Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, 8 November 2012CAPE 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 […]
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Northlight Studio, Stromness, Orkney, until 29 September 2012REBECCA Marr is more than a photographer.
YOU drop by this starry little exhibition on a dreich day, between getting the mince and posting the […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 17 November 2012DEREK Williams was a chartered surveyor from Cardiff.
SOUNDS like the start of a particularly British psychological thriller, doesn’t it. Maybe a […]
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Northlight Gallery, Stromness, Orkney, until 16 July 2012, and elsewhereSPIT in Stromness these days and you hit an artist.
THEY’RE all here doing stone pictures (mostly awful – take my tip, just visit the […]
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Various venues, Orkney, 22-27 June 2012THE 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 […]
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Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 18 August 2012THE 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 […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 9 June 2012IF FOR any reason the spring forecast – economic, political, or temperature-wise, whichever you will – has been getting you down, this exhibition will put […] ]]>
St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney, 8 March 2012, and touring 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 […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 17 March 2011 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 […]
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Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, Orkney until 24 February 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, […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 24 December 2011 I’M A newcomer to the world of the Swirry – that’s the Scottish Womens’ Rural Institute to the uninitiated amongst you. I WAS prepared for competition, for high standards, for quality – but not quite prepared for the fierce gaze of neighbouring Swirry ladies as you unload your […]
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39 Albert Street, Kirkwall, Orkney, until 9 December 2011 THREE very different artists have taken over an empty commercial premises in the middle of town and filled it with wildly contrasting work. IT’S AN interesting show, not just aesthetically, but philosophically, because it nicely encapsulates the problem which has beset makers since…[Read more]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, 29 October 2011 I THINK we should let artists out more often. They’re a solitary bunch, squirreling away in the studio or contemplating a cliff: but when they get together you can’t shut them up and the results can be very thought-provoking. The Pier was host to this animated – very animated […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 5 November 2011 SYLVIA WISHART (1936-2008) began life in a house on Clouston’s Pier, in the centre of Stromness, a couple of doors away from where, fifteen years earlier, George Mackay Brown was born. Their lives were intertwined a bit: but Sylvia was her own woman, and cut her own solitary […]
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Pier Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 14 August 2011 I OFTEN think that the art world – despite all its protestations and its open days and its community workshops – is a very closed shop indeed. It reminds me of the Magic Circle – you only get in if you know the secret of the trick and […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 13 August 2011 SEE, this is what happens when you get old – young turks take your history and re-invent it better. Constant Reader, I was there in the 60s, and unlike many, remember it. I remember my Biba trouser suit, my long white socks, the day I asked the Stromness […]
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Pierhead to Museum, Stromness, Orkney, until 26 June 2011 WELL, this is a jolly wheeze. I remember reading somewhere about a community project in Wales I think, which did the same thing in a village; and I’m just back from Brighton, where, on a totally different scale, enormous Regency piles gave themselves over to Art for the week of […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 29 May 2011 IT’S sort of nice to know that Orkney has had an Islands Councillor who spent whatever time he squeezed from the bloodless stone that is local government printmaking, indeed helping to found Soulisquoy Printmakers, producers of many beautiful tranquil things. What better, after a long hard…[Read more]
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Ron Ferguson GMB Memorial lecture, Pier Arts Centre, Stromness / Ragnhild Ljosland, Orkney Library, 15 April 2011 RON Ferguson is a weel kent, weel loved face in Orkney – a minister who writes, a journalist who ministers, a loyal supporter of lost causes, if his love for Cowdenbeath FC is anything to go by. His packed-out Memorial Lecture, the […]
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Orkney Art Graduates 2009-10, Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 12 March 2011 OKAY, what do we want from new graduates? We, being old and hair- and tooth-less, want reinvention. So what do we have? The Pier, as always, creates the ambience. I’m looking for a new voice, a new sound. And you know what I think? […]
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Orkney, 21-24 October 2010 WEEL BAIRNS, the nichts is drawin in and the clocks is gaan back – just the time for cooriein in roond the fire telling a few yarns… Which was what was happening at various venues around Orkney last weekend. The Orkney Storytelling Trust was founded in 2001 and had faded a touch, but […]
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MORAG MACINNES talks to the outgoing Artistic Director of the St Magnus Festival as she hands over after 23 years at the helm IT’S BEEN a successful 33rd year. Sold out performances. The audience profile is changing. The programme is broader, edgier, funkier. This year’s Polish theme worked well. Glenys is perched at her desk with […]
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MORAG MACINNES speaks to co-founder JOHN CUMMING about the Northern Isles-based publisher whose distinctive poetry pamphlets and collaborative work with local artists and writers have earned rich praise over the last few years, and an award in recent months WE ARE sitting in Stromness, overlooking Hoy Sound, in a house which clearly belongs to…[Read more]
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Stromness Museum, Stromness, Orkney, all summer 2010 WELL, THIS is a nostalgia trip for me. I was that fifties bairn with me socks and sandals, me navy blue knickers and me Saturday sixpence, off down the street to enhance the coffers of the local entrepreneurs. The Stromness Museum is a jewel for lots of reasons – principally […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney 16 April 2010 THE GEORGE Mackay Brown Fellowship instituted a Memorial Lecture on the poet in 2007, to be held on or as near St Magnus Day (16 April), as possible. Aficionados will know how important to the author the saint was – the subject of many of his poems, and […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 10 April 2010 THE CONTEMPORARY Art Society celebrates its centenary this year. Over the years it has gifted over 8000 works to British collections. The Pier has not only received four works, but also benefited from the CAS’s partnership with the Scottish Arts Council, which has yielded a further ten […]
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Orkney Museum, Tankerness House, Kirkwall, Orkney, until 27 February 2010 I LIKE literate art; works that inhabit lots of references comfortably, competently, and in an understated, not a show-offy kind of way. The school of ‘see me, see what I can do with ironic postmodern references to baffle you poor viewers plus a bit of ecology […]
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Orkney Museum, Kirkwall, Orkney, until 30 January 2010 THIS EXHIBITION is the result of a serendipitous accident – an American printmaker, Jennifer Strode, with half an hour to kill at the end of her Orkney holiday, pops into the Porteous Brae Gallery in Stromness while waiting for the ferry. There’s work in there she really likes, […]
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Future Soup – A Collection of Orkney Futures MORAG MACINNES sat down over lunch with Alistair Peebles and Dr Laura Watts to chew over a new handbook that attempts to imagine futures for Orkney MORAG MACINNES: Can you give me the details, about the handbook? ALISTAIR PEEBLES: It’s a 56-page soft cover booklet which contains 49 pieces of writing […]
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Cromarty Hall, St. Margaret’s Hope, Orkney, 6 October 2009, and touring THE PREMIERE of this National Theatre of Scotland production of Duncan McLean’s Long Gone Lonesome was packed to the gunnels. The show sold out before it was even advertised in the papers (how did that happen?) leaving a good few punters disappointed. A vile night with […]
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Revitalising Scots Language James Robertson visited Orkney to read from new work recently, and MORAG MACINNES took the chance to catch up with his doings in the 100 Acre Wood and elsewhere. JAMES Robertson is a well known Scottish author. He is a poet, a childrens’ story writer, he has won the Saltire Award. Much of his work touches on Scottish […]
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MORAG MACINNES finds quiet at the core of the work of Thomas and Laurie Clark YELLOW AND BLUE is a pleasingly minimal title for this pleasingly minimal exhibition-cum-installation. Thomas A Clark puts works on walls; he’s just recently done an installation at the New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow, attempting, Alistair Peebles the gallery owner…[Read more]
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MORAG MACINNES investigates Roger Ackling’s recent work on Orkney THIS EXHIBITION could have been a curator’s nightmare. There are so many pieces. Many are small. They are titled by number and material – ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with wire’, ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood’ – rather than having tricksy names which might divert and direct […]
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Stromness Museum, Stromness, Orkney, until September 2009 OUR MUSEUM sits opposite George Mackay Brown’s council house. It’s a treasure house, an old fashioned place and all the better for it – stuffed with things sailors brought home – the cases all feel as if they are bursting at the seams and there’s none of this pretty […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 5 July 2009 IN 1934 Edwin Muir borrowed Stanley Cursitor’s car and went on a wee Scottish journey. He said: “my intention in beginning it was to give my impression of contemporary Scotland… the Scotland which presents itself to one who is not looking for anything in particular, and is […]
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Stromness Parish Church , Stromness, Orkney, 21 June 2009 ‘ORDINARY stuff is miraculous’ It’s a fairly standard Scottish Parish kirk, with warm wood, pulpit and pews, charity posters. The difference is that – unlike most Sundays – it’s full to the gunnels, heaving with folk. The St Magnus Festival attracts the grey pound, for the most part, […]
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St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney, 22 June 2009 OF COURSE, the setting is perfect; that warm red sandstone, the soaring roof – it’s a small cathedral but it seems very big and airy – some architect did a good job, all those years ago, created a landmark you could see for miles. The acoustics are good, […]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 5 September 2009 .”] HE LOOKS like a tidy chap, Bill Viola. A bit like a chartered accountant or – hey! – a sound engineer for Radio 3. Perhaps this is appropriate; he’s the video art man, the one who realised the possibilities of the medium – think what […]
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Stromness Library, Stromness, Orkney, until 27 June DENISE CAMPBELL is Tasmanian artist and printmaker. She first came to Orkney in the nineties, and has exhibited here often; but this exhibition is a departure for her. Rather than looking at the Orkney landscape, she’s moved behind, as it were, into the history which connects us to the other […]
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Waterfront Gallery, Stromness, Orkney, until 9 May THIS EXHIBITION, squirreled away in the long back gallery of a shop full of beautiful buyable prints, knitwear, CDs and take-home-from-your-holiday-stuff, is testimony to the power of friendship, the pull of home and the unexpected directions life takes us in. The artists are old Orkney…[Read more]
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Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 6 June WILLIE, as she was called, was born in 1912 in St Andrews. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, despite some objections from her father, and , hampered slightly by bouts of illness, graduated in 1937. By 1940 she was in St Ives, hobnobbing with Hepworth and Nicholson, […]
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Pier Arts Centre, until 8 November 2008 THE VENICE Biennale was established in 1895, to promote contemporary art. It’s now an international showcase. Scottish artists began exhibiting independently here in 2003, buoyed up no doubt by a Scottish Arts Council commitment to identify Venice as a Priority Project, to be supported over three…[Read more]
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Porteous Brae Gallery, Stromness until 18 October 2008 AT THE famous Whistler v Ruskin trial in 1878, the painter of ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’, a representation of fireworks falling over Cremorne (one of the most popular pleasure gardens in late Victorian London) was asked by the Attorney General “How long did it take you to […]
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Porteous Brae Gallery, Stromness, Orkney, until 24 September 2008 THERE IS something very intimate about drawing – the best sketches leave no space between the artist, the observer and the action observed. Look for example at Toulouse Lautrec, or Adolphe Von Menzel, Bruegel or Durer, or anybody Japanese. Intimate, sad, funny, swift portraits of…[Read more]
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Porteous Brae Gallery, Stromness until the end of August 2008 IT’S TWO for one up the Brae – two parties of makers responding to islands and each other, producing film, photographs, books, poems, sketches, sculptures, ceramics. Collaborative creative ventures can be fraught – the idea of isolating folk together with no escape until the ferry…[Read more]
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