house destroyed by bomb damage – it’s very much of it’s time, melancholy and brooding.

But I didn’t know his earlier work, which is lovely, full of reverberations for an Orkney audience. Hope Inn, done in 1934, is sea saturated, full of images – shells as classifications and as stars, – which lead you into more and more metaphors about the life of sailors (it’s impossible not to cross reference it with the Richard’s Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood).

Sidmouth is another delicate lovely study – the stepped gables, the kirk door (Methodist perhaps, but I thought of Mackay Brown’s poem Peter Esson when I saw this). Then – looking at Still Life with Window and Ship – I thought of the recent Sylvia Wishart exhibition (the book’s available from the Pier, if you haven’t got it). She’d have enjoyed this tight doily patterned, shuttered still life on the window, with the busy tramp steamer rushing past the tranquillity.

I’ve gone on too long. There’s more joyous, loose, tangled Piper in the darker room (trying to avoid glass reflection, nearly succeeding). There’s a Tube drawing – a sleeping person, hands clasped – from Henry Moore – poignant again, that vanished War. There are student Lucien Freuds! Very skull-beneath-the-skin-ish, these two drawings – in Man and Bird With Worms the bird has definitely dissected the worm with relish, and the Falling Skeleton reminds me of that classic Paestum diver on the tomb, only this skeleton isn’t going anywhere nice.

There’s Stanley Spencer! It’s like a Leonardo drawing, all sepia, this Cookham study, and I can’t believe I can look at it for ages here in Stromness, and see for myself how interested he was, not in individual shapes, but in the all over patterning of the whole.

It’s a great show.

Upstairs, the Piergroup are part of a nationwide learning programme; they’ve been working with staff to pull out their own complimentary exhibition until 13 October 2012), finding out on the way the joys and pains of choosing, displaying and discussing art. The choices are good – they’re thinking about form and vitality and there are interesting connections between diverse works.

They’re shy though when it comes to talking; only Stephanie Spence offers some thoughts on her pick, Landscape Head by John Wells (1950). The rest of the group, somewhat dutifully, say in different ways what a wonderful time they had and how useful it was. I’d rather hear what it was about that Kapoor that rocked you (colour? shape? ) and how it melded – or diverged from – with the Hepworth and the lovely Robert Adam sculpture.

There’s also a not to be missed new film by Mark Jenkins playing, about Scapa Flow in wartime, which, again, dovetails rather neatly – the recollections of Orcadians counterpoint the wartime work downstairs; as do Jenkins images of a sea – struck community into which war – and ENSA – intruded. A fine day out, at the Pier, I’d say.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

Scotland's Culture

Each year the Scottish government conduct a Scottish Household Survey that gives us an insight into the composition, characteristics, attitudes and behaviours of Scottish households and individuals. The research is used by the government to support their work in transport, communities and local government policy areas and allow for the early detection of national trends. The Survey covers a range of topics including housing, communities, economic activity, finance, education, transport and travel, the internet, health and caring, local services, volunteering and culture and sport.

I’ve been looking over the last three published reports going back to 2007 to see what trends we can detect about cultural attendance and participation in Scotland. I’ve picked out some of the things which caught my attention and I’ll let you interpret the facts in the way you want. However this type of information can help you to identify either how big a potential local or national audience you could have, or help us to identify areas that we need to grow, develop and support.

Sian’s Top Insights into the Scottish Household Survey

I’ve been looking at the reports from 2007/2008, 2009/2010 and the most recent report 2011 to see what patterns or trends I can see. These are some which stood out.

Participation and attendance

• 63% of the population read for pleasure, by far the most popular cultural activity to participate in (the second most popular activity is dancing with 17%). There are approximately 5.2 million people living in Scotland, so this means around 3.3 million people read for pleasure.
• When we then look at the cultural activities that people attend in Scotland it shows that only 5% of the population attend book or writing related events, that’s about 261,100 people. A fraction of the total number of people who read books.
• A similar trend emerged for dance – 19% of the population participate in dancing, however only 5% attend a live dance or ballet performance. It is not clear what the survey means by ‘participate in dancing’ and whether that refers to classes or dancing on a night out.
• However in music, art, theatre and cinema the behaviour shows the opposite trend.
• Around 11% of the population play an instrument, however 28% have attended a live music event (that’s around 1.5 million people).
• 9% of people actively create art or sculpture, while 17% have attended a gallery, and a further 17% have attended an exhibition or viewed an art collection (together that’s around 1.7 million people – although I would imagine that people who said they have visited a gallery are likely to be the same people who say they attend exhibitions).
• And in cinema, 53% of the population have been to the cinema to see a film (the most popular activity attended in Scotland), however only 2% of people in Scotland actively make film or video’s.

Age

I noticed three possible trends in the data around age and attendance.

• There has been a small rise (2%) of the number of 16 to 24 year olds in attending cultural events in the last 5 years (2007-2011).
• Similarly for people aged 25 to 34 there has been a 2% increase in attendance.
• Together that’s about an extra 25,000 people under the age of 34 attending cultural events.
• However, this is compared to a 3% decrease in the number of people aged 75 and over attending cultural events – this equates to a drop of around 10,970 people.

 Frequency of Attendance

• A quarter of people go to the cinema once a month in Scotland (that’s about 705,000 people), while 42% of people go 3 or 4 times in a year (around 1.1 million people).
• On average 27% of the population have attended the theatre in the last 5 years (1.4 million people), of these less than a third have been 3 or 4 times a year (approximately 469,990 people), just over a third had been twice a year and less than a third once a year.
• Similar patterns emerged from museum attendance, live music attendance, exhibition and gallery attendance. Around about a third of people will attend 3 or 4 times a year, a third twice a year and a third once a year.
• In Crafts, although the survey does not clearly outline what a craft exhibition is and whether that includes craft fairs or visiting craft shops, approximately 11% of the population (574,430 people) have attended a craft exhibition. Around 23% go 3 or 4 times a year, 35% go twice a year and 36% go once a year.
• There has been an increase in the frequency of craft exhibitions people attend in the last 5 years – we can see a 5% increase from 21% of people attending craft exhibitions 3 or 4 times a year in 2007 to 26% in 2011 – that’s an increase of approximately 28,700 people in 5 years.
• In opera and classical music 6% of the population attend these events (that’s around 313,330 people). Of these 40% attended one event per year, 30% saw 2 events per year and 22% saw 3 or 4 events, which is approximately 68,930 people.
• We can also see some rises and falls within opera and classical music attendance over the last 5 years. In 2009/2010 there was a big rise in the number of people attending classical and opera events. In 2007/08 27% of people saw 2 events per year, and then in 2009/10 34% of people had seen 2 events. However in 2011 only 29% of people went to see 2 classical or opera events – that’s a drop of 5% – approximately 21,932 people from the previous two years.
• A similar fall can be seen in the number of people who see opera or classical music once a year. In 2007/08 44% of people went to see at least one classical or opera concert (that’s around about 137,863 people). While in 2011 this dropped by 5% to 39% – which is a fall of about 15,666 people.
• Finally dance showed a different trend, of the 5% of the population who attend live dance or ballet performances, over 50% go to see a show once a year, 25% go twice a year and 15% go 3 or 4 times a year.

Rural versus Urban

For the first time in 2009/2010 the survey distinguished between urban and rural attendance and participation. Although we only have two reports worth of data to compare there are some interesting trends to be brought to your attention.

• Attendance of live music events in urban areas and accessible rural areas has increased by 5%.
• Theatre attendance across urban and rural areas has stayed the same since 2009.
• Museum attendance has increased by 5% in remote rural areas.
• Gallery attendance has increased in remote small towns by 5% and 4% in rural areas.
• Nearly twice as many people in rural areas attend craft exhibitions as they do in urban areas. While 10% of urban populations go to craft events, 19% do so in remote rural areas and 17% in accessible rural areas.
• 8% of large urban populations attend dance performances compared to 7% of people in accessible rural areas; only 5% attend dance performances in remote rural areas.
• Of course there are individuals who do not attend any cultural events during the year, and the report shows us that 22% of people in urban areas do not attend, while 30% of people in remote rural areas do not attend.

There is a lot more information available in the reports which you can download directly from the Scottish Governments website (all links made available below). And if you would like any advice on how to use and interpret this kind of data then you can get in touch with me.

Scotland’s People

Scottish Household Survey 2007/2008

Scottish Household Survey 2009/2010

Scottish Household Survey 2011

The film is the culmination of a film residency commissioned by the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme (SFLPS) in collaboration with the Pier Arts Centre. The aim of the residency was to celebrate and respond to the themes of The Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme – Landscapes of War, Landscapes of Peace, Natural Landscapes, Celebration and Communication.

Mark Jenkins said ‘Instead of picking one of the SFLPS themes I thought it possible to cover all of them. Having read publications about wartime Orkney, certain first person accounts resonated, reminding me of my own journey and experience here.’

The wartime memoirs have been sourced from three publications: ‘Scapa Flow’ by Malcolm Brown & Patricia Meehan, ‘Sky Over Scapa’ by Gregor Lamb, and ‘Bloody Orkney’ by Virginia Schroder. Supported by images from Orkney Library & Archive, Mark explored the themes of escapism and longing.

He commented ‘While I wanted to reflect on history, I didn’t want to make a straightforward documentary. I realised that entertainment – music, film and amateur dramatics – was huge in wartime Orkney and began to develop a narrative within these strands’.

After presenting his ideas to local groups and individuals, nearly 50 people in total, a 20 page script was written and 22 characters cast mainly from the South Ronaldsay drama group at the Cromarty Hall.

Mark continued ‘The two lead actors are Duncan McLean and Daniel Sargent. Duncan already has plenty of theatre experience and created the character of Islandman brilliantly. For Daniel it was a first time acting experience. I’d written the part of Wonderman with him in mind so I was confident he would be capable, and I wasn’t disappointed’.

Daniel added ‘I’ve spent a lot of time playing around at some of these wartime locations and it was exciting to get the opportunity to connect the past and present on film. It’s nice being yourself but it’s even nicer being somebody else, and playing 6 other people was sublime and right up my street. I hope I get the opportunity to act again’.

Many locals were involved in crewing for the film and providing audio recordings of memoirs. Interior scenes were shot at the Cromarty Hall as well as Kirbister and Corrigal Farm museums.

Exterior filming used locations around the coastline of Scapa Flow, focussing on many of the wartime structures.

The original soundtrack for the film has been composed and played by Orcadian James Watson.

‘James was incredible.’ Mark continued ‘This wasn’t the first time I’d worked with him but it was certainly the most elaborate. I’d seen James at a recent concert where he was using a fiddle through a loop pedal to create this wonderful layered effect. I thought this would work well with the idea of memory. We had an initial meeting and swapped guide tracks and thoughts. I think he’s done an amazing job, it’s a major part of the emotion of the film’.

James will be playing a specially composed set for the premiere at the Cromarty Hall.

Mark has been involved in cinema for nearly thirty years. As a film editor his films have picked up over 30 international film festival and six BAFTA Scotland awards. Since moving to Orkney he has made over 20 short films including ‘Reflections’, on the life and work of Sylvia Wishart and ‘Gunnie’, in memory of Gunnie Moberg.

The project was organised by the Pier Arts Centre with support from the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme and funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Orkney Islands Council and the Scottish Government and the European Community Orkney LEADER 2007-2013 Programme.

The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow will be shown on Saturday September 1, 8 pm at the Cromarty Hall, St Margaret’s Hope, Orkney. Admission is free but booking is essential. Contact the Pier Arts Centre on 01856 850 209 to book a seat or for further information.

Source: Pier Arts Centre

The Derek Williams Trust Collection contains works by L.S. Lowry, Henry Moore, John Piper, Ceri Richards, and Ivon Hitchens among others and is currently on a limited tour of the UK.

The exhibition’s display at the Pier Arts Centre is sponsored by Allianz Insurance and Clark Thomson Insurance Brokers and the national tour is supported by the Derek Williams Trust and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

Steve MacDougall, national and top tier broker manager, Allianz Insurance commented: “Allianz Insurance is very pleased to support the Pier Arts Centre to bring this important exhibition to audiences in Orkney. The Derek Williams Trust Collection includes a group of much admired British artists and it will be a real treat to see works by Henry Moore, LS Lowry and all the others alongside the Pier Arts Centre’s own fine collection.”

Kevin Hancock of Clark Thomson Insurance Brokers Ltd added “The Pier Arts Centre is rightly lauded for their ability to attract internationally renowned collections to Orkney and the Derek Williams Collection is another fine example of their efforts in this area. Clark Thomson are delighted to be associated with this event and look forward to it being enjoyed by all those who visit the Pier Arts Centre”.

Derek Williams (1929-1984), a chartered surveyor who lived and worked in Cardiff, began to build his collection in the 1950s. His passion for modern British art attracted him to the work of John Piper and Ceri Richards, whose works make up the majority of his collection. These are supported with works by other major figures of mid-twentieth century British art such as Stanley Spencer, Victor Pasmore and Lucian Freud. The whole collection is on long-term loan to Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

The Curator of the Derek Williams Trust Collection, Melissa Munro said, “During his life Derek Williams built an incredible collection of modern British art, which continues to be developed today by the Derek Williams Trust. Both Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales and the Derek Williams Trust are extremely pleased to be bringing this unique collection to Scotland and with it a greater awareness of the collection outside of Wales.”

The Derek Williams Trust was established following the collector’s death. The Trust is committed to the care, enhancement and public display of the Derek Williams’ collection. In addition, the Trust provides generous support in furthering the acquisition of post-1900 works of art at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales.

The Curator of the Pier Arts Centre, Andrew Parkinson added, “We are very pleased indeed to bring such a fine collection of British art to Orkney. While the Derek Williams Collection roughly matches the Pier Collection in time it represents a very different approach to the British landscape and abstract painting. Artists like Ivon Hitchens, John Piper and David Jones work in a more romantic and pastoral vein and it will be interesting to view their work and the other artists in the Derek Williams Collection, alongside the Modernist core of the Pier Arts Centre Collection.”

Melissa Munro, Curator of the Derek Williams Collection will give a guided tour of the exhibition on Saturday 1 September at 2pm. Admission is free and all are welcome.

Meanwhile a new display of works from the Centre’s own permanent collection is to open to coincide with the Derek Williams Collection. WE LOVE REAL LIFE is an exhibition of works from the Pier Arts Centre Collection curated by Piergroup – a shifting collective of young people who participate in gallery programmes and events. Members of Piergroup have been working closely with gallery staff to draw out complementary themes and motifs in the Centre’s Collection for this special public display.

The exhibition forms part of a nationwide learning programme supported by Plus Tate – a collaboration between Tate and a network of visual arts organisations across the UK, including the Pier Arts Centre. The Plus Tate learning programme is supported by Tate and J.P.Morgan.

WE LOVE REAL LIFE is on display in the gallery until Saturday 13 October 2012 and the Derek Williams Trust Collection runs until Saturday 17 November 2012. The Pier Arts Centre Collection is on display all year round.

The Pier Arts Centre
Victoria Street
Stromness
Orkney
Tel: 01856 850209
Web: www.pierartscentre.com

Source: The Pier Arts Centre

The Cowboy and the Spaceman was shot on location in Orkney in 2006 and is receiving its Orkney premiere at the Pier Arts Centre on Saturday 25 August when the 30 minute film will be shown on a loop throughout the day.

The film explores two differing views of Planet Earth and its resources and their profound implications for the long-term survival of life on earth.

Taking up economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding’s imagery of the Spaceship Earth, the film contrasts the archetypes of cowboy and spaceman. In Boulding’s view the cowboy sits atop his horse overlooking a wide open prairie, seeing the earth as an endless horizon of limitless possibilities. Conversely, the spaceman looks back at our planet from outer space realising that the earth is not only small, but finite in it’s resources. Within his spacecraft all equipment and supplies have to be recycled as often as possible in order to survive.

Using stunning shots of the West Mainland landscape a simple narrative is constructed exploring the two archetypes. In conclusion, a series of local people are portrayed and asked whether they are: a cowboy or a spaceman?

The artist’s fascination with Orkneys connections with the Wild West and with the native peoples of Canada led to the film being narrated by native Canadian Willie Ermine, of the First Nations University of Canada, in the Cree tongue with English sub-titles.

Colin Kirkpatrick commented, “The northern and western fringes of Europe are still considered by many to be our culture’s last local frontiers in terms of both resources and development. My Orkney upbringing, and Oil Town further education at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, often reminds me how fragile and limited many of these resources are. At the same time my childhood, surrounded by young farmers and returning trawler men bedecked in cowboy boots, perpetually reinforced the frontier-like qualities of the Northern Isles existence.”

The Cowboy and the Spaceman was written and directed on location in Orkney by Colin Kirkpatrick and produced by Adam Proctor at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen.

Andrew Parkinson, Curator of the Pier Arts Centre added, “Colin’s work in photography, painting, printmaking and drawing is well known in Orkney and we are pleased to bring the artist’s first substantial film to audiences in his home town. The film beautifully portrays a fundamental dilemma faced by local communities in seeking out sustainable modes of living.”

Screenings of the film will take place continuously at the Pier Arts Centre on Saturday 25 August from 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The Cowboy and the Spaceman is the second of three special events celebrating filmmaking in Orkney. The final screening of the season will take place at the Cromarty Hall in St Margaret’s Hope on Saturday 1 September when Mark Jenkins new film, The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow will be premiered. The event is free but booking is essential through the Pier Arts Centre on 01856 850 209.

Source: Pier Arts Centre

Films will be shown in the gallery at events over the next month culminating in the première of a new film, The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow, by Mark Jenkins at the Cromarty Hall in St Margaret’s Hope on 1 September.

Bill Forsyth visited Orkney several times in the 1980s and 1990s and shot Andrina, a film based on the George Mackay Brown short story, in the islands for the BBC in 1981. Forsyth was photographed several times by the late Orkney photographer Gunnie Moberg and one of these portraits is currently on display at the Pier Arts Centre.

Carol Dunbar, Education Officer at the Pier Arts Centre explained, “We have been thinking about how best to support the exhibition of Gunnie’s work and felt that a screening of one of Bill Forsyth’s most iconic films would be highly appropriate. The exhibition of portraits is a remarkable body of work – the calibre and range of writers and artists that Gunnie photographed and the particular rapport that she established with her subject is pretty unique.”

That Sinking Feeling, Forsyth’s first feature film from 1979, will be screened at the Pier Arts Centre on Thursday 16 August at 7 p.m.

Bill Forsyth is best know for classic films including Gregory’s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983) but That Sinking Feeling, a comedy set in Glasgow using young actors from Glasgow Youth Theatre, was the film that established the writer and director as a startling new voice in Scottish filmmaking. The film has recently been re-mastered and is now distributed through the British Film Institute.

A special day long presentation of a short film by Orcadian artist and filmmaker Colin Kirkpatrick will take centre stage on Saturday 25 August in the gallery. The film, The Cowboy and the Spaceman, takes up the well known economist and philosopher Kenneth Boulding’s image of Spaceship Earth, and contrasts the archetypes of cowboy and spaceman.

Commissioned by Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen in 2006, the film highlights some of the ecological and ethical issues surrounding stewardship of the earth’s natural resources.

Screenings of the film will take place continuously on Saturday 25 August from 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

A new film by Stromness filmmaker Mark Jenkins, commissioned by the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership in collaboration with the Pier Arts Centre, will complete the short season of screenings.

The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow is a creative docu-drama inspired by memoirs of service men and women based in wartime Orkney. The memoirs have been sourced from three remarkable publications: ‘Scapa Flow’ by Malcolm Brown & Patricia Meehan, ‘Sky Over Scapa’ by Gregor Lamb, and ‘Bloody Orkney’ by Virginia Schroder.

Thirty three local people took on roles as crew, actors and voice-over artistes. Filming took place in many locations around the coastline of Scapa Flow, and in the Cromarty Hall as a studio for interior filming. The original soundtrack for the film has been composed and played by Orcadian James Watson.

The project was organised by the Pier Arts Centre with support from the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme and funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Orkney Islands Council and the Scottish Government and the European Community Orkney LEADER 2007-2013 Programme.

The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow will be premièred at 8 p.m. on Saturday 1 September at the Cromarty Hall in St Margaret’s Hope.

Admission to all screenings is free but space is limited for The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow and That Sinking Feeling and booking is essential – contact the Pier Arts Centre on 01856 850 209.

Source: Pier Arts Centre

Director Annilese Miskimmon (newly appointed Artistic Director of Danish National Opera) gets right to the heart of the story in a production that centres on the turbulent relationships at its core.
 
Violetta, a famed escort, leads a seemingly charmed existence amidst the cream of Paris society. But, in fragile health, she is tired of living an empty life and when Alfredo introduces himself she finally sees a way out of her tawdry lifestyle. Deeply in love, all is blissful contentment until some home truths convince her to leave Alfredo and head back into the arms of another…

The sheer concentration of drama makes La Traviata the perfect piece to present in more intimate settings, and Verdi’s music only heightens the spectacle. It encompasses an astonishing range of moods and emotions, from Alfredo’s fresh-faced charms to Violetta’s vivid effervescence, which is perfectly captured in ‘Sempre libera’, a vocal showpiece to rival any other.

20 Sep to 24 Nov 2012 (piano-accompanied)

Touring to: Giffnock, Stirling, Fort William, Plockton, Portree, Strathpeffer, St Andrews, Aboyne, Drumnadrochit, Ellon, Lerwick, Kirkwall, Thurso, Ullapool, Stornoway, Nairn, Easterhouse, Galashiels, Pitlochry, Greenock, Newton Stewart, Langholm, Largs, Musselburgh and Perth.

7 to 23 Mar 2013 (chamber orchestra-accompanied)

Touring to: Dundee, Kelso, Dumfries, Elgin, Oban, Dunfermline, Hamilton and Troon.

Tickets on sale 30 July 2012

Source: Scottish Opera

Nonfiction is a success story for Scotland’s writers and publishers and we’re looking for new, unpublished, nonfiction books – or simply great ideas – for development for the commercial and mainstream book market.

The projects submitted can be memoirs, self-help guides, cook books or any other type of commercial nonfiction for adults or children.

For Scotland’s emerging and unpublished writers this is a great chance to pitch their work directly to a partnership of Scotland’s leading talent development agency for writers and Scotland’s leading Literary Agency – and through HI~Arts’ Talent Development project authors can get the professional assistance and advice they need in developing their book or idea – and have all the benefits of a leading literary agency behind them!

HI~Arts Talent Development Manager for writing, Peter Urpeth, said:

‘We are very excited to be able to launch this project at a time when nonfiction remains one of the strongest and most successful sectors in Scottish writing and publishing. But we know that the book market in general remains very difficult for writers looking to get an agent or publisher for their work.

‘This project combines a chance for writers to pitch their work to an agent with the chance to receive professional advice and support and from a leading talent development agency for writers.

‘Where appropriate, Jenny Brown Associates will work directly with writers whose work or ideas they like, and if we find promising work that needs the kind of nurturing that we can provide, then we will be offering that support.

‘HI~Arts has very considerable experience in assisting writers in developing their nonfiction projects, and in nurturing talent, and I’m sure that we are going to uncover some real unpublished gems of nonfiction through this project.’

The criteria for qualification are simple: writers must be resident in Scotland; the work or idea they plan to submit must be unpublished and all their own original work.

The application process is very straightforward. Writers complete the online form to tell us about their work or ideas for a nonfiction book, and send us the first three chapters. For those proposing an idea for a book, that’s fine, too, use the same form and if we like what we read, then we’ll be in touch either to receive a copy of the work as it is developed or to assist in further developing the idea or proposal.

HI~Arts usually offers talent development services only to writers living and working in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, but for this project we’re offering writers from across Scotland the chance to take part in one of our projects.

We cannot guarantee that all of our services will be available to writers outside of the Highlands & Islands, but we can certainly guarantee that through the partnership of HI~Arts and Jenny Brown Associates, work that’s has commercial promise will receive the kind of advice that really makes a difference – and both the application process and development support are free!

The application process is open throughout August and September 2012, and we will be reading work and contacting applicants right through until the end of October 2012, to ensure that writers have time to fully develop their pitch before submitting it to us for consideration.

HI~Arts Talent Development (Writing) is funded by HIE and Creative Scotland.

Full details can be found at HI~Arts website:

http://hi-arts.co.uk/services/talent-development/writing/services/

Source: HI~Arts

SPIT in Stromness these days and you hit an artist.

THEY’RE all here doing stone pictures (mostly awful – take my tip, just visit the stones), Druidical pictures (take my tip, revisit Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s better) and landscapes which never really existed. It takes courage to really see.

Marian Ashburn's jaunty take on the Stromness street

Which is what Diana Lesley has in spades. Her wee exhibition in the Northlight Gallery (forgive me, it used to be the butchers shop and I still feel the mince getting to me somewhere in the air…) is a real joy to see. She has a painterly love of the thickness of texture, so that her boats and townscapes feel physical, like eating a sandwich. Of course they’re mostly sold, as is right – she is Orkney’s next configurer, or delineator. A fine eye.

Up to the Waterftont Gallery, one of these generic touristy shops, offering, alarmingly, head massage and tarot readings. In the back there’s a generous heap of local art. Some good, some not (depending on your point of view.) But the main thing is – it’s there, and spilling over . All these folk painting puffins and stacks and sea views, full heartedly.

On to the new Deli – a much needed addition to the Stromness street – and to see Eileen Bevan’s new collection, up at the back behind the beef jerky and the Arborio risotto.

This artist confounds me. She has a brilliant graphic touch – her black and white illustrations are brilliant. But she will keep trying to escape into colour and oil, and it doesna work! Stick with the intimate observation you do so well, I think.

There’s another exhibition, on the other side of the island, worth a look – in South Ronaldsay (The Loft, until 24 July). Carole Saxon’s clear, assured view of Orkney; Marian Ashburn’s jaunty take on the Stromness street, and Shona Firth’s dry look at us Orkney folk…oh, and don’t miss Holly Pearson at the Stromness Library. She’s the new generation – young, thinking hard, and painting up a slightly edgy storm.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

THE exuberance of this year’s festival is obvious from the programming – it’s bursting out of the straight-jacket that’s a week.

EVENTS start before the opening reception and carry on after the traditional end date. There’s also been a lot of constructive thinking, I’m guessing, about how to cope with budget cuts – it’s important to remember that it’s still the norm for local people to put up most of the performers – a big ask – but there are enormous travel bills to foot, and wages to pay. Maximising audiences, while not compromising on quality, has been the objective.

Alasdair Nicholson (© Paul Foster-Williams)

I detect other differences, on new Artistic Director Alasdair Nicholson’s watch. The theme of dispossession is big enough to link most work together; but there’s a clear political thread running through this year’s offerings which gives an edge to things.

Magfest, the rather well brought up offspring rather than badly behaved bastard bairn of the ‘big’ Magnus mamma, hasn’t quite succeeded in grabbing a younger audience (the profile is still overwhelmingly over sixty, white middle class) is smaller this year, and may shrink away completely. You can’t, after all, fund an edgy café culture fringe – it grows of its own accord. But while the audience remains stubbornly the same – and very enthusiastic and dedicated – the performers are younger.

Catherine Wyn-Rogers (© Paul Foster-Williams)

The big names are here of course – The Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Catherine Wyn-Rogers and James Baillieu performing lovely lieder; but there are many many new, fresh faces. There’s less of Peter Maxwell Davies, which is right and proper – and interestingly, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, his Miss Havisham in musical theatre (except she’s not Dickensian, she’s Australian), complete with football rattle sandpaper and policeman’s whistle, and that’s not even beginning on what mezzo soprano Alison Wells had to do with her voice, wasn’t an audience hit – perhaps they’d all seen it before, or perhaps, teamed with Through Roses, an Auschwitz story full of unease and discord – it was all a bit too bleak.

Best of all, there are now three courses for folk at the start of their careers – a singing course joins the composers and poets. Seems obvious, doesn’t it, but only once it’s there!

The Magnetic North

These week long masterclasses are probably the most important thing the Festival does – because they stimulate creativity. A packed audience enjoyed tea and cakes in Stromness followed by very assured performance from eight poets mentored by the indefatigable and inspiring duo, Pam Beseant and Jen Hadfield. Betwixt and between, a handsome (sorry – but he was) young cellist belted out some Bach, with nice unfussy explanations of what he was about.

My neighbours had come from Macclesfield. They come to the Festival every year, love it, wouldn’t miss it. ‘Why?’, I said. ‘It’s the venues, the settings,the lack of stuffiness, the friendliness,’ they said – ‘the fact we can go and talk to that young chap on the street, or that poet. This is another great strength the Festival has – there’s no room for bow ties and pearls here – it’s caguls and sharing. Democratisation of the high arts, that’s what goes on down these streets.

It’s also a tale of venues. Health and Safety has squeezed the blood out of many a proposal – but we had Carmen in the bull ring at the Orkney mart, ENSA giving it laldy at Ness Battery, musical excursions to Skaill and Deerness, the Italian Chapel, and Hoy. It’s amazing to be in St Magnus with a houseful under the rosy pillars. Yes, there are sound black holes and blocked sight lines – but that doesn’t matter. The audience satisfaction is enormous.

Carmen in the Mart bull ring kind of sums up what I feel about the value of the Festival – it smelt very authentic; it was a tiny, almost impossible space to work in; it felt precarious. The production had glaring faults – the sort of elephant in the room faults it’s hard to talk about, like the fact it was utterly unsexy and very very pretty – but also great strengths – the singers, from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, threw themselves into it and – here’s the bit – they’ll have learned an awful awful lot about how hard opera is, how you have to act and talk and sing and inhabit shoes and dresses, and move furniture all at once. The audience, knowing all this, loved them to bits for trying their damndest.

Ness Battery draped in Union Jacks, ‘We’ll Gather Lilacs’, a magician and reminiscence – It Aint Half Cold Mum was another crowd pleaser. It did what it said on the tin.This marks an interesting shift in programming, I think. There’s no big community drama production this year – a sensible move, since it really hasn’t ever worked very well; the Johnsmas Foy, traditionally the Orkney talent showcase, is also needing a bit of an overhaul. What we have instead is a determinedly populist piece, sitting fairly sentimentally in a traditional corner, gaining most of its power from the venue’s sense of history.

There’s a freer movement between genres that’s refreshing – we had lots of folk music (the Wrigley Sisters! Soloists from Trondheim!), a concert performance of The Magnetic North, a debut album by Orcadian Erland Cooper’s new band – we had the Bolivian Choir Arakaendar singing the most beautiful baroque harmonies from the Jesuit Missions. Again, this choir had only performed in Britain once before, and festival favourites Florilegium coaxed them from timidity into full throated glorious sound – and they wowed the festival club with their folk songs too.

The Bolivian choir Arakaendar (© Arakaendar)

On top of all the events there are talks, films, exhibitions, and the opportunity to see extraordinary things – Alice Oswald, like a latter day Cassandra, electrifying the Kirk (reducing folk on both sides of me to tears) as she performed Memorial, her verse take on the Iliad – the version looking, not at heroes, but at ordinary men.

I say performed, because, as the question and answer session revealed, she ‘hears a rhythm’ – she doesn’t read her verse. Rather, she takes us back to an earlier tradition – it is an oratorical experience, like hearing a saga-teller – all the rhetorical devices are there – repetition, alliteration, assonance – but the verse itself is stark and simple, strong as anything.

A dishevelled (in an untidy, creative good way..!) enthusiastic bunch of performers and their audiences, full of vim and vigour. Best of all, perhaps, the youngest – in the world premier of A Little Book of Monsters, a song cycle by Stephen Deazley and Matt Harvey. It’s tough, working with children, but worth it. There are a lot of talented happy bairns out there who’ve got a taste for performance now. They’re the legacy of the St Magnus Festival.

Perhaps there’s a metaphor here, about growth and change – what began fairly solemnly, all those years ago, in the teeth of opposition, has matured and softened. Maxwell Davies must feel a bit like a proud grandpa, watching the new generation bounce around in his footsteps.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• St Magnus International Festival

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

CHRIS STOUT’s Brazilian Theory Band wound up their Scottish tour at The Gable End Theatre in Hoy.

CHRIS explained to us that the Scottish tour was also a vessel in which to show his Brazilian compatriots “the better parts of Scotland”. Looking at the tour so far they have certainly seen Scotland at it’s finest, Hoy providing a spectacular wild setting for them to finish off seeing the sights.

Chris Stout's Brazilian Theory Band at the Gable End (photo Barry Jones)

The newly refurbished theatre’s decor complimented and mirrored the warm, friendly atmosphere where theatre directors are on hand to welcome the audience and usher us towards the bar then to the stage. Once we were seated, Chris and his band were introduced by theatre director Lindsay Hall in a style that echoed music halls and cabarets of the past.

Opening with a tune called ‘Latina’, the band treated us to a precise and eclectic mix of genres, enabling the musicians and their instruments to introduce themselves by demonstrating their skill and range through solos and improvisation. ‘Latina’ proved to be a taste of what was to come. Next came a Brazilian dance number based on traditional five rhythm. It contained Arabic and Oriental influences that mixed with the Latin sounds more traditionally associated with the region.

Rohrer’s soprano sax was exchanged for the rabecca, a Brazilian folk violin brought across from Portugal, a unique instrument with the look of a primitive fiddle. Baiao de Cinco demonstrated the cultural melting pot and pride that Brazil has in its multicultural identity, a sentiment echoed in Scottish folk tradition. Due to their location, Shetland and Orkney are historic thoroughfares to the rest of the world. The Northern Isles have the merging of cultures in common with Brazil.

‘Fisherman’s Prayer’ was written by Stout, based on a Shetland tune called ‘The Auld Swaara’. The story had particular resonance with this island community. The ‘auld swaara’ or jumper hanging on the line had once belonged to a fisherman who was lost at sea. The rabecca added another level of emotional depth to an already haunting lament that was further bolstered by a broken chord guitar accompaniment.

Moving into a more Latin-influenced phase, the familiar story of the Brazilian pescador was told who faced the same perils as his Shetland counterpart, and whose loss would leave a similar scar on his Brazilian fishing village. A reminder that costal communities are brought together through tragedy and the relationship between humans and the sea is an experience shared by those living around it.

Two happier compositions took us to the end of the first half, Stout’s ‘Devil’s Advocate’ and a tune which until the Shetland leg had no name. A Shetland audience gave Thomas Rohrer’s piece the name ‘Hentilagets’, which is the Shetland name for pieces of wool seen blowing around in fields. ‘Hentilagets’ was an international tune but showed considerable European influence. The new

Shetland name seemed to fit as parts of this piece had a Scandinavian feel similar to folk tunes from Shetland’s tradition.

We were left on a high for the interval where musicians and audience had the chance to mingle at the bar and refresh themselves in time for the raffle. Chris treated us to some raffle related tales and due to quizzing at the bar about the “unusual fiddle” we were given a brief question and answer session where Thomas Rohrer gave his the story of his instrument and the man who made it. Every one has it’s own unique look and sound as there is no set blue print.

Chris Stout and Thomas Rohrer (photo Barry Jones)

‘Ze Gomes’ started us off with a quiet duet between the fiddle and rabecca. The piece really showed off the range of the two instruments, their similarities and differences. It was a balanced piece where both instrument’s strengths were intelligently shared between accompaniment and main melody. The two shifted from sounding like a fiddle duo to a fiddle/cello partnership. Drones and chords made by the rabecca brought a richness that was truly amazing and somewhat hard to believe when faced with such a comparatively primitive instrument.

Chris then left us to enjoy a purely Brazilian interlude where Carlinhos Antunes introduced us to the Cuatro, a 10-string Latin guitar, with ‘Maria Rosa’. ‘Pe Quebrado’ saw Chris return to another tune that was almost familiar. We were taken through a range of emotions by Quartet Original. They played their instruments with precision amidst the passion that can potentially create chaos. Order was restored by Carlinhos and has guitar picking melody that subtly lead us out of the tumult.

This was the note we thought we would be left with, but the boys returned for an encore of one last Brazilian and a Shetland number. Taking a few moments for Carlinhos to tune the Cuatro gave Rui Barossi time to interject with a well known Brazilian joke about Cuatro players who spend a third of their life tuning, the other third playing out of tune and the last third telling this joke! Once all instruments were ready to go they began to build on an introduction of fiddle and rabecca pizzicato by adding a characteristically eclectic mix of influences. The ‘Unst Bride’s March’ was the parting note, the intention being to leave us feeling “warm and weddingy”. Unst’s bridal march was in parts quite a sombre tune as again the fiddle and rabecca demonstrated their harmonious partnership with the droning chords of the rabecca and ringing strings of the Fair Isle fiddle creating a sound like a harpsichord.

The night as a whole had the feel of a ceilidh in the traditional sense. It was a night of sharing tradition and experience through music and story-telling. Although Sao Paulo and Shetland are miles apart geographically their closeness in culture and experience is reflected in the music of the two regions. The quartet exposed us to a plethora of different sounds and emotions though their music which was made all the more spectacular given there were only four musicians on stage. The ethos of the Gable End lends itself perfectly to this kind of showcase in that the warmth created by subtle and considered touches of the directors of this community theatre, enables the audience to have an experience that is unique and grass roots where everyone who’s present is left with the feeling of having contributed valuably even if only there to listen.

© Euphemia Matheson, 2012

Links

• Chris Stout

Christine Borland is a Scottish artist who has gained an international reputation for her sculptural work and gallery installations. Divine Imperfect features new works that have been specially created for display at the Pier Arts Centre, including an interpretation of Oval Sculpture a work by Barbara Hepworth from the Centre’s permanent collection.

Christine Borland commented, ”I have been fascinated by the Hepworth Oval since my first visit to the Pier Arts Centre, 15 years ago. The mystery of the interior space is something I have wanted to explore since then. I am delighted that a new piece which makes the sculpture’s negative interior into a positive space, sits at the centre of the exhibition, ‘Divine Imperfect’, which combines work which has both a local reference and an international significance, like the Hepworth and a very special new series of pots made with the help of potter Andrew Appleby, from Skara Brae clay.”

The artist’s work bridges the fields of art and science, often embracing current technological advances in science and medical research in its creation. Divine Imperfect develops the artist’s interest in the human body and in reinterpretations of the female form, from a Neolithic Venus to a contemporary medical simulation manikin.

As part of the exhibition, Christine Borland will be installing a large-scale new work entitled ‘Grey Room’. The work has been created in response to a site visit to MYB Lace Factory in Ayrshire; the last factory in the world producing lace using machinery which has remained unchanged since the 19th Century. Part of the manufacturing process includes a ‘grey room’ where a team of women spend time marking, then darning by hand, the small flaws in the lace, made by the machinery.

The gallery installation includes long lengths of specially commissioned lace cloth from the MYB Lace Factory that has been woven to include a built-in flaw in the weave, which requires to be mended. The mend will become part of the pattern creating a unique collaborative fabric.

The mending process will proceed live during the period of the exhibition and members of the public are being invited to take part.

Carol Dunbar, Education Officer at the Pier Arts Centre said, “This is a great opportunity for people to have a hand in forming a new work by Christine in the gallery. The scale of the work along with the intricate nature of its design will provide a challenging but enjoyable experience for anyone interested in textiles and installation art. We are delighted to be able to bring this and other new work by Christine Borland to audiences in Orkney.”

If you are interested in participating in ‘Grey Room’ during the exhibition please contact the gallery on 01856 850209 or by email carol.dunbar@pierartscentre.com

Christine Borland will lead an informal tour of the exhibition on Saturday 23 June at 4.00pm – all are welcome, admission is free.

The gallery is also to display a specially selected exhibition of portraits from the photographic archive of Gunnie Moberg (1941-2007) over the summer. The portraits span some fifteen years 1982-1997 and record the writers and artists who have visited Orkney during that time, often for the annual St Magnus International Festival.

Since the first Festival in 1977, Gunnie regularly photographed the many international, national and local musicians, artists, and poets gathered to perform at the five day midsummer festival founded by Sir Peter Maxwell Davis and George Mackay Brown.

Carol Dunbar added, “This exhibition of a small selection of Gunnie’s portraits will provide an evocative reminder of the extraordinary rapport that the artist developed with the many world class performers, poets and artists that made their way to Orkney. Over the years many picture editors said to her ‘You must travel a lot to have such a big library of famous artists.’ ‘No,’ she said ‘they all come to me!’”.

Both exhibitions run until Saturday 18 August.

Source: Pier Arts Centre

TO SAY that Orkney’s 30th folk festival was celebrated in suitably splendid style would be a somewhat gargantuan understatement.

AS THE event’s director, Bob Gibbon, observed in his closing remarks, before the massed finale to Sunday’s whistlestop seven-act Farewell Concert at Stromness Town Hall, “There’s only 24 hours in a day, but I think we’ve used every single one of them.” Musicians having their breakfast before going to bed at the Stromness Hotel – the festival’s primary hub, opposite the harbour – following the previous day/night’s marathon sessions of tunes and songs, would be chowing alongside those who’d had an earlier night, in order to perform that morning for local schoolchildren or old folks.

Eddi Reader (photo Leila Angus)

The first ‘official’ sessions in the festival’s three designated hostelries – also including the Royal Hotel and the Ferry Inn, and all no more than a hop, skip and jump from each other; or a slightly slower stumble – kicked off daily at noon, as did Friday and Saturday’s lunchtime concerts. The other session slots, all hosted either by acts from the main programme, in between their main gigs, or by hotshot Shetland quartet Vair, drafted in specifically to play the pub circuit, were at 3 and 8pm, supplying a daily 10- or 11-hour stint of top-quality, entirely gratis music (bar the price of a pint or two) – and music, too, which couldn’t be replicated at a scheduled concert, what with other visiting and local musicians joining in as they happened along.

Le Vent du Nord (photo Leila Angus)

This semi-impromptu dimension to the festival’s programming accounts for a significant proportion of its audience, a good many of whom buy no tickets at all, travelling to Stromness solely for the sessions, and thereby still mainlining a hefty wadge of cash directly into the town’s economy, what with their bed, board and beverages over the weekend.

And in fact it was just as well that plenty of Orkney punters weren’t fussed about attending actual concerts, since virtually almost every single seat for this year’s 28 ticketed shows had been snapped up in advance, attendance perhaps buoyed not only by the big 3-0 but by the festival’s being crowned Event of the Year at last December’s Scots Trad Music Awards.

From the wilds of Westray in the islands’ far north, via the (relative) metropolitan fleshpots of Kirkwall to the looming southward grandeur of Hoy, a fleet of minibuses and inter-island ferries scurried hither and thither delivering musicians and PA crews – just one aspect of the festival’s not-so minor, volunteer-driven logistical miracle, alongside stewarding, stage-management, venue liaison, compering, and keeping everyone fed and watered, wherever they might be working that evening. Following the midday start, each night’s final shows kicked off at 10.30pm, finishing with the bars’ 1am licence – although with all three session venues being hotels, and all packed with folk festival visitors, the informal graveyard shift would then commence in the residents’ bar, seeing the tunes through until breakfast.

Orkney favourites The Chair (photo Leila Angus)

The 30th birthday line-up expertly spanned the folk spectrum from such stellar international names as Eddi Reader, transatlantic fiddle/cello duo Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas and sensational Québécois quartet Le Vent du Nord, to national treasures like Arbroath veterans The Foundry Bar Band, and outstanding Orkney talents like singer/songwriter/guitarist Kris Drever, eight-piece folk/rock/blues juggernaut The Chair, and multi-talented teenage siblings Maggie and James Nicolson.

And it’s only fair to say of the last-mentioned duo, who opened Saturday night’s Town Hall show ahead of Drever’s Festival Quartet and Reader’s second set of the weekend, that their beautifully harmonised vocals, self-accompanied on piano and guitar, caused just as much buzz on the festival grapevine as any of the headliners.

Pretty much all round, Orkney 2012 was one of those occasions when everyone was inspired to play out of their skins. Le Vent du Nord, to take just one example, seemed to have attained a whole new dimension of scale and ambition in their music – even measured by their triumphant 10th anniversary show with Dervish, Väsen and Breabach mere months back at Celtic Connections. One extended number in particular, encompassing a positively mind-boggling hurdy-gurdy solo and a haunting, devotional-sounding a cappella vocal among its panoply of delights, had much of the audience sitting literally open-mouthed.

Kan, too, the four-way instrumental dynamo comprising fiddler Aidan O’Rourke, flute/whistle ace Brian Finnegan, guitarist Ian Stephenson and drummer Jim Goodwin, have always set themselves formidably high standards, but even by those sounded almost literally on fire rounding off Friday’s late-night show at the Stromness Hotel.

Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas take a bow (photo Leila Angus)

Fraser and Haas’s self-styled ‘journey’ through Scotland’s fiddle traditions explored fresh realms of joyous virtuosity, while the young Highland-rooted five-piece Rura, combining tremendously tight, brilliantly multi-hued pipes- and fiddle-led instrumentals with Adam Holmes’s huskily affecting vocals, unarguably affirmed their reputation among Scotland’s hottest folk prospects – even if their flautist and bodhran player David Foley did unfortunately dislocate his shoulder during Sunday afternoon’s traditional Orkney vs Rest of the World football fixture. Team strips for the match included Tigger suits, liberal helpings of face-paint and outrageously garish drag, and while Orkney claimed victory, Derbyshire singer/fiddler Bella Hardy – a member of Drever’s aforementioned quartet – was justly proud to be man of the match.

The Farewell extravaganza (photo Leila Angus)

And when respite was needed from all this musical richness and associated shenanigans, a spot by the sea to soak up the silence and space, often while watching seals swim by, was never far away. The birthday was blessed with largely lovely weather – including a handful of showers to produce some absolutely stunning rainbows, not least immediately after the Farewell Concert, just as a final flourish. Orkney’s largely treeless landscapes and deeply serrated coastline can look sere and unassuming under cloud, but when the sun comes out it lights up like a jewel, glowing in myriad intense, contrasting greens, browns and blues. Even amidst the verdancy and seemingly endless daylight of almost midsummer, though, there’s still that residual scalpel edge to the breeze as a reminder of the latitude – or as a prompt to finish your delicious al fresco fish and chips, and get back to the music.

© Sue Wilson, 2012

Links

• Orkney Folk Festival

Members of the public are invited to join the artist at an informal viewing of the exhibition on Saturday 12 May 2012 at 3pm.

The exhibition is held in conjunction with two concurrent Dingwall exhibitions at the Cairn Gallery, Pittenweem and at St. Andrews University. An illustrated publication covering the work shown at all three venues has been published by the School of Art History at St Andrews University, with essays by three of their distinguished art historians, Natalie Adamson, Tom Normand and Alistair Rider.

Edinburgh-based Dingwall studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and taught there before moving to the United States, where he lived and worked for twenty years. He returned to Scotland to paint full-time in 2003.

Individual exhibitions include the Mayor Gallery London, Graeme Murray Gallery, Edinburgh, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Peter Noser Galerie, Zurich, Katherina Rich Perlow Gallery, New York, Knoedler, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, USA, Castelluccio della Foce, Siena and in 1997 at the Pier Arts Centre.

Dingwall’s work is represented in many public collections including the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Saatchi Collection, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA, and The British Council.

The Pier Arts Centre is open Tuesday – Saturday 10.30am – 5.00pm. Admission is free.

The Pier Arts Centre
Victoria Street
Stromness
Orkney
www.pierartscentre.com

Filmmaker Mark Jenkins was appointed artist-in-residence last year through a venture funded by the Scapa Flow Landscape Partnership Scheme (SFLPS) and coordinated by the Pier Arts Centre. A short film, The Imaginary Worlds of Scapa Flow, is nearing completion and the Stromness filmmaker is inviting members of the public to view work in progress at the Pier Arts Centre next week when he sets up a temporary editing suite in the Centre’s reference library.

Imaginary Worlds centres around the landscape and buildings of Scapa Flow and explores themes of escapism and longing. A film-script using extracts from memoirs and interviews with soldiers, sailors and local people who lived through both wars, has been developed by Mark Jenkins into a 30 minute screenplay. While Scapa Flow endured significant, violent attacks and formed the central core of ‘Fortress Orkney’, boredom among the troops was a major factor. Entertainments including music, dance, drama and sports were important in maintaining order as well morale.

Mark Jenkins commented, “The residency has been a really exciting opportunity for me. The starting point was working from wartime memoirs and documented events that happened in Orkney during the two world wars. What interested me was not the often seen portrait of wartime Orkney as a desolate corner of the earth, rather the more positive and fond recollections. A strong theme that began to emerge was one of escapism.”

The film poetically explores make-believe worlds with local actors playing the part of the men and women who found themselves in Orkney during a time of war. Various locations around Scapa Flow have been used including Hoxa Head and the Cromarty Hall in St Margaret’s Hope.

Mark Jenkins added, “Once the characters were fleshed out I began casting. I found instant enthusiasm from the South Ronaldsay drama group at the Cromarty Hall. For the interior scenes the Cromarty Hall was just perfect. Shooting in a place that was actually used for cinema and theatre, during wartime, made it especially poignant.”

Making the film has so far involved a crew of 13 people and 10 actors playing 17 characters. Members of the public are now being invited to view the editing of the film. Mark will set up an editing suite in the reference library at the Pier Arts Centre from Tuesday 15 – Saturday 19 May and visitors are welcome to drop in between 10.30am and 5pm to see the process up close.

Mark Jenkins has worked on many films over more than twenty years. His credits include editing the BAFTA Scotland Award winning Ma Bar in 2009 and Peter in Radioland voted Best International Short Film at Glasgow Film Festival in 2010. More recently he created a short film on the life and work of Sylvia Wishart as well as series of film portraits of various characters in Hoy.

Andrew Parkinson, Curator at the Pier Arts Centre said, “Scapa Flow holds a deep fascination for many people and its cultural history has been well documented in books, films and photographs in the past. Mark’s fresh approach to this archive of material will help bring to life aspects of the Flow’s rich history and I very much look forward to seeing the completed film. We are keen to make the editorial process available to as many people as possible and hope that folks will drop in to talk to Mark about his work.”

The film is due to be finished later in the summer and a special screening is being arranged to present the work to the public.

The Pier Arts Centre is open Tuesday – Saturday 10.30am – 5.00pm. Admission is free.

The Pier Arts Centre
Victoria Street
Stromness
Orkney
www.pierartscentre.com

Inverness Wednesday 6 June 2012
Inverness Thursday 7 June 2012
Stornoway 11 and 12 June 2012
Lerwick 14 and 15 June 2012
Kirkwall 18 and 19 June 2012

These event are free of charge to companies in the HIE area.

Please complete your online booking by clicking on the relevant links below. Please complete your booking by 31 May 2012. If you have any queries please contact Avril Souter at HI-Arts on avril@hi-arts.co.uk

INVERNESS: Wednesday 6 June 2012
Mercure Hotel (formerly known as the Ramada Jarvis), Inverness
(Mercure Senate Suite Conference Room 4)
13.00 – 16.30

Business of PR & Styling – Fashion/Crafts

Speakers:

Lauren Martin is a Director of Blow PR, one of the UK’s leading fashion PR companies she has vast expertise on how traditional promotion and the fashion industry itself is evolving in the UK and internationally, she also has great experience of working with and nurturing a wide range of designers.

Reemé Idris stages catwalk shows, is a well-regarded stylist and a trends researcher.

Register here for the Business of PR & Styling event on 6 June here: http://invernessbusinessofprandstyling.eventbrite.co.uk

INVERNESS: Thursday 7 June 2012
Mercure Hotel (formerly known as the Ramada Jarvis), Inverness
(Mercure Senate Suite Conference Room 4)
09.30 – 17.00.

Anne Ritchie and Anne Ferguson will deliver a trend and colour workshop, designed specifically for design, textile and fashion companies.

The trend presentations for Autumn/Winter 2013/14 by Anne Ritchie will discuss:

• Interior, retail and lifestyle trends
• Colour, design and product trends for textiles, fashion and accessories

Following a networking lunch, Anne Ferguson will hold a colour workshop:

Hands-on adventurous exploration of colour with a specific focus on colour ranges featured in the trends presentation and how the trends can be best applied to your individual company needs

Anne Ritchie will be available for 1-2-1 consultations during the afternoon. If you would like to have a 30 minute appointment with Anne please register your interest on-line.

Register here for Inverness Trend event and/or 1-2-1 consultation on 7 June here: http://invernesstrendworkshopsjune.eventbrite.co.uk/

STORNOWAY: 11 & 12 JUNE 2012

Monday 11 June at the Oak Suite, Cabarfeidh Hotel, Stornoway.
Registration and coffee at 09.30 – finish at 17.00

Anne Ritchie and Anne Ferguson will deliver a trend and colour workshop, designed specifically for design, textile and fashion companies.

Trend presentations for Autumn/Winter 2013/14 by Anne Ritchie

• Interior, retail and lifestyle trends
• Colour, design and product trends for textiles, fashion and accessories

Following a networking lunch, Anne Ferguson will hold a colour workshop:

Hands-on adventurous exploration of colour with a specific focus on colour ranges featured in the trends presentation and how the trends can be best applied to your individual company needs.

Tuesday 12 June, HIE Offices, St James Street, Stornoway

Anne Ritchie will be available for 1-2-1 consultations. If you would like to have a 60 minute appointment with Anne please register your interest on-line.

Register here for Stornoway events: http://stornowaytrendworkshopsjune.eventbrite.co.uk

LERWICK : 14 & 15 JUNE 2012

Thursday 14 June at the Shetland Museum (Auditorium), Lerwick.
Registration and coffee at 09.30 – finish at 17.00.

Anne Ritchie and Anne Ferguson will deliver a trend and colour workshop, designed specifically for design, textile and fashion companies.

Trend presentations for Autumn/Winter 2013/14 by Anne Ritchie

• Interior, retail and lifestyle trends
• Colour, design and product trends for textiles, fashion and accessories

Following a networking lunch, Anne Ferguson will hold a colour workshop:

Hands-on adventurous exploration of colour with a specific focus on colour ranges featured in the trends presentation and how the trends can be best applied to your individual company needs

Friday 15 June, Interview Room, Solarhus, 3 North Ness Business Park, Lerwick

Anne Ritchie will be available for 1-2-1 consultations. If you would like to have a 60 minute appointment with Anne please register your interest on-line

Register here for Lerwick events: http://lerwicktrendworkshopsjune.eventbrite.co.uk

KIRKWALL: 18 & 19 JUNE 2012

Monday 18 June, Kirkwall & St Ola Town Hall, Broad Street, Kirkwall, KW15 1DH
Registration and coffee at 09.30 – finish at 17.00.

Anne Ritchie and Anne Ferguson will deliver a trend and colour workshop, designed specifically for design, textile and fashion companies.

Trend presentations for Autumn/Winter 2013/14 by Anne Ritchie

• Interior, retail and lifestyle trends
• Colour, design and product trends for textiles, fashion and accessories

Following a networking lunch, Anne Ferguson will hold a colour workshop:

Hands-on adventurous exploration of colour with a specific focus on colour ranges featured in the trends presentation and how the trends can be best applied to your individual company needs.

Tuesday 19 June, HIE Offices, 14 Queen Street, Kirkwall

Anne Ritchie will be available for 1-2-1 consultations. If you would like to have a 60 minute appointment with Anne please register your interest on-line.

Register here for Kirkwall events: http://kirkwalltrendworkshopsjune.eventbrite.co.uk

Speaker Profiles

Anne Ritchie has over 30 years of experience in the textiles, creative and design industries. She has carried out extensive work for Scottish Textiles and UK Fashion Exports delivering design and trend presentations and promotional events. Anne has extensive knowledge and understanding of the international fashion and design industries, and has previously worked for leading brand names in design and product development roles. She advises widely on design, products and trends to the UK and international clients.

Anne Ferguson is an artist, designer and educator with over 20 years of teaching experience in The Glasgow School of Art Textile Department. From 2003 Anne has delivered education projects at all levels from pre-school upwards in a variety of subjects and media. Throughout this period she has regularly exhibited her own work in Stained Glass and Textiles. Anne is passionate about colour and pattern and enjoys sharing this enthusiasm with others.

Source: HI-Arts Craft Development

Crouchte is a high quality, selected showcase, where cutting edge designer-makers are given the opportunity to sell their work directly to the public within an exciting new pop-up gallery in the Eastgate Shopping Centre, Inverness, providing a unique shopping experience and widening audiences for arts and crafts. The centre enjoys exposure to roughly 25,000 customers a day and the largest catchment population in Europe.

5 makers will be selected to take part in a two week showcase for their area. These showcases are back to back for 6 months.

There is a fee to take part but no commission, selected artist/maker keeps 100% of their sales.

Please email crouchte@yahoo.co.uk for an application pack or pass on to anyone you may know who might be interested.

Please state which region you are applying for in your message.

Regions:-

• Shetland
• Orkney
• Caithness
• Sutherland
• Ross & Cromarty
• Inverness-shire
• Skye & Lochalsh
• Moray
• Argyll & Bute

Visit the Hung Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hung-Inverness/205325119477900

Source: Hung

Blogging has become quite the social media phenomenon in the last 2 years. They’re a fantastic tool to be using for both marketing and promoting yourself, your artwork, your organisation, basically anything that you do, or it can also be a brilliant way of putting your thoughts and inspirations down into words, a creative journal if you like.

Below are just some of the creative Blogs I’ve come across recently.

If you have a blog you would like to add to this list please do contact me.

ARTS AND CULTURAL ORGANISATIONS

• Creative Cultures Scotland  – A place for creative practitioners to network and represent their skills.
• The Editorial – The Editorial: The Temporary Projects Season: Ruth Barker’s Blog
• Rowan Gallery – The Rowan Gallery in Helensburgh
• Craft Research –  Knowledge through making
• Craftspace – A Crafts Development Organisation
• Innovative Craft – The latest developments at IC: Innovative Crafts
• Caritas Music –  Music promoter, distributor, store and production company blog
• Creative Industries Shetland – Textiles and music in the North Isles of Scotland

 ARTISTS AND MAKERS

• Judy Scott Textiles and Mixed Media –  A Vintage Girl who just loves to create with fabric paper thread and paint
• Elizabeth McCrindle’s Art from Scotland – The journey of a Scottish artist, equine, canine, landscape and sporting art
• The Thoughts of An Artist – A blog from Ralph Taylor, a Fife based Painter
• Jan Patience Journalist and Art Lover – Blogs about the art she’s seen and artists she met on her travels in Scotland
• Lightstalker’s Blog – Glen Campbell – Highland based photographer
• My Minds Eye – A blog from an Edinburgh based artistic dabbler – Alexander J Blair
• Mad Cat Art Studio – A blog from Marion Boddy-Evans in Skye
• Tim Wootton – A wildlife artist based in Stromness, Orkney
• Lesley McInally Ceramic Art – A Scottish ceramic artist living and working in Canada
• Pure Art and Soul – An artist’s blog inspired by music, by dreams, by hope for a better world
• Feltsket – A crofter and textile maker in Shetland
• Austin Taylor Photography – Freelance Photographer based in Shetland
• Felt Addiction – A blog from maker Joni Phippin
• Home in the Highlands – A Midwest American transplanted to the Highlands
• Red 2 White – A self-taught designer-maker based in the Highlands
• Ebba Redman – Jewellery Designer who runs Tayberry Gallery in Perth
• Taking Time – A touring exhibition from Craftspace curated with Helen Carnac
• Text-Isles – Shetland’s Contemporary Textile Group
• Kerrianne Flett – Third Year Duncan of Jordanstone Art and Design Student
• Mary-Ann’s Cottage – Two artists inspired by the maiden voyage of the Westland in 1879
• Paper Boats – Documenting the Paper Boat Fundraiser and Exhibition to raise funds for Mary-Ann’s Cottage
• Joanne B Kaar – Journeys of an Artist in residency in Durness, Sutherland
• Timespan Artists in Residence – A place for artists staying with us to record their ideas, encounters and thoughts.

WRITERS & MUSICIANS

• Breathing Out – Occasional journal of Scottish writer and musician Clare O’Brien
• The Truth About Lies – A writer based in Glasgow
• Sea Penguin – The view from nowhere, to everywhere – or should that be the other way round?
• John Crosbie – Various bits of writing, opinions, plays, screenpalys, poems etc

THEATRE & DANCE

• Theatre in Scotland –  Theatre in Scotland aims to inform the theatre going public of Scotland which shows are playing around the country and when, with reviews, interviews and much more
• Scottish Ballet – Latest news from the Scottish Ballet
• Citymoves Dance – Dance news and opportunities in the North East

CULTURAL COMMUNITIES

• The Spill Blog – An open to all music and culture blog which originated from the Guardian’s Readers Recommended community
• Artists Talking – Artists Talking is a unique space to explore artists’ insights and perspectives on contemporary practice
• UK Handmade – UK Handmade is a design led online magazine committed to showcasing and promoting the best creative talent the UK has to offer

AROUND THE GLOBE

• Las Vegas Art and Culture – Arts and Culture from the other side of the pond
• Granny Sue – Storytelling, writing, life and all that intervenes based in the USA
• Writing, fishing and sesenach’s Scotland – A freelance writer in Staffordshire
• Natalie De Koning – A blog from an Aspiring Artist from the Netherlands

* We’ve recently changed our blog set up on Northings which means that some of the content on the ‘old’ audience development blog hasn’t been available recently. However, I’ve finally found some time to copy and paste the most important content across to the ‘new’ audience development blog.

Created: April 2010

Updated:

April 2011

April 2012

IF FOR any reason the spring forecast – economic, political, or temperature-wise, whichever you will – has been getting you down, this exhibition will put the creative heart back into you.

THIRTY years of printmaking on Orkney are celebrated – not to mention thirty years of survival – and what a learning curve they’ve been part of – from lino cut to digital image and back.

arah Maclean - Untitled (relief print)

I can’t help but think of printmakers as quiet folk, and their craft the gentlest and most delicate – but I’m all wrong, of course. Printers were radicals, getting their message across to the illiterate early on – in demand to illustrate pamphlets and proclamations, religious manifestos and political calls to arms.

Radicals, too, in terms of innovation and experiment; they were forever tinkering and trying new techniques. Beneath it all lay a simple, powerful thing – love of the line, and a desire to share its various and powerful manifestations.

There are two parts to the show – the work of the printers themselves, and a special nod to George Mackay Brown’s relationship with artists and illustrators. Brown was in awe of artists, he said; but privately he acknowledged that they were working ‘from the same sort of source, with the same kind of joy and pain.’

Both emotions are on show here. Jeremy Baster’s jolly Orkney Medley, a jumble of cows and tractors, sheaves and wind turbines – is refreshingly free from po-faced spirituality. It’s a busy, working, greeney orangey Orkney he depicts, optimistic and brisk. Speed’s his thing. His prints are full of sweeps and undulations; they have a retro feel to them, as if you’re turning the pages of a 50s motor cycle mag.

Alistair Peebles is mischevious too; his We come to Orkney and Me Orkney – just the letters, some highlighted – seem wilfully enigmatic till you know the back story. There’s been a derelict shed at the pier for a few years now, on which somebody’s painted ‘Wecome to Orkney Dave’ (spot the mistake…) in vivid blue paint.

It’s endured long after Dave, whoever he was, arrived, and saw the message, one hopes, as he drove past off the ferry – but of course everyone who comes off the ferry sees the sign. If you’re local, you look out for it. A neat take on the power of words, these prints; another sort of celebrity for the greeting. Nick Gordon’s Technicians Only, plays with letters and language, in the same sort of territory.

Anne Marie Nicol - Goldenlight (woodblock)

There’s a really good little guide to printmaking terms and techniques, which makes you aware how versatile these artists are. You have to linger over Carol Dunbar’s stunning flower images – archival digital print on tonasawa paper, creamy and thin. The biological diagram of the flower – elegant, precise, like a template for a piece of embroidery – is juxtaposed with the rich subtle tints and variations of the flower itself. You can see the way it has grown. It’s like seeing the live and dead versions, and it’s utterly fascinating.

Birds feature for Sarah MacLean, birds and stars in black and white lino cut. The landscape is Liz Lea’s preoccupation (she has worked with melted plastics – environmental concerns are close to her heart); her line is frank and clean, her colours rich.

Anne Marie Nicol bridges the gap between the natural and the metaphysical, with her woodblock Goldenlight. It is indeed warm red gold and blue. It conjures up astrolabes and maps, turning worlds and man’s attempt to understand them. Again, it’s a warm, engaging piece. The medieval features in the hall, where there’s a Mappa Mundi, Island Phantasy, an early commission for Alan Davie inspired by trips to Orkney. This bird’s eye view of a simpler world, with cathedrals and rivers and nota benes, has a merry childlike wonder about it.

Sue Daniel’s titles suggest a different set of preoccupations – The Mouth of Truth (after Cranach)…Know Thyself (after Domenchino)…The Illusion of Self. Her etchings with drypoint aquatint and colour are on a low table; one’s looking down, rather as Davie looks down on the world – but here we’re looking into a psyche. The prints have depth, solidity, and an interesting grainy texture to them. Cerebral, and slightly scary, these; about the artist, not her environment, but no less interesting for that.

Sue Daniel - Know Thyself (after Domenichino)

Diana Leslie bridges the metaphysical with a firm leap, and splashes about in narrative,with gurgles of joy, re inventing Hogarth for the 21^st century (with a nod to German Expressionism on the way). Her series takes the hero from his Inheritance through Orgy, Marriage and points north – to his Madhouse incarceration in 8 rumbustious pictures. Full of imagination and energy, these prints bristle with vigour, wit, and sinew. Linger over them; all human life is there.

The Mackay Brown Fellowship commemorates the anniversary of the poet’s death – three days short of St Magnus Day, 16^th April – with a lecture (this year by Dr Linden Bickett from Glasgow University) and a series of special events. The Pier has come up with a little show dovetailing perfectly with the printmakers’ celebration.

In 1985 Brown received a request from the 22-year-old history student Charles Booth-Clibborn, to provide text for a Scottish Bestiary, an equivalent of those produced in England and Wales in the Middle Ages. Within a month of his writing, he was amazed to receive 19 poems about mythical and real animals including the Orkney Stoorieworm and Nukeelavee.

He persuaded what would become a roll call of Scottish artistic talent – John Bellany, Peter Howson, Jack Knox, Bruce MacLean, June Redfern and Adrian Wiszniewski – to illustrate them. It became one of the biggest post-war private-printing projects undertaken in Scotland.

Maggie Fergusson tells us in her biography of GMB that Booth-Clibborn says ‘it was extraordinary – an almost unbelievable act of faith in a complete stranger.’ She adds that, ‘on George’s part, it had been entirely typical…he had this sense that time was running short.’ He wrote ‘ I think of the marvels, beauties and joys in the world that have passed me by and that now I can never celebrate, and the pen shrivels in my hand.’

You will find your own favourites here. What grabbed me was how each artist, in responding to the poems, reveals as much about his/her own personality as s/he does about the animal under consideration. Howson is medieval, earthy, bright; his stag’s head bursts through a Scottish pub. John Bellany’s grouse (‘I am a very shy bird/I really don’t want to appear on a million whisky labels…’) has an edgy elegance, and his dove is tranquil; Redfern’s wolf, meeting man for the first time, recoils in a blaze of blue, full of emotion and sensuality.

Knox’s grey and white Whale, beached, pierced by harpoon heads, on a pier with a three-master dim in the background, perfectly catches Brown’s elegiac mood – ‘the iron enters him slowly, cell by cell.’ There’s much to delight here.

He never met his faithful correspondent Sister Margaret Tournour, a Sacred Heart nun, but she was part of the last twenty years of his life. Correspondence was important to him; but a writer who was also a nun, who marked every important day in his catholic calendar with a little engraving celebrating the beauty – and sometimes cruelty – of nature was a special blessing.

Her tiny prints are here, with magnifying glasses provided, on a big table. The big guns of Scottish 80s art thunder away on the walls, it’s a fine contrast to turn in to these.

Clearly she was a disciple of Bewick, and a traditionalist. There’s real beauty in her precision – she comments sometimes (‘not a good print!’) rather as GMB does himself by the side of a poem. He would have understood and applauded her critical approach to her craft, not seen it as false modesty. She liked the slow growing hard box wood, and burnished the back of the paper with a spoon. They do have an air of tranquillity, these little things; of patient toil. There’s an elephant; a hawk; a lop eared bunny; many flowers; a slightly soppy English cottage; a hawk moth which is a miracle of detail. You return again, to marvel at the intricacies of the world.

All this – and upstairs you can still see the special International Womens’ Day collection – the Hepworths, in the clear Orkney light, will bring you back to the generosity of the great big curve.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

From one of her earliest drawings to the later large-scale paintings, the exhibition allows Sylvia Wishart’s work to be seen in a context that charts her artistic achievement over more than fifty years, and establishes her place as an important and influential Scottish artist. The range of her work is reflected through some 40 major pieces.

Jane Kidd, Collections Curator at Robert Gordon’s University, said: “This long-awaited show at last honours this modest yet much-loved artist, so firmly rooted in her remote island home, but whose significance and reputation is on a national and international scale. Sylvia Wishart taught for many years at Gray’s School of Art where she was an adored teacher, friend and inspiration to many students in the 1970s and 80s. Retiring to her beloved Orkney in 1987, she continued to paint dramatic landscapes and seascapes, exploring the subtle changes in the seasons, the nuances of light and the textures of the land.”

The exhibition, curated by the Pier Arts Centre, was shown at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh earlier in the year and will move onto Inverness Museum and Art Gallery as well as venues in Thurso, Wick and Kingussie following the exhibition at Gray’s.

Supported with funding from Scotland’s Islands the exhibition and tour has formed a key element of the year long cultural celebrations which come to an end this March. Further funding was awarded from the Orkney Islands Council Culture Fund and the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, and the exhibition has been generously sponsored by J&W Tait Ltd, Orkney.

The Year of Scotland’s Islands initiative aims to raise the profile of the islands across the UK and internationally, attract more visitors, bolster economic development and strengthen links between the islands and mainland cultural organisations. The programme, which includes over 100 events across 42 islands, will showcase the music, arts, food, sport and history of the islands, as well as highlight their unique beauty as visitor destinations.

The Scotland’s Islands initiative has been developed through a partnership of the six local authorities with island communities – Argyll and Bute, Highland, North Ayrshire, Orkney, Shetland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar. Other supporters who have contributed to the funding the programme include Highlands & Islands Enterprise, EventScotland, European Regional Development Fund, VisitScotland and Awards for All.

Andrew Parkinson, Curator of the Pier Arts Centre added, “We are delighted that Sylvia’s work will be seen by the current generation of students in Aberdeen, as well as by the general public there. Sylvia was a very generous teacher and it is most appropriate that her work should be displayed in an institution that meant so much to her. She is certainly very fondly remembered as a friend and influential teacher at Gray’s and her work continues to provide inspiration for those who knew her as well as a growing audience of admirers who are new to the work.”

The exhibition, The lamp in the seaward window – the art of Sylvia Wishartruns from 26 March to 20 April at Gray’s School of Art and the Georgina Scott Sutherland Library at Robert Gordon University’s Garthdee campus in Aberdeen.

For further information on the Scotland’s Islands initiative visit: www.scotlandsislands.com

Source: Pier Arts Centre

The event takes place over the weekend 18 – 20 May 2012, from Aberdeen to Ayrshire and Skye to Stirling, there’s an ever-growing programme with more than 50 confirmed events so far Scotland-wide, and many of the events are free.

This year, visitors can enjoy some sleuthing at the Bell Pettigrew Museum in St Andrew’s; settle down to some wistful and wonderful Celtic fairy tales at the People’s Palace and Winter Gardens in Glasgow; discover Scotland’s ‘horrible history’ at the Falconer Museum in Forres, Moray; listen to Tosca in the National Galleries in Edinburgh or attend a Japanese tea ceremony at Dumfries Museum and Camera Obscura. From little ones to big kids, and young Einsteins to avid inventors – there’s something for everyone.

Festival of Museums is organised by Museums Galleries Scotland. Follow them on Twitter for the latest news: @FestofMuseums and join in using the hashtag #FoM12

Browse through the full line up at www.festivalofmuseums.com.

WHAT happens when a fine poet bounces off another fine poet? You get a new insight into both.

COMPOSER and writer Lise Sinclair is from a croft on Fair Isle, and her writing, at times wistful, at times gutsy, is thoroughly bedded down in her island. With great and commendable persistence she garnered funding from all the available pots for this project of songs inspired by A Time to Keep by George Mackay Brown – Scotlands’ Islands being the major helper. This performance, and the CD accompanying it, is the result.

Lise Sinclair

In her introductory remarks she described how she ‘heard the songs’ as she read. The breadth of humanity in the voice, and the backdrop – the sea, the horizon, the struggle to make a living – all were familiar to her, and to other islanders.

She described her fellow performers as ‘representatives of the North Isles’ – Brian Cromarty from Orkney, Ewen and Inge Thomson from Shetland and Astvaldur Traustasson and Adalsteinn Asberg Sigurdsson from Iceland. It went without saying that they all had a creative response to their particular sea-girt surroundings.

GMB’s association with Peter Maxwell Davies is well known. There’s a largeness to that composer’s work. It feels urgent, metropolitan, modern. Interesting that the most enduring pieces of his oeuvre here in Orkney will be the simplest airs, and the many fine works for young people, I think, rather than the major orchestral pieces. Despite his commitment to island life, or perhaps because of it, Max can’t help negotiating intensely with the busy world; GMB acts as a focus, yes, but also a contrast, a spur to engage.

The work we heard in the Cathedral – beautiful setting, of course, all rosy and ancient, blithely presenting its sight obscuring pillars and medieval acoustic to all comers – was a new collaboration with the Orkney bard, and a very interesting one.

Lise Sinclair introduces some of her fellow performers in the Cathedral (photo Fran Flett Hollinrake)

It was clear that Sinclair approached each story with an attentive and responsive ear. The comments which preceeded each song got right to the core of the tale – ‘Celia’ was ‘about anybody anywhere coping with pain’. In A Time to Keep ‘you see the harsh landscape at the back of Hoy, and feel the hand of the sea.’ In safe hands then, as far as understanding GMB’s world.  How then to take the language and make music from it without obscuring the purity of the original. ‘I wanted his voice to come through,’ she said.

It did, in the most unexpected way. Ewen Thomson’s melancholy fiddle, underscoring and counterpointing like another voice in the conversation; Inge’s accordion, which somehow had to be there – it’s so redolent of island knees ups, but here worked like a sea swell, rising and falling – and the piano playing of fellow lyricist and arranger Astvaldur, which was benevolent, reproachful, ominous, meditative by turns – all this topped by Lise Sinclair’s husky tones. I want to call her a contralto but her sound isn’t defined in that way at all; she takes the words and somehow moves them about the tune unexpectedly. I expect there’s a word for it; it’s kind of like a jazz riff infused with a smoky peaty island rhythm.

There were eerie moments . As the Gravedigger’s Spade dug, the fiddle swept down in time and the women keened, an anguished dissonant sound just like pure loss. Music was saying what’s unsayable.

The sense of the eternal, never far from Mackay Brown’s mind, was well caught in ‘Cornerstone.’ There we sat next to ancient sandstone, as she sang, ‘a hundred years of rain falls/and a hundred more’, and the fiddle underscored her voice. It could have been a hundred years ago – or a hundred years on.

Adalsteinn Asberg Sigurdsson reads (photo Fran Flett Hollinrake)

The novelist and translator Adalsteinn –  a fine reader and a perky presence in his red check shirt – gave us the lyrics in Icelandic. Here I was glad I had the CD by me, to get the lilt of it, and the gist. I suspect some folk at the back thought he was an Orcadian and they were just mishearing him a bit. But what the readings did was point up the universality of the concerns Mackay Brown deals with. There was utter understanding of the trials of the sad, generous drunk Celia, or the money-challenged, wife-challenged whaler, or the family whose son brings a wireless to the valley, but never returns from the war. Islands are islands, whatever language they speak. Folk are just folk.

I liked ‘The Five of Spades’ best, on the night (the CD is another matter – you will listen and listen, I guarantee, and re-read the stories, and find your own special favourites). Here Brian Cromarty’s sharp clear tenor rose above Lise’s softer tones, as he sang Check Harra’s shanty whilst she sang about the card game that’s life – ‘Flogged on the mast/Burn the bothy down/leave the five of spades/on the smoking ground.’

It got me thinking, amongst many other things, about how this was essentially a womans’ take on what is almost always a male narration, in the stories. There’s an insistent overwhelming gentleness in many of the songs which I think is a very honest response to Mackay Brown’s persona. His heroes are often outcasts, out of step, deserted or lost. They’re weak, or scared. Women are to them a puzzle, a torment or a blessing, never much in between.

Lise Sinclair ‘s response is to create a new conversation with his characters. There’s no slavish copying or uninspired mimicking or hagiography here (there’s a lot of that, in the GMB world). This is a fine new take. Get the CD. It’ll haunt you, send you back to Brown, and, more importantly perhaps, send you to the work of Lise Sinclair.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Lise Sinclair on MySpace
• Lise Sinclair on Facebook
• A Time To Keep on Fair Isle Blog
• George Mackay Brown

Exclusively using poems by female Scottish writers, the collection of songs, dubbed Fiere (a Scots word for companion or friend), is a collection of new songs by the trio who met via twitter, highlighting the creative output of Scottish women through fresh and innovative compositions.

The launch of the eleven-date tour, spanning the length and breadth of the UK – from Orkney to London, takes place at St Andrew’s in The Square in Glasgow, showcasing the unique collaboration which explores the lives, loves and experiences of women in Scotland.

Drawing from a mixture of Gaelic, Scots and English texts, Fiere, which is also being releases as an album, includes poetry from a wide range of esteemed writers such as Carol Ann Duffy and Morag Montgomery and also features a traditional Gaelic waulking song and a poem by Sheila McLeod commissioned especially for the project.

Joy Dunlop said: “We are very excited to be performing these songs up and down the UK and especially in and around our home towns. This is the first time that most of these poems have been put to music but as soon as we read each one, they just cried out to be sung. There was something unique in each poem that caught our attention but they all had one thing in common, an ability to touch the reader and therefore, the listener.

“We are really looking forward to seeing what the reaction is from a live audience and we hope they think we’ve done the original works justice.”

A prominent figure in the Scottish music and Gaelic scene, Joy Dunlop was nominated as ‘Gaelic Singer of the Year’ at the Scots Trad Music Awards in 2010 and 2011. She also won the Fatea ‘Tradition Award’ in 2010 and her critically acclaimed solo album “Dùsgadh” (Awakening) won the ‘Roots Recording’ Award at the 2011 Scots New Music Awards.

Twelfth Day is at the forefront of innovative, modern British folk music.  With a fresh, open minded approach to song and tune writing, the duo create an entirely unique sound, interweaving masterful fiddle and harp playing with beautifully harmonised vocals in stylish and dynamic arrangements.

From opposite ends of Scotland, Orcadian Catriona Price (fiddle/vocals) and Peeblesshire Esther Swift (harp/vocals) knew of Joy through her pianist brother Andrew, who studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester with the girls. Initially communicating through twitter, they recognised a shared passion for musical exploration and decided to work on a song together. This proved to be an exceptional meeting of creative minds, which generated the idea of producing more work together. Their enthusiasm for Scottish culture, in particular traditional music and literature soon evolved into the idea of a song circle based upon poetry created by Scottish female writers.

Tickets are available on the door at each venue (first come first served)

Tour Dates (Scotland)

23rd March 2012 – St Andrew’s in the Square, Glasgow. 7.30pm

24th March 2012 – Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh. 2pm

24th March 2012 – Eastgate Theatre, Peebles. 7.30pm

25th March 2012 – The Reel, Kirkwall, Orkney, 7.30pm

26th March 2012 – Sandwick Hall, Sandwick, Orkney. 7.30pm

27th March 2012 – Hoy Kirk, Hoy, Orkney. 7.30pm

28th March 2012 – Hootananny, Inverness. 7.30pm

29th March – Dunkeld – Little Dunkeld Kirk – 7:30pm

Follow the link for a preview of one of the songs featured in Fiere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6NxJFxBdQs

Source: Joy Dunlop and Twelfth Night

Meantime in the northern isles, there’s “A Time to Keep”. Musicians Lise Sinclair and Ástvaldur Traustasson perform a very special work in Lise’s home of Fair Isle and at stunning venues including Lerwick’s Town Hall (Shetland) and St Magnus Cathedral on Orkney.

So, that’s music on Skye and Orkney. There’s more on Lewis and Eigg. And then on Lewis and Skye there’s dance and theatre, on Arran those hardy bikers are still pedalling for all they’re worth and someone’s bringing the biscuits to market on Barra. Some bright spark has put Pop-Up Theatre on tour with two great comedy shorts showing at all kinds of venues including Mull and Iona.

March is going to be another great month on Scotland’s Islands. Don’t miss out, get in the car, get a train, get a bus, catch a ferry, take the plane….

Dennis Coutts, Sixties Exposure Exhibition

21 Jan 2012 – 4 Mar 2012, Shetland Mainland

There’s just time to catch this fascinating photographic exhibition. Dennis Coutts has been photographing Shetland’s society for over 60 years and his work is a fascinating catalogue of life throughout the Isles.

Work has been selected from the 1960’s and represents the pre-oil era. While life was very difficult then, these stunning photographs reflect a character of life in Shetland which is timeless and remains in many ways unchanged today.

Pop-Up Tour

1, 2, 17 Mar 2012, Mull, Iona and Skye (and many others)

Two comedy dramas about guys, friendship and camping…’Waterproof’ by Andy Duffy and ‘From Paisley to Paulo’ by Martin McCardie

Stornoway Amenity Trust Presents – Meeting of the Bands

2 – 3 Mar 2012, Lewis

This fantastic event is based around music, piping, singing and dancing! The St. Laurence O’ Toole Pipe Band will play in concert with the Lewis, Skye and Uist Pipe Bands, plus there’s lots more!

A Time to Keep

8, 9, 11, 15, 17 Mar 2012, Orkney, Fair Isle, Shetland & other locations

Lise Sinclair is a singer, songwriter and poet of Fair Isle, Britain’s most remote inhabited island, half way between Orkney and Shetland. Lise has written a series of new songs that dramatically bring out the stories and landscape of George Mackay Brown’s book ‘A Time to Keep’ and connect the past with the present and the Northern Isles with Iceland.

Breabach in Concert

16 Mar 2012, Skye

One of the most celebrated and successful Scottish folk bands in recent times, Breabach command the stage with flare, charisma and a sound that is as expansive as it is distinct.

Nominated as ‘ Best Group’ at both the 2011 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and the Scots Trad Music Awards simultaneously, it is little wonder that this band have a fast growing international reputation.

Barra’s Fair Trade Island Market

17 Mar 2012, Barra

If it weren’t for this great local market, why would you want to visit the only place in the UK with an “airport” on the beach? Oh yes, to meet the stars of BBC2’s “An Island Parish” of course. Held in Fair Trade Week, the headline competition at the market is all about biscuits and flapjacks. Yum!

Celtic Connections (Big Top)

23 – 24 Mar 2012, Skye

Celtic Connections – Glasgow’s internationally renowned folk, roots and world music festival – will stage a first-of-its-kind, two-day music festival on the Isle of Skye as a finale to the year of celebration. Taking place on Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th March 2012 at the Broadford Airfield, the Big Top will feature a line-up of traditional music, show-stopping arts experiences and action-packed workshops on a local and international scale, showcasing local talent alongside top international artists.

Source: Scotland’s Islands

THIS IS an intriguing pairing.

BOTH shows, in their different ways, are enigmatic, almost teasing. This can be delightful and also frustrating – I’ll try and explain why.

Rik Hammond had three weeks at the Ness of Brodgar site – yes, that one, the one you saw through a haze of holiday celebration on New Year’s Day on telly, the one in which yet another toothsome young man with a scarf walked backwards from the camera talking very enthusiastically and using his hands a lot.

It’s a major archaeological G-spot, and the theories about Life, Death and the Universe are orgasming out of it. So are finds – a Brodgar Boy, painted walls, all sorts of stuff. It’s been buzzing with volunteers, viewers, schoolchildren; you can buy NOBS woolly hats.

Trench Recording (Ness of Brodgar) Action 2011 - Rik Hammond on site at the Ness of Brodgar as part of his short artist residency (photo Clare Gee)

Rik was ‘ exploring aspects of the heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site,’ ‘exploring ideas realating to the wider themes of identity, belonging, and place.’ First thing you hit in the Pier – appropriately, perhaps – are a corridor full of bullseyes. These field studies in pen and ink , with spoil heap dirt incorporated sometimes, are meditations on circles, suns, and searching for the truth, I think.  They may have to do with the precision archaeologists bring to their mapping of territory. They may also be suggesting that, no matter haw mathematically rigorous you may be, ancient truth will elude you.

‘I doot yun boy’s spent ower long in the pub’, said a lady, and it’s true, the targets do put you in mind of the occe and one-hundred-and-EIGHTY. But  move on, into the double height gallery. There on the wall is a spidery track – it’s a GPS walk, a collaboration between Rik and archaeologist James Moore. Beneath it there are two glass bottles, filled – no, layered – with stuff. There are cows heads in there, in the soil.

Next to this, Tool – an inky scrawl on graph paper – reminds you of the task in hand and the enormity of the mystery you’re trying to unravel. The video being and remembering – ‘miscellaneous action and digital works’, offers no explanations either. Turn round and there’s a 360 degree drawing – another collaboration – grimy, layered, scuffed – work in progress, trying to extract sense from layers and layers of ancient earth, stone, rubble.

Layers and circles, instruments and emptinesses – there are telling, pleasing spaces between the lines, and across the pages. Hammond has a strong sense of line and how to deploy it – and when to stop and merely suggest.

In the hall I hear the old mantra again – ‘but are you allowed to touch it?’ And then, even more pertinent to the subject in hand – ‘can I put it together?’ It’s a jigsaw, this art work. Called Tea Break, it’s a version of the information trailer which graces the Brodgar site, a witty riff on the whole business of what you do with broken bits when you are in the re-creation business.

Some lateral thinker has built some of the shapes into a sort of 3D Brodgar stone. By the time I’ve been round, someone else has demolished this and laid out all the straight edges, colour coded. I love this (there are as many archaeologists, and methods, as there are relics, rituals and middens), just as I love the rail of High Visibility jackets in the harbour view room.  This room is beloved by artists, I think, because you can make it an environment, a happening – which is what’s going on here.

The jackets  say daft things which are also deep. In-jokes for archaeologists  (who have their own vocabulary, like all trades)  – ‘What would Colin Renfrew do?’ or ‘Keep Calm and Dig a Test Pit’  hang next to ‘Intangible Heritage Warden’,  ‘Treasure Officer’ and ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for until I find it.’ Ah, the power of the name emblazoned on your back. I love this subtle subversion of the whole business of Heritage Industry – uniforms, titles, structures which confer meaning in the midst of mystery.

Spoil (castles) & Spoilcastle (gold) with High Visibility (vests with text) in background

Neatly counterpointing this sideways comment on the whole business of organised heritage is a fantastic floorshow. Sandcastles, made of spoil heap dirt and paint, scattered on the floor – and thus called Spoilcastles. Some are broken,  some have three towers, some two, some are just nubs – some suspiciously perfect, like replicas – they are layered and striated, and in the middle, waving a World Heritage Flag, is a gold one. Perfect and very pleased with itself. A gold mine. A painted bauble.

It’s great.

Beyond it is the closest thing in the show to a traditional landscape with a horizon – Untitled (Golden Landscape). I am very taken by this, though it looks for all the world like the Somme – mud, emptiness, a faint gold glimmer in the sky. It’s perfectly placed beside the Spoilcastles, the slightly desperate neon jackets wth their hopeful logos. It suggests (to me anyway) that no matter how far you dig, and how many bonny boys you put on camera to speculate about Circles of Life and Circles of Death and processional pathways – you’ll never crack the real mysteries of our golden landscape.

If this is just three weeks work, it seems to me a year long residency should be mandatory.

As you look beyond the bullseyes, you see a very Orkney face staring from a very traditional portrait –  perfectly illustrating the contrast between one kind of excavation and another.

Mirella Arcidiaacono is the Gallery and Museum Intern. She found a plaster bust and three straw cubbies made by the gentle-looking chap in the portrait, William Kirkness, in the Museum, and her exhibition is the result of some detective work into an Orcadian who really should be much better known.

William Kirkness watercolour by Hamish Paterson 1942 (on loan from Laura A Dutch)

Kirkness was the son of the Westray straw back chair maker David Kirkness, and inherited his father’s skill. The straw cubbie on show here is a perfect marriage of function and beauty – firm, assured, neat, rhythmic, like a perfect sonnet except useful in the kitchen. His life took him to Edinburgh, after a spell in the Royal Scots in World War 1. There he became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, donating and contributing articles; he became an inspirational and inventive crafts teacher at Tynecastle School, and was made a fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland for his research into experimental psychology; he made films of rural life and archaeological digs and educational matters which won prizes (like the excellently named Lucidity Prize awarded for his observations of Sheep Dipping in Shetland.)

Had you heard of him? Me neither. Clearly he’s an important part of the flowering of craft and social activity which was so much a part of the Scottish renaissance. He lived near Stanley Cursitor and Eric Linklater knew him and consulted him. He was around at the same time as Margaret Tait was filming.

There are tantalising glimpses here – a page from the Tynecastle School Magazine (1929-31) tells us of his energy – he’s setting up a home cinema; there’s a studio with a camera for photographers; a jazz club, a reading room where ‘we spend many a happy night which usually terminates with a hearty supper’ … we see his girl pupils in their ankle socks and pinafores, doing woodwork, (it seems they’re making toy boxes, but still…).

Best of all are three films he made about excavations in Orkney – William Traill ‘the friendly gadfly’ is there in his plus fours and stout brogues, striding about in the bog cotton. Neatly printed information flashes up – these educational films would suit all ages and there’s no irritating music or glitzy presenter getting in the way. You just observe, read, observe, learn. It was far sighted of Kirkness to film the excavation of the Knap of Howar; and indeed, he seems to have been a man with an eye on both the past and how the future might deal with it.

I said these shows were both enigmatic – and the slight frustration here is that there’s not enough information about the subject. But as a taster, this exhibition should certainly encourage more research into Kirkness and his Edinburgh circle – and give him his proper place in Orkney’s archaeological hall of fame.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Rik Hammond

Crowdfunding Workshop

Are you constantly looking for the right funding route but coming up empty handed? Are you looking for alternative routes to fund your project that doesn’t rely on public bodies? Would you like to start engaging people with your project now?

Crowdfunding could be your answer!

Crowdfunding is a modern, online and interactive way to raise funds directly from the public – or the Crowd – for your projects and activities. With the advent of Crowdfunding we can now turn our audiences into supporters and funders, by collecting multiple small donations online and offering unique incentives to encourage giving, not only can you raise funds to get your project off the ground but you can start to create a ‘buzz’ around it before you start.

The Crowdfunding workshop will cover all the aspects you will need to create, implement and market your project.

The workshop is suitable for all individuals, organisations and professionals who work within the Cultural, Creative, Heritage and Arts sector in Orkney. It will be led by Sian Jamieson, Audience Development Manager at HI-Arts on Wednesday 29th February between 10am – 1pm (with a break for coffee and networking). In the afternoon (from 2pm onwards) there will also be the opportunity to have a one to one consultation with Sian about Crowdfunding and any ideas for potential projects.

Networking Day

Drop in Networking day on Thursday 1st March 2012 between 11am to 3pm. Come and join colleagues and fellow creative people, meet HI-Arts staff to discuss your professional development, your future plans and get advice on a wide range of topics – tea and coffee provided.

There is the opportunity to book a 1-2-1 meeting with Audience Development Manager, Sian Jamieson and Pamela Conacher, Craft Development Coordinator.

Sian can offer advice in marketing and promotion, social networking and social media, surveys and focus groups, identifying your target audience and evaluating their audience experience.

Pamela provides support for the craft sector throughout the Highlands and Islands and can help you with planning your future creative and professional development in both visual arts and crafts.

If you are interested in attending the Crowfunding Workshop, Networking Day and/or booking a 1-2-1 appointment on 29th February & 1st March please visit our website http://hi-arts.co.uk/services/business-development/starting-out/ (and click on the links for Crowdfunding Workshop and Networking Day on the left hand side of the page) for booking details or contact us directly on info@hi-arts.co.uk or call 01463 717091 and ask for Avril Souter or Laura McHattie.

Source: HI-Arts

YOU know how M&S in Inverness assumes an importance totally out of proportion if you live in the rural North?

SO when you are catching the bus up the A9 you have to go in and get a wee snack to sustain you whilst you listen to all the Golspie, Helmsdale  and Wick gossip which will swell like big surf around you – and you see a selection of toy shaped rolls with different fillings, and toy shaped boxes of sushi, cunningly marketed as tasters to get you hooked.  You end up getting lots of wee things and only liking one of them – but I guess the marketers know that you’ll buy a really big roll, or even two, with the filling you like next time…

Rik Hammond drawings at Orkney Museum

Anyway, this was in my mind during my wander around Rik Hammond’s work. He has never exhibited in Orkney, though he’s lived here a while – and this is, I think, a taster for the exhibition opening on 18 February at the Pier Arts Centre – sushi perhaps, rather than filled roll.

A neat bit of programming, I’d say. Rik has been appointed Orkney World Heritage Site Artist in Residence, focusing on the disciplines of art and archaeology, and the Pier exhibition will let us see what new work he’s developed over his time on the sites.

In the meantime, we have a series of drawings in pencil, pen, ink and wash, from the past couple of years, and a video of him creating a piece, to the sound of the sea.

‘Drawing’, he tells us in his artist statement, ‘for me, is an instinctive activity akin to the process of thinking. I tend to approach drawing in an experimental way, often treating it as an automatist exercise… enquiry, chance and experiment tend to be the basis for the decisions I make… (I have) little, if any, specific direction in mind.’

Statements of intent like this tend to make my heart sink; they have a vague let’s-shake-the-box-and-see-what-falls-out feel to them that’s a worry.

To read the drawings we proceed past a fine staircase, c.1820, with a long case Dutch clock in a niche – Stanley Cursitor’s paintings decorate the curve of the wall,  – ochres, greens, Orkney landscape colours. The exhibition room itself is painted a fairly pungent c.18^th century green. Hammond’s drawings, which are black and white with subtle wash tints here and there – green, ochre, blue – look at first glance to be rather brutally enclosed, by the background and then, on closer investigation, by the framing.

On the video we see him drawing round a soup plate, then letting go, free hand (it’s speeded up – I wonder about the wisdom of that.). He leaves the work, then re-visits it, washing over organic shapes, adding spiky squiggles or hatching. Of course you’re reminded of Jackson Pollock painting ‘free’ – but Pollock let his bedraggled canvases or paper hang as he left them, bedraggled at the edges.

Rik Hammond drawing

The Australian 20^th century artist Fred Williams also comes to mind – his drawings of You Yangs, Plenty Gorge, and Lysterfield Hills participate in the same random freedom of line – and at the same time pay homage to Aboriginal art and the mythic significance of certain marks and shapes, as signals and messages. Then there’s the late great Cy Twombly – all the marks he made, random and playful as they may have seemed, were bedded firmly in an understanding of the power of the line and its child, the letter.

Hammond is aware that his automatic drawing produces recurring motifs which may or may not be symbols. You can be a Zen master, a Freudian, a Jungian, or a child, and see things in these pieces to which you may want to attach meaning. They’re not a single act of expression – some are layered and scraped; but they do have a joyous simplicity which is very attractive. At its best, it is loose, playful shape making, and the occasional phrase –‘ 13 bodies’, for example – arise out of the picture, rather than being imposed upon it.

The rolling pencil provides us with dots and stutters, cook’s hats, cocks and balls and rabbit’s ears, prows and oars and birds – or not. It doesn’t matter. These random phrases –because that’s what I think they are, are like half a conversation which could be a poem, or a blurred snapshot which reminds you only of how cold your hands were that day; or a sound picture of some rock band.

I am less taken by the severely formal balls, circles and squares, the rulered lines, and a couple of very brooding black and grey studies, charcoal smudged. They don’t have the spontaneity which is this artist’s gift.

I have a real problem too with the framing here. There are some small studies heavily enclosed in pine frames. The artist perhaps liked the interplay between the four different grains surrounding the drawings, and the warm colour, a big band of it enclosing the blue grey Chinese wash and liquid ink shapes. I found it distracting, and thought it drowned the delicate intimacy on the paper.

I had the same problem with a group of circular drawings – like the one in the video. Why not leave an edge, and let us see what happens when the colours splash about over it? Tightly hemmed in a perfect card circle and then bound in a black frame, these lovely wandering pieces seemed trapped somehow, a bit diminished. Maybe it was on purpose. I thought they needed lighter handling.

I’m now very interested to see how Hammond has developed his work from these very personal, intimate studies. A year with archaeologists, watching their disciplines, walking in a landscape full of symbol and myth should bear interesting fruit. I wonder too what being out and about will do to his palette, which here is so subtle as to be almost hidden. As I drove home, a sudden great shaft of light hit the Ring of Brodgar, causing all sorts of extraordinary things to happen to land and sea, and shifting the horizon to boot. I wonder what he’ll make of all that. Not long to wait….

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Rik Hammond

In the first edition of 2012, an ‘Industry Insight’ article was focused on getting the right price point for your goods. A handful of suppliers and retailers were interviewed about the current climate and it became quite apparent that there has been an insurgence in the £10 category in recent months. Customers will not hesitate in spending £10 as these are more likely to be impulse buys.

With forecasts still gloomy, the retail climate continues to be a tough one, it is important as a maker to offer retailers what customer are demanding, and at the moment it is gifts valued around £10. As a maker myself, it is increasingly difficult to create and offer such goods when the cost of raw materials continues to rise. Also taking in to account the retailers mark-up as well as your own! With this in mind, a maker has to sell an item for £4 in order for the retailer to sell at £10. Not only difficult, but also having to compete the foreign, mass produced goods!

The article has been an interesting read and one which I am now taking into account. It has made me think about reducing my costs i.e., buying in cheaper/alternative materials, without compromising the end product. The key being to create fun and unusual items that customers still believe to be good value for money. It’s not easy having to be one step ahead, but the beauty of handcrafted products, is that they are unique and will often stand out against the mass produced. Keep creating!!

Kathryn, Lazy Daisy Glass

Thank you to Kathryn of Lazy Daisy Glass for her thought-provoking blog – This is the first of a series of guest blogs by craft makers and retailers which will be hosted by Northings Crafts Blogs in 2012. If you are interested in contributing to our blog site, please feel free to contact Avril on avril@hi-arts.co.uk