AN ANNUAL installation by the students on the Art, Space and Nature masters course at Edinburgh University has now become part of the An Lanntair calendar.

COURSE tutor Donald Urquhart established the Western Isles connection. It is possible this will alternate with course visits to Orkney. The pattern is that a group of students first visits as a field trip. They then have a period to continue their investigations and research.

When they return to the Island, they install a group show, exploring responses to what has struck the individual artists and sparked off further work. The first installation, three years ago, was in the corridor and bar area but the quality of work led to last year’s offer of installing in the main gallery. I felt it was a show brimming with ideas so was not surprised to see the space offered to this year’s students. Sadly it is only on show for a week.

It’s fortunate that Northings is still active, just long enough to draw attention to a body of work that might otherwise hardly be noticed. And I’m glad to be able to sign-off from a happy long-term relationship with this excellent forum, on a positive note. But where will we find its like – a skillfully edited and well presented Journal, fairly presenting comment across all the arts, as they relate to the Highlands and Islands?

This is a body of work brimming with a sense of adventure. Pieces vary from provisional expressions of a developing idea to pieces which seem to me to have already found a satisfying form for the ideas behind them. The range of media is wide but all works do home-in to our small geography. But there is an implicit sense of comparison – our context in a wide world.

Take Stephanie Getta’s Dic | Seanphacail | Sayings. It is a work in three languages. A simple but well-designed pamphlet gathers the proverbs of an area in the Dolomites and those of the Isle of Lewis. The work is the gathering and comparison, diligently researched, quietly presented and likely to be ongoing. A small group of plastic cups for the ear are suspended as an offer to listen to the languages of Gaelic and Ladin.

Tanja Geis represents the luxurient sea-foam which has been such a feature of recent storms. The meeting of ocean and shore is recorded in photography but this becomes two large scale long rectangles, inviting comparison. They are like positive and negative images, richness come from sheer energy. She sets this by a “haleidoscope” where salt crystals turn inside a hand-shaped cylinder carved from a piece of discarded shipyard oak. The timber, from a decommissioned fishing vessel, has been giving a new life. Both pieces are beautiful objects but are also part of an exploration.

Sara Ockland - Walk Away

In contrast, the exploration of possibility seems more to the fore than a finished presentation in the work shown by Sara Ockland. She continued the group’s relationship with the traditional boat society, Falmadair. The whole group sailed the last of the original north Lewis lugsail boats, sgoth Jubilee, during their field trip. Sara was taken back out into the approaches to Stornoway harbour by skipper Jim McWhir. A series of like discs were painted with a fairly wild shade of red to enter the water, but tethered together so all could be recovered. Although they did not present enough surface area to be affected by wind, the drift induced by tidal current and small waves sent them drifting in divergent lines.

For me, this is an idea that could continue to be explored. The discs themselves looked startling on the grey gallery floor and led you to a small, simple image of their distribution on the sea. But it’s surely part of a Masters Degree course that there is room to set an idea in motion. Perhaps some artists work by forming the idea and thinking out its practical representation in advance and others have to try this and try that till it all seems right. It’s interesting too that some artists on this course come from a background in architecture or in landscape architecture and others from fine-art. For some it may be the first time they have exhibited a made work, outside a formal commission.

Luskentyre beach has proved a draw on all the course field-trips. It’s character is caught by Javier Vidal Aguilera, who exhibits 99 small prints. They are derived from photographs of seaweed traces. It reminded me of Helen Douglas’s work, gathered in one of Alec Finlay’s pocketbook series in the sense that it is a subtle, sustained study of a simple but beautiful found thing. But something mysterious happens here, in the translation from digital photograph to monochrome print on semi-transparent paper. The whole series taken on one day (another number 9 in the date) adds a shamanistic element. The observed natural debris has become a mysterious calligraphy.

Sandra Teixera - 32000 Folds

This work naturally chimes with Sandra Teixera’s “32,000 folds”. It is a prayerful commitment – representing 1,000 salmon, in small origami models. These are suspended on monofilament line and allowed to move to any air-currents. They ask more then they tell – perhaps there is a native North American parallel to the Gaelic tradition of the salmon of knowledge. Perhaps there is an implicit comparison with the free-swimming wild fish and its densely-farmed, genetic cousin.

Flavia Salvador has observed what Robert Livingston once called “the zen of passing places” in a Northings blog. You look ahead and show courtesy, guaging your speed so perhaps you might not even need to stop. The idea uses the space offered by the particular gallery to meditate on an observed tradition of passing a waved greeting across the space outside the nearly-meeting cars. One text is carefully painted on one wall and you look twice to see how it corresponds with the answering phrase, opposite. The work is a poem. It is gentle but depends on wit to express the observation.

Flavia Salvador - The Passing Place

A direct quotation catalogues the work of Zhongying Ren: “Man is ruled by land, land is ruled by heaven, heaven is ruled by Tao, and Tao is ruled by nature.” In one sense this work relates to the seafoam wall, round the corner of the L-shaped space. Crumpled metal foil replicates the strange natural phenomena in a contrasting material. It’s like a metaphysical conceit in poetry – where an extravagant or daring metaphor brings you to study one thing by likening it to another. I had to stoop low to see the foil reflected in a floor-level band of uncrushed foil on the wall. Perhaps this is another work where the present visual form is not the final result of a developing idea.

There is a turning point in any L shape and Jonathan Hemelberg probably unwittingly follows his tutor, Donald Urquhart, in carrying a work around that corner. Urquhart’s last show here, really did play music with the opportunities of the space. Drawing has returned, big time, to the art world. This artist draws a simple, alternative map. Significant features – a lighthouse, a broch, are placed in a landscape of swirls that could be contours. Written diary-like comments note a personal reaction to our landscape. But you could argue that any phrase in common use was someone’s personal reaction once. To quote from the lore of a region in the Dolomites:

“Då lå Madònå dei Chèrmin i òrjes doveså ˘spièr.”

“On the day of our Lady of Carmel the barley should start to spike.”

It’s good to know there’s a summer of some kind coming.

© Ian Stephen, 2013

Links

• An Lanntair
• Art Space and Nature Programme
• Ian Stephen

THE NAME ‘six degrees west’ fixes a group to a measured distance from the prime meridium which goes right through Greenwich but it gives you quite a bit of latitude.

SIMILARLY, this group exhibition, INCH KENNETH, curated by Alicia Hendrick, stems from limiting the scope to one particular island, west of Mull. There’s no shortage of islands that way, from the iconic line of the Dutchman’s Cap in the Treshnish islands to the basalt of Staffa or the sickening jagged nature of the Torran Rocks. But the more pastoral Inch Kenneth has a significant history in its own right, layered over centuries.

David Faithfull (photo Shannon Tofts)

If you take Murdo Macdonald’s approach that ancient artifacts can’t simply be sidelined as historical objects but can be seen simply as made things, just older ones, then the carved stones I witnessed, reclining on Inch Kenneth some thirty years ago, are important works of art. There was a tradition of burying the noble dead here if conditions prevented reaching Iona. Equally iconic now is the layer of history linked to the once grand house on Inch Kenneth where the residency actually took place.

The house was owned by the Mitford family during the second world war. The society daughters chose varying paths. Diana went on to marry Oswald Mosley, founder of the British fascist party. Unity corresponded intimately with Hitler. And Jessica thought uncle Joe Stalin was just fine and communism was the road to the future.

Veronica Slater - Map Shadow, the house on Inch Kenneth (photo Shannon Tofts)

The family tension must have come to a head when Unity attempted suicide, on the mainland, but returned as an invalid to live out some more damaged years, on the island. It’s a script you couldn’t write, for fear of being thought theoretical or sensational. But that’s part of the history of this house.

It’s picked up directly by David Faithfull in his bound folio of digital prints with a screen-printed cover. The colour background alludes to both Nazi and Communist sympathies. The print medium and its presentation in this bound folio lends itself well to presentation of a body of work made in response to being a resident artist’s group in this place. I spoke in depth to Veronica Slater, who attended the opening in An Lanntair with David.

She explained that some work in the show came, as you might expect, as a spontaneous response and other pieces came later, as a hard-won body of work. There is a range of styles and favoured media in the show and this seems a healthy thing in bringing together such a residency. I suggested to Veronica that there could be parallels with the ethos of the Triangle Trust international artists’ workshops which led to a pilot project in North Uist then a series of three Scottish Island workshops.

The difference is that there is no exhibition or product in mind in the Triangle ethos – a deliberate policy. You might say there’s a risk of a possible lack of focus but a gain in that artists, both early in their careers and established, are encouraged to think, experiment or interact – or all of these – and possibly arrive at something which could be outside or extending the scope of their usual working practice.

No doubt thanks to a range of factors, the 6° WEST concept has resulted in a very worthwhile exhibition. These factors must include sensitive curatorial input, including choice of artists, management of challenging logistics and support of the galleries the show will be linked to. But most of all, the commitment of the individual artists has to be the crucial element.

Mhairi Killin (photo Shannon Tofts)

Mhairi Killin takes a more minimal approach than the others. In An Lanntair, a wall is built so a corridor is simulated. The sort of tag you might find on vintage luggage, hints at more clues to elusive lives. There is a particular mirror, with layers of allusion, but you have to look for clues. Outside, there is the most delicate assemblage which is so striking it revitalizes a possible cliché in the art of working with things found – a Gaelic/Japanese aesthetic seems present. There is also an editioned print which combines some of these elements as motifs.

Anne Devine (photo Shannon Tofts)

Anne Devine’s work is cleverly placed adjacent. This is drawing essentially, though colour is used too – it is discovery by doing. The fluency and energy of the drawing provides the interest as opposed to the delicate balance in her neighbour’s pieces. The figures in the drawing suggest folklore and mythology. Many elements are gathered in a large scale vibrant work, oil wax and resin on linen. It’s a bit like placing a more sprawling but energetic novel beside a tight series of short-stories. Again, a print has also been produced, this time in stone lithography.

Veronica Slater has gone for one telling thing – the porthole-type window. Then she repeats it, expands, plays with it. So windows are contained within windows. She has taken a colour swatch from the interior décor and painted a large circle on the gallery wall. Within that are circles which could either be looking out, through weather, towards a mainland or looking within the rooms of the house.

Veronica Slater (photo Shannon Tofts)

I have been within these walls but more than thirty years ago. A friend was invited by the then caretakers and brought me along. I’d been expecting something more opulent. Instead there was a consistent arts and crafts look and feel to the quite spare but elegant furnishings. Veronica Slater is clearly an artist who loves her materials as well as her subject. She has observed how damp has affected the fabric of walls and reproduced its effect with a wide range of media, orchestrated within her large circle. On an opposing wall, a group of smaller circles uses similar techniques.

You could say that her vision sees ageing and weathering as a gradual enrichening.What might have been once quite spare has become opulent. Similarly her Giclee print – a straightforward photographic means of reproduction which I must say doesn’t excite me the way the slightly uncertainties inevitable in other print media does – has an additional layer imposed by screenprinting.

David Faithfull takes us back outside to the tidal regions where bleached cetacean bones can be found amongst whitened driftwood. He shows a whole body of work, enough for an exhibition in its own right, linked to a 20th century literary reference to a leviathan – a text from William Golding’s Pincher Martin. The list of materials reads like poetry. A central large-scale drawing, on paper and linen is made in “gouache, meteorite and oak gall ink”. Although the drawings are mainly monochrome and the subject matter is exterior, the allusions are as often literary classics as family-history. The overall effect is again rich.

Shelved and floor-mounted sculptures reproduce the beautiful bone shapes in cedar-wood – a transformation from the bible. This is an artist who loves the book as a form in itself. I’m sure one day soon artists will make work from the dead shells of Kindles, but right now I find that difficult to see.

Shannon Tofts documented the process of the workshop and the acts of making in still and moving images, installed to make good use of the busy An Lanntair foyer and to lead custom into the show. Veronica also shows an intriguing attempt to draw the moving shadows cast by a tenacious small tree, in pebbles or shells. I loved her title for a video piece focusing on this strange, tall, island house –‘Home’ Movie.

Veronica Slater’s printed works were made at Highland Print Studios (David Faithfull is a master printer and printed his own prints; Anne Devine worked with master printer Elspeth Lamb to produce her stone lithography, and Mhairi Killin worked with Edinburgh Print Studio). The idea of using HPS as a mainland hub is one seen before at An Lanntair in their touring exhibition Is A Thing Lost?, exploring storytelling in mainly visual terms. It’s inspiring to see this excellent facility continue to take traditional and contemporary printmaking techniques to such a level of excellence.

Ian Stephen is assisting Christine Morrison this week at Highland Print Studios, making a series of four prints, derived from voyages to outlying islands. Each uses the photo-polymer process (monochrome) and screen-printed texts in colour.

© Ian Stephen, 2013

Links

• 6° WEST Artists Collective
• Ian Stephen

THE title really does say what this bright, light, winter-solstice show in an Lanntair’s main gallery is about – “the sea that’s within me”.

THE tapestry-maker Fiona Hutchison points out that there is no spot in Scotland more than fifty miles from the sea. But she is also a sailor and therefore one who who has no option but to look closely at the surface of water for clues as to the forces which are acting upon it at any time. A sailing vessel can’t just disregard eddies if forward momentum is to be maintained. And I’d say the subject of this celebratory exhibition is the interplay of warp and weft, seen as cross-currents.

"warp and weft, seen as cross-currents" - work from the exhibition (Ian Stephen)

But the artist, trained as a tapestry weaver, takes her craft into a huge range of variations. Her materials do not simply criss-cross a chosen format but at times seem barely contained within the scheme. You get a sense of energy in all the diverse works. This is an artist who loves her medium as well as her subject. She is inventive in her range of different scales, in presentation and in materials. But restricting the palette to one dominated by the blue-grey-turquoise and whites range, gives a strong sense of unity.

There are two large-scale tapestry works, both of which seem to have found their own dimensions for the subject. One is simply called “wave”, but you get a sense of the sweep of a whole shoreline – the complex geography which results in the shape of a particular wave. It is balanced by another, more conventional woven work, “dark sea”, where wisps of reds suggest the extraordinary force of bright colour you often see in the natural world, shocking and near garish.

Diptych from the exhibition (Ian Stephen)

Elsewhere, several diptychs, sometimes boxed in acrylic glass, house woven objects which give close scrutiny to the results of turmoil in the natural world. There is also a triptych of harmonic pieces but with significant variations between the individual items. “The work is not a literal translation or a representation of the sea but something remembered, a metaphor for our lives.”

So the ‘tapestry” could be only a few inches square and could contain a shard of glass to represent a section of ice-flow. Monofilamemt netting can have a mind and memory of its own and leap into its own shape, known universally by fishermen as “a bundle of bastards”. But Hutchison harnesses phenomena, or rather she observes and represents. She doesn’t fight against the currents.

Floor show (Ian Stephen)

Part of the pleasure in this show is from the musical balance between the elements. The artist brought more work than she hung – the L-shaped gallery does not have the linear space you might think it does, at first glance. Instead, a floor-mounted installation, takes you round the corner. A series of paper scrolls, laid in salt, suggest a Paisley pattern swirl to sweep you through the space. Fiona reported a very good partnership with an Lanntair, in selecting the works and balancing them out.

I might have been tempted to make it a shade more spare still, but on the other hand would have found it difficult to decide which of the treasures to edit out. There is for example a series of five square format open box-frames. Each contains a small tapestry, not quite uniform in size and nowhere near uniform in the orientation of the form within it or in the way the materials comprise a made thing.

This fine winter exhibition is thus its own single tapestry, made out of individual tapestries.

© Ian Stephen, 2013

Links

• An Lanntair
• Fiona Hutchison
• Ian Stephen

IN THE world of Contemporary Art Steve Dilworth is a rarity, an artist that defies classification in being uniquely himself.

WORKING since the late 70s with once living materials from land and seascape, his beautifully crafted works redefine our perception of sculpture and of the art world object. The ritual of making, with the inner construction and outer form as equal elements, is central to Dilworth’s practice. He’s an artist who consistently offers questions rather than answers in his transformation of materials and prodigious command of form.

Twenty years after his first solo exhibition at An Lanntair, Acts of Faith (1992), Mortal Remains presents a review of his extraordinary work, aptly coinciding with Faclan, Feis Litreachas Innse Gall/ The Hebridean Book Festival (31 October – 3 November) and its theme of Creideamh/ Belief.

Exhibition shot with Porpoise in foreground (John Maclean Photography)

Throughout his career the truth of making and the belief in art as a bridge between the physical and metaphysical have continued to define Dilworth’s unflinching and visionary work. Like an explorer bringing back artefacts from the depths of our collective unconscious, the artist reinvests power and meaning in creative process:

“I want to retrieve that moment of understanding, not by describing but by making. Of course I’ll fail, but in that chemistry of making another moment will appear. These objects are drawn from an internal landscape of shifting sands, connections are constantly being discovered.”

The transformation of material as part of the artist’s creative process and the idea of illumination through darkness, with the artist and viewer as protagonist, are an integral part of the interior life and psychology of Dilworth’s art. Archetypal narratives and collective folklore permeate his choice of “materials as sources of power” and “construction as ritual”.

The Hanging Figure (1978-79) (courtesy Steve Dilworth)

Crafted from a human skeleton, bovine meat, heart, liver, horsehair and sea grass, The Hanging Figure(1978-79) is represented

Hanging Figure Under Construction (courtesy Steve Dilworth)

in the exhibition as a photographic triptych in black and white with a further sequence of 16 colour photographs recording its making. Sold to the Richard Harris Collection in the United States in 2011, the departure of this seminal work from the UK in the context of world Art History is a national disgrace. In Dilworth’s oeuvre and in the history of art in this country it represents a significant point of departure, an initial exploration of the energies of raw materials, their histories and origins that has shaped all subsequent work.

Unlike the work of many contemporary artists, Dilworth’s work presents art as an offering, creating objects greater and more expansive than themselves or the egos of their makers. The artist introduces the idea of altruism into an art world that falsely presents cultural value and monetary value as equal. The elaborate inner structure of many of Dilworth’s works, often containing precious objects or elements hidden from sight, place imagination at the centre of human experience as a core value and an agent of transformation.

In its use of materials The Hanging Figure brings the viewer into visceral contact with many of society’s taboos. The reanimation of human bone with sea grass and blackthorn, which binds and articulates the figure, displaces raw decaying material from mortal time. In the mind’s eye it becomes something else, a timeless ritual of creation; a moment of understanding for all eternity. The artist embodies life, death and transformation in a single object; a bridge between the physical and metaphysical akin to shamanic practice; in full knowledge of the responsibility of making, the artist becoming a channel.

Woven into the spine of the Hanging Figure is the same genesis of craft and intent consistently present in later work such as Porpoise (Bronze, Sterling Silver 2004). Here the hollows and contours of the sculpture, form within form, are dynamically fluid, encouraging the viewer to move around the work to contemplate from every angle the embryonic nature of becoming. The outer form conceals and reveals the silver vertebrae of a creature turned in on itself. Like the conception of The Hanging Figure as part human, part animal, there is a strong figurative association in this work expressed in its craftsmanship, presenting human perception in malleable form, shape shifting before our eyes.

Sea Chest (courtesy Steve Dilworth)

This sense of power and human vulnerability is also conveyed in Sea Chest (Driftwood, Driftrope, Sand eel 2010), seemingly dredged from the ocean of our collective unconscious. Found materials drawn directly from the land and seascape of Harris are transformed by the artist into an object of individual and collective contemplation. There is a profound feeling of loss held in the interior mindscape of the object, it feels as though it has travelled incalculable distance , a timeless archetypal human mark on landscape and memory.

Like many of Dilworth’s objects it contains that which we cannot see, a kist of precious things held within; a vessel and an enigma. Hidden inside is the bronze cast of a sand eel revealing an essential relationship between living and decaying matter, mortality inverted by the relative permanence of metal, held beyond sight. Dilworth is not secretive about the inner contents of his work; rather the inner and outer design of his sculptural objects makes a “physical connection to the mysteries” of life and death. The organic curvature of soft wood grain exposes closely bound fibres of rib-like rope and form powerfully directs our associations; open carapace, burgeoning seed or still beating human heart.

Mother and Child (courtesy Steve Dilworth)

Mother and Child (Bronze, Meadow Pipit 2008) is arguably one of the most beautiful pieces in the exhibition, a supremely elegant expression of creation, life and death. The inner golden patina of bronze is possessively guarded by avian claws, clasped around an egg with the real “sculpture” of a bird held inside. The form itself folds inwards upon the idea of nature or nurture, the gentle maternal instinct suggested by the title evolving into a more complex reality of instinct.

The complexity of its inner workings is its freedom both for the artist in the act of making and the viewer in the act of seeing. Mother and Child creates connections between what we see, sense and feel; we are increasingly drawn towards the edge of our awareness as a potential core of expanded perception in powerfully tangible bronze. The superb finishing of this work is, like many of Dilworth’s objects, extremely tactile.

There are many fine examples of smaller throwing objects which whilst distanced from their function in the confines of a gallery space were created to be touched and held. Throwing Object (Wood, Bird, Rivets 2004), Swift (Harris Stone, Bird 2012) and Dolphin Tooth Rattle (Harris Stone, Ivory 2012) are examples of objects designed to be “cast into our internal landscape”. The scale of Dilworth’s work is both intimate and infinite, drawing on the geology and prehistory of the ancient landscape in its use of materials and archetypal form.

Lure I (Soapstone 2004) is a magnificent example, inspired by hawking lures and reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf (24,000-22,000 BCE) in the fecundity of its sensuous curves. Timeless in its “connection to the mysteries” and “independent of time and place” both the Willendorf Venus and Dilworth’s Lure I are steeped in rituals of human creation.

The powerful translation of form in this hand held object can be seen in the monumental scale of Dilworth’s Venus Stone (2008) installed at the Goodwood Sculpture Park, West Sussex. Whilst Venus Stone, its masculine companion piece Claw (2007) in 9 tonnes of polished black granite, the artist’s land-based works and other larger scale work such as Ark (Nickel Silver and Bronze, 2000) are understandably absent from this exhibition, a full scale retrospective acknowledging and celebrating Steve Dilworth’s work nationally by an institution like Tate Modern is long overdue. Mortal Remains draws acute attention to the remarkable scope, continuity and integrity of the artist’s work which is of international importance.

Cat and Rat (John Maclean Photography)

Although much is made of Dilworth’s dark materials the presence of Cat and Rat (Bronze, 2007) in the exhibition further defies classification of his work in delightfully humorous fashion. Of course the comedy is resoundingly black, but there is nursery rhyme joviality in predator and prey forever locked in an eternal dance upon a moon like disc of bronze. Exquisitely balanced upon their tails the two figures have curious elegance, like drawn marks of calligraphy or music. Although their mummified bodies are immortalised in metal, on closer inspection the delicacy of decay makes the viewer feel as if a single touch would cause the entire form to disintegrate. A lively and comic Momento Mori, Cat and Rat cause the viewer to reflect on the macabre joke of the human condition.

Fledglings (courtesy Steve Dilworth)

Rook (Rook, Bog Oak, Nails 1980) preserves a once living body in a sarcophagus of its own mythology. Dilworth’s materials are “equal in presence”; the alchemy of the rook, 10,000 year old bog oak and iron an act of poetic distillation, the beginning of a series of objects creating deepening hollows for the mind to wander into. Fledglings (Fledglings, Yew, Bronze 2011) is a more recent example, a poignant embrace of sharpened curves sculpted in the light and shadow of bronze patina. Although Dilworth claims to have left figurative art behind with the Hanging Figure, there is a sense in which every work is humanely figurative. Where nature is depicted it is our own nature that is implicated by design.

Detail from Moonstone (photo Georgina Coburn)

Moonstone (Harris Stone 2002) feels like an entire world in a single piece of stone. A precursor to the megalithic scale of Claw (2007), the concave hollow of the moon utilises pure light and positive/negative space in its abstract design. Hewn from Harris stone millions of years old, Moonstone digs deep into our collective psyche, an enduring fragment of the earth’s geological forces and the human mind perceiving the landscape through ancient ritual. The ebb and flow of organic cycles and geometric lines of force create a play of light on the object bringing the sculpture to life from every conceivable angle.

Also screening in the gallery space the relationship between the artist and his chosen environment is explored in Paul Cox’s insightful short film, Steve Dilworth, A Portrait, featuring commentary by Ian Sinclair and Robert Macfarlane. (Cox’s film will also be screened in Inverness on 9 November as part of the Inverness Film Festival.)

Mortal Remains is an important survey of the artist’s work including many pivotal works drawn from private collections. A cross disciplinary festival like Faclan presents a great opportunity for Dilworth’s works as enduring, universal acts of engineering, perseverance and faith to be discovered and appreciated by a growing audience. Whilst it is a travesty that this exhibition will not be touring to other centres, An Lanntair are to be congratulated in continuing to acknowledge, celebrate and champion Steve Dilworth’s remarkable work.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Faclan
• An Lanntair
• Steve Dilworth

YOU KNOW the story of the emperor who paraded through the streets in his new invisible clothes. You’ll also know, for sure, about blank or apparently blank canvases. And most of us have heard of the timed period of silence – a work for any performer on any instrument, by John Cage, born a century ago.

BUT THE famous or infamous work, 4.33, is only one example of the inventive proposals of a man who also wrote and painted. I remembered that I possessed a work by Cage – part of Alec Finlay’s astonishing “Folios” series. You subscribed and, for a fiver a time, received a white envelope every few months. Inside, it could be a folded map, a booklet, or indeed just about anything that would easily fit. Once, it was some pages of language by Cage. And this centenary performance included storytelling with a difference, as well as the timed period where anything but silence happened.

John Cage

I work with Peter Urpeth – an inventive improviser on piano and percussion as well as a writer. He’s also a friend. I declare that standpoint and the fact that I have no real background in John Cage’s work, or indeed contemporary music at all.

But this probably puts me in line of the majority of the local audience for the centenary event. Looking around An Lanntair on Thursday (20 September) I could see many new faces, and suspect that some people travelled many miles to experience what would happen. The whole work has also been recorded and will be part of an international relay of the celebration. But I could also recognize many people, who had come, like me, because they were curious. If someone is passionate enough to make the links needed to carry-through an event on this scale, there must be something that got under their skin.

I trusted the An Lanntair website for the start time but it started half an hour earlier. You might think that this was part of the script – staggered arrival of people to an arts event – but I’m afraid it wasn’t. But somehow this random factor fell into the spirit of the night

There’s a lot of humour, implicit throughout. OK, I missed the silence that wasn’t. But Peter’s description of it, later, told of a relationship between him on stage, as a performer with the expectations and reactions of the audience, also players. He said there was more than one wave of laughing.

So what seems to have happened is a willingness to allow the inclusion of chance.

As I’m typing and thinking, I look up now and again to see the two large drawings installed in my living room but also made as a series of three for a publication. These are by the artist David Connearn who had a show in the old An Lanntair, that was like an installation of music.

Publication by David Connearn

He draws one line after another, within set parameters, with different thicknesses of pen or in different materials. Connearn also made a drawing, in gravel, in a courtyard in Dublin. This could only be documented from the air before it was raked to something that was nearer nothing – a less-designed fall of the stones. As each line of these very fine ink drawings, in my house, follows the one before it, there is a chance difference – that could be the result of tension in the artist’s hand or it could be a tendency suggested by the paper itself.

The same artist has also made a print by blind-embossing, which looks like nothing on paper, until you catch an angle to see that again it is a meticulous and brave attempt to follow a proposition in line. I feel that this is significantly different from the minimalism in the recent show of works on paper by Calum Innes at Ingleby Gallery. (And why, by the way, have we not seen the work of either artist in the suitable gallery space of An Lanntair?)

Innes is known for removing the paint he has placed on his medium. However, there seems to me a common element though one artist is concerned with line and one with colour. That is the allowance of chance to enter. There could never be complete control in the removing of paint from a page and the ability to work, responding to the movement of these substances, seems to me a bit like a musical improvisation. The titles often suggest sequences – numbered variations.

Chance re-occurred all through the John Cage performance. Five performers tune five radios to pre-determined frequencies, but, according to Peter’s very clear and detailed notes, the score permits additional variations, left open. And of course there is no control over what arrives, along the frequencies. I thought of the radio-hams I’ve known, with dreams of transmitting from Rockall or simply noting the call-signs come from afar. These guys are attuned to the static or interference or other sounds which occur between the morse blips or the spoken voice.

So why could you not do this at home? Just listen to the tuning of a radio or sit to watch paint dry on the boat-parts I’ve just coated. Well, I could, but there’s always something else to be done.

Before the concert, I’d asked Gerry Loose, one of said tuners and a poet and writer by trade, to tell me why he’d come a long way to take part. He said he thought Cage was very playful. One of his pieces was scored for “toy piano”. Gerry said he shared Cage’s fascination with the relationship between control and chance.

Raku landscape by Alison Weightman

This suggestion brought me back to a workshop led by the ceramic artist Alison Weightman. She has adapted the meditative process of raku firing to use of a blowtorch and oildrum. But the timeless and placeless works also involve an element of chance. She is never completely certain how the chemistry of the glaze will fall.

Gerry described an exhibition of Cage’s paintings, where again, there were variations in the way they were displayed so you approached from different angles. Cage and Loose also share a passion for collecting wild mushrooms. When once asked if this could be dangerous, Cage replied that statically there was more chance of being killed by a lion.

So you could see the work as an incentive to look rather than see and to listen rather than hear.

And this indeed give me a way into interpreting the experience of the celebration. My only slight discomfort was that it seemed a bit serious when the men on stage were glancing at their scores and turning the dials. This was broken for a moment when a very fine piece of fiddle playing came through just when we were all ready for a cheery note.

And when John Cavanagh read, this was indeed a performance. A bit of a coup – engaging a vastly experienced broadcaster used to striving for the continuity that suggests a completely dependable professional and calm broadcasting corporation. But John later said how challenging it was, to read the stories of Cage, with a huge variation in the number of words, to the same timing of one whole but single minute. Later, he alternated readings from the current Stornoway Gazette and Fishing News between the contributions from the radio-tuners. Here, you really did get a sense of a playful though thoughtful proposition. Each page was cast aside and fell where it did.

Peter Urpeth and Ian Stephen in a previous project at An Lanntair (photo Mhairi Law)

Just when my concentration was being tested, we were given a piece which placed the entertainment factor up front. Peter had been paying regular visits to the Bethesda charity shop and buying LPs to a formula which will ensure that the playing of them, to Cage’s score, is indeed random. The first performance was over in our neighbouring city, New York, in 1952, with of course a different range of recordings available for sampling. It was performed with a dance-piece by the choreographer Merce Cunningham. In this performance Andy Mackinnon contributed a film, assembled without hearing the piece of music.

“The score is block-graph, where each square equals three inches of tape. In total there are eight tracks, made from the 42 selected records.” Cage used the I-Ching to create a chart for the original work. It was astonishing how often it all appeared to be synchronized.

And there were thee short bursts of energy and skill when Urpeth on piano and Stuart Wilding on percussion, betrayed the fact that they have a long-standing working relationship – responding to each other but in a way that could never be exactly replicated. With all that experience and skill open to the musicians, it really is an act of dedication to keep it all under restraint, to serve the purpose of the evening.

That purpose was indeed a celebration – a little bit of an exploration and a bit of an adventure. I can’t remember feeling bored but I do remember being ready for something pleasing or humorous – and usually that arrived.

An Lanntair are to be congratulated on trusting Urpeth and his team to carry out their vision and one of their own staff, Jon Macleod, took part. Balanced programming has to transcend personal taste. Even if I had not found something to engage me, I think I’d be glad that Stornoway was playing a key role in an international programme to celebrate a guy who has provoked so much discussion.

© Ian Stephen, 2012

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AN LANNTAIR have just installed a summer exhibition which presents images of Scottish landscapes along with a complex, puzzling series of allusions to Scottish culture, expressed in English Gaelic and Scots.

HELEN MacAlister was commissioned to make the exhibition, which will move on to a commercial gallery in London. This helps re-establish a pattern where work originated or gathered by Scottish island arts centres then travels to the mainland as an export. It’s clear that the artist has been given scope and time to follow through areas of research and experiment. The art has been allowed to find its own form.

Helen MacAlister - Ben Dorain

The process allows a measure of risk but gives the chance of producing something innovative. The evidence here is that MacAlister has responded to the trust with a thorough and diligent investigation and a sustained series of experimentations with the aim of arriving at an exhibition which will be challenging but rewarding. Both the artist and an Lanntair are to be commended on permitting this journey. Care has been taken in the presentation of the results. The L-shaped gallery and the foyer which is a continuum of the exhibition are are fully used and the works are well-spaced. Framing and presentation standards are high.

The accompanying notes are absolutely essential – and even on the first day of a preview, everything was in place. Laminated files list the references and notes. A print-out of the well-designed on-line catalogue is to hand. The impression is of a determined effort to provide a contemporary exhibition with access by way of landscape icons and resonant phrases.

Helen MacAlister - 'Bastard' Affairs

If the claims and expectations are well nigh impossible to live up to – that’s no bad thing. Better to aim for a wide range and fall short than limit the scale to an easy competence. Take Roddy Murray’s introduction: “This exhibition penetrates deep into language. In so doing, it creates a new medium of itself that leaps gaps and generations, fuses ideas and influences and transcends, resolves and reconciles them.”

Let’s go out and meet the work as displayed now, in the light of this background.

The landscapes are painted in monochrome on an off-white linen. There is a group of large scale paintings. Three of them have a smaller canvas, in the same format, hung close, presenting a short text. But several of the same body of images are also presented again in a line of framed drawings, pencil on paper. It is possible that photographs of the landscapes have been projected and made new in paint and pencil respectively.

Helen MacAlister - Bealach nam Ba

Whatever the method, the visual presentation already accepts deliberate restrictions – a bit like a poet accepting the discipline of schemes of rhyme or metre. Both the paintings and the drawings remind me of some of the work of Donald Urquhart, where moving branches or grasses become fixed for observation. This is not an immediate, personal response to landscape. The selected scenes are viewed through complex prisms of previous responses. Thus, this body of work seems to me more about culture than landscape. I was reminded of the exhibition Turner And His Contemporaries, in Tate Britain, a couple of years ago. The arrangement of work revealed how Turner made no attempt to hide his way of building on arrangements or viewpoints taken in previous paintings. Similarly, later artist’s borrowed from Turner’s own interventions, without guile.

This classicism is of course a main aspect of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s body of work, exploring many fields from the French Revolution to the culture of the Scottish Fishing vessel. MacAlister’s way of selecting short phrases which suggest huge landscapes of thought behind them, follows on from Finlay. But it also nods to multiple layers of Scottish discourse. It’s not simply a quote from Hamish Henderson but a context where the editor Alec Finlay’s approach to Henderson is also referenced.

Thomas A Clark’s practice of recalling walks and expressing the experience, in spare language, is also in the index. There is an echo of Marvell’s use of language, borrowed knowingly by Clark’s nod to that. In the same way, Macdiarmid’s translation of Birlinn Chlann Raghnaill by Alasdair Macmhaighistir Alasdair is alluded to. In this case, there is a sense that a bilingual commentator sees the version as looking at the stained-glass windows of a cathedral from the outside in. Macalister’s visual expression of such propositions, in the form of engraved glass postcards, is witty but again multi-layered.

Helen MacAlister - Cold air in the nostrils

You have to keep your own wits about you and be prepared to spend time, chasing the riddles. For me it was time well spent and I’m resolved to return. It seems to me as much an exploration of Scottish philosophical propositions as much as a visual art exhibition. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I am however going to raise some questions.

Let’s accept that any exhibition, outside production of work for a known market, is a measure of exploration and a measure of exposition. This show is very far along the exploration line. But could the artist give the audience a bit more help? If you set up a proposition like a line of postcard-sized glassworks, all on a named type of dimpled glass, then there is already some sense of pattern and a framework. So you can look for the particular detail of the proposition in each. But the last two are a different size and one of these also has a reference to the use of the panatone blue recently approved as the saltire colour. Is there not a risk of just too much going on?

Helen MacAlister - And I bleer my een wi' greetin (detail)

There are already variations within the series, in size and style of typefaces and one clever little work juxtaposes red and white to emphasise that the Gaelic words have another layer of meaning from a previous use.

This is a lot to take in and it would be easier to give it the time and focus it needs if there were a few less puzzling visual variations. Why is the font size of the title quote, “At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae” so much larger than that used in the two similar works presented in the same format? It might be that it is exactly because it is the title or that the quote from Hamish Henderson is indeed the driving force of the whole exhibition. But a little more apparent logic in the patterns made by the hung works would have allowed me to sit and ponder the layers.

In the same way a long line of similar frames give the expectation that this is really one work. But it seems to me that the pencil versions of the scenes can’t be tied too closely to the separate text works which follow them.

Is it possible that this is exactly the type of exhibition which calls for a trusting but two-sided relationship between artist and curator? My own conclusion is that this is a brave and braw show. Well done the artist for taking us deep into her journey.

© Ian Stephen, 2012

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• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

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

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

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

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

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

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

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

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

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

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

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

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

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

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

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

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

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

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

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

The Gestalt installation in An Lanntair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Ian Stephen, 2012

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• An Lanntair
• Gestalt
• Ian Stephen

OF COURSE it’s a fine social occasion, the annual open art show in an Lanntair.

THE Grinneas nan Eilean invitation always elicits a huge response across a wide range of media. Artists with secure reputations rub frames or fabrics with those who have never shown work in public before. The gallery staff always make a superb job of making a lively collage of an arrangement, and there are some clever groupings of theme and colour.

A proud angler has presented his prize trout and the reflection of dozens of works in the glass case makes one work of all the layers of exploration and enterprise. Colour is certainly to the fore. It forms a dramatic contrast with Gordon Fox’s strange half-devoured trout or salmon, seen through gauze – the fish of wisdom over the hazelnuts of knowledge.

Trout reflections (photo Ian Stephen)

Steve Dilworth’s very pure marble work also reflects much of what’s around it. This artist seems to alternate work which has a rough, near brutal shamanistic undersong with the most finely-finished, refined shapes. This is certainly in the second category – more on the spectrum towards Brancusi than the codhooks and stories which sometimes appear in Dilworth’s oevre, suggesting shared territory with Will Maclean.

But refined work is also presented with the rough finish that suggests rocks attacked by shifts in weather or hands worn by use and scrapes. Nikolai Globbe shows three contrasting “Patera” – bowls with glass in stoneware, like pools left behind a Harris deluge.

You look out over that, in the centre of the main gallery, to a low-slung and substantial deck-chair which in one way is contemporary in feel and in another suggests a bygone era of craftsmanship and solid materials. Innes Smith is a craftsman and sailor. He has reclaimed some of that finest of timbers – pitch-pine, from a fallen roof – and made an unfussy project, excellent design and finish, matching grains­, but allowing the stains and wear of years to speak.

Tweed is used with ever-more ingenuity. Karina Murray combines a dress with a coat and its cut has flare. Sallie Avis subverts the traditional image of tweed, in fact  reveals what is normally concealed, with her tweed corset. Elsewhere scraps and salvage are put to good use in best Island style (By Rosie). All this luxuriance thrives by the expected and welcome appearance of driftwood and at least one mermaid.

Waves and skies dominate. There are always exceptional studies of waves in this show and many quality paintings take this subject. I’d give the prize for skies to Willie Fulton this year – he seems to have let go to a brooding one and come close to the more expressionist work of Jon Schueler, the American painter (1916–1992) who lived near Mallaig for many years.  Harris features strongly and we come down to a night-sea at Scarista that could also be  from a dream you’ll never recover, by Gavin Williams.

Wall of paintings (photo Ian Stephen)

But there is a host of fine painting. At first it’s difficult to see individual works in all the lively blur but Mairi Morrison’s portrait is like a Colourist responding to a festive city. Three small paintings show the same artist’s continued interest in rural landscapes. I’d say  her wonderful observation “Sheep Grazing” takes the animal prize, but it’s a close run thing with Anne Campbell’s studies of the same tireless subject –  animals in landscape. Ruth O’Dell’s blackbirds (in resin oil tempura) are strong and delicate at the same time.

Seascape paintings range from  Kenneth Burns’ gracefully drawn mixed media compositions of Stornoway harbour to Simon Rivett’s shimmering gouache and pastel open-landscape works. Draughtswomanship comes bold and strong in Catherine Maclean’s “Ceann Cropaig” and subtle and delicate in the wistful, screenprinted “Meeting Place” by Sandra Kennedy. Fine also to see an Lanntair staff submitting work, keeping in touch by making,  and  Jon Macleod’s willingness to explore the potential of different media – his own work here evokes stories of Macedonia with digital photos on acetate screenprinting, mounted on board.

Catherine Maclean's Ceann Cropaig (photo Ian Stephen)

There is a huge range of photographic work and it needs more space than we have here to compare and be fair to all. Let me just sketch the range – from the fine-art closely observed study of a single breaking wave by Beka Globbe to a colour but near-monochrome winter wave observed by Judi Hayes, to an intimate arrangement of decaying furniture speaking stories in John Maher’s non-heightened study.

But the great joy for me was coming across a tiny framed photograph, hung very low and on sale for £10 but seeming to show everything that’s needed. David Kraal spotted the very point when the brushstroke of a house-painter is just as graceful as anything we’ll see on display. We can hardly say why the everyday has the power to move us, but this photographer has indeed caught the moment.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

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• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

THE clacking of the Hattersley loom was as much a part of the Lewis and Harris soundscape as the corncrake, curlew or competitive gull. Colour mixes which came off these mechanical beasts were mostly muted and well-suited to blend with the moor so the angler or stalker would not shine out.

This exhibition is an elaborate presentation of a luxurious book, on walls but made on the premise of linking the colour and pattern in contemporary tweed to the landscape and peopled world of its Island of origin.

Installing the exhibition in An Lanntair (photo Ian lawson)

It’s nothing new for the subtle organic colour schemes (documented in old pattern-samples in the Loom Centre on Bayhead)  to be juxtaposed with surprising choices of strong colour or texture. In the 1960s Mrs Perrins’ Ceemo tweed label brought Breasclete crofters to New York to show their light, designer fabrics to a new fashion market.

And then there was Breanish Tweed, made at the end of a road in the southwest of Lewis and now ironically still made but near Skigersta, close to the northeast limit of the same landmass.  Luskentyre tweed is also marketed with a locality, and Lewis Tweed is another more individual product with a slightly provocative title.

So tweed designs have never been static and there have always been makers who produced cloth with more individuality than larger scale mills.

Ian Lawson has adopted the persona of a pilgrim journeyman. The opening pages show self-portraits of a man in a wide brimmed hat before a blazing driftwood fire, in the open landscape. His written introductions also acknowledge a sharing with  the community who survive in the landscape he celebrates.

One wall is devoted completely to landscapes – in different seasons and ranging over the terrain which qualifies for the orb mark, if foot- or hand-powered looms are used to produce it to the agreed criteria. He often uses slow exposures to blur waves or flowing water.  The technical quality of the digital image is sufficient to allow it to be presented in large scale formats.

Another section concentrates on the ongoing work – sheep being transported by boat or newly-sheared wool or man and dog at work before sudden mountains. Both portraiture and landscape photography is of good quality in the way you would expect competent commercial work done to an exacting commission.

But the whole project – including the forthcoming publication, layout, design and texts – are in fact the vision of the originating artist.

The longest gallery wall is devoted to one huge panel which is composed of a wide range of images of tweed and landscape, so closely hung that they become one work. It’s somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a collage. The composition is of overwhelming richness.

So a detail of banding in rock is set beside woven representation of something which could well be inspired by exactly that. Or an orange oxidized roof could suggest the fleck in the tweed detail set beside it.

But sometimes the orchestration of  the study is so tight that it  makes you suspect manipulation. Even if the colour has not in fact been processed or filtered, the tight juxtapositions seem to me to leave no room for a more emotive, subtle linking of  product and place.

It’s a popular show. The visitor’s book (also designed by Ian Lawson) lists enthusiastic reactions, one after another, with hardly a questioning response. You can well see why the show would be programmed at Festival time, rather than a more monochrome or  quiet response to our culture or issues.

I can well see the argument for presenting a show in this form at this time. However, the work seems me to suggest the need for a strong curator and editor, to bring out a more concentrated exploration of the theme.

The banners which fill the foyer – (one of An Lanntair’s strongest areas for showing work) are overwhelming, and suggest a domineering stage-management. The repetitions of golden graphics are a coffee table book writ large and high.  And the sheer volume of images inhibit the possibility of true, close observation of  the strongest images, which is a pity because I think there are some very strong compositions.

Take the sheep-shears – a key instrument of imagery – even if we all know from primary school geography that most tweed wool used in recent years is from Border Cheviots and our own produce normally went to carpets. There is a fine unfussy shot of the worn signal-red in the grips, giving way to the matt shine of chafed steel.

A  spirited pony at Luskentyre is a timeless icon. There is the hessian of a sack against the clumps of fleece which could really be human hair, from their appearance.  And the shot did indeed remind me of an early Murdo Macleod photograph where that suggestion is implied in a portrait of the Shawbost artist’s mother.  It’s an unconscious echo of last year’s prime-time show of island images.

The green brightness of a modern petrol container shines out by the marking paint in a boatload of  sheep. But that is a rare note of more hard realism in an exhibition which is romantic without apology.

There is the official permission to use the orb mark and an endorsement from Charles, Prince of Wales, as an introduction.  But there are also the overt statements of the photographer/author. And here I do have to suggest that a hard editor could have steered the product away from carrying all the traits of  a high quality commercial campaign.

The arts centre has cleverly juxtaposed a small showcase, in the bar area, for each of four contemporary designers who use tweed. The presentation could be a bit sharper, but the work and the statements of each designer are an interesting  counterpoint to the work in the main gallery.

Moving up a floor, the response of Island children to the return of the Lewis chessmen as invented board-games is a grand lively use of colour and design and idea.  The work confirms one of the main current strengths of the Stornoway arts centre as its education and outreach programme.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

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• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

IT was also, as she admitted beforehand, “terrifying”.

For Alyth, there is more pressure performing solo in front of a few hundred people in Stornoway than there is performing with the likes of The Chieftains in front of thousands in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

But it is also, of course, uniquely special – so much so that Alyth plans to release a select recording of the concert later this year as a ‘live’ album.

Alyth

Although she has appeared on more than 20 albums, this will be Alyth’s first live album. Indeed, it will be only her third solo album, although she has also just recorded a duo album with Irish harpist and singer Triona Marshall.

Triona and Alyth both perform alongside Irish traditional music gods The Chieftains so a project together was a natural next step.

Entitled Red and Gold, their album is due for release in June and was recorded in Aberdeenshire in January between Alyth’s Celtic Connections commitments with The Step Crew and her fourth annual American tour with The Chieftains.

Alyth’s last album, People Like Me, was released in February 2009 and was very well received – online folk and roots music hub Spiral Earth called it “a dose of unadulterated music magic” – so there will be a lot of interest in her coming albums.

However, her priority for the An Lanntair show was the concert itself. She said: “If we get a good album out of it, that will be a bonus. Our primary aim is to put on a good show.”

Joining Alyth in Stornoway will be her own band. They are Brian McAlpine of Session A9, on piano and accordian; Capercailie’s Ewen Vernal on double bass; Innes Watson of The Treacherous Orchestra on guitar and fiddle; and, last but not least, Noel Eccles – of Moving Hearts fame and Mr Alyth McCormack himself – on percussion. Playing with them in An Lanntair is, for Alyth, “an ideal scenario”.

She said: “It’s a great venue; I know all the staff so well; and I trust so much the musicians that are going to be there. I absolutely know that we’ll be looked after and An Lanntair is a really lovely venue to sing in.”

Singing to a home crowd is another issue, though. “It’s terrifying,” admitted Alyth, “because I can’t pretend to be anything I’m not. People know me. I hope that by that point we’ll be so rehearsed that it will just happen.”

Alyth on stage at Celtic Connections

The concert itself is to be “an overview” of all the different work Alyth has done. She planned to include some new songs as well as some pieces from her duo album with Triona, whose role was to be filled in Stornoway by talented local teenager Mischa Macpherson.

There were also to be pieces from her work with The Chieftains, The Step Crew – a group of high-octane musicians and dancers from America and Canada – and The Global Music Foundation. They are a group of musicians from all over the world who come together to teach and perform. And just one week before her show in Stornoway, Alyth was with them in Spain.

Before that, she had spent five weeks in America and Canada with The Chieftains. Their 22-date tour began in Troy, New York, and ended this year in Toronto – on St Patrick’s Day, as it does every year.

Alyth said: “It was the best tour that I’ve done with them but it was also the most difficult, from the point of view that we didn’t have a day off at all. We’d have a day off, which would be a travel day, which could be two flights and a drive. We did two TV shows and on those days we also had gigs. On the last week of the tour, we did eight shows back to back. There is so much travelling. The gigs are great and the venues are great – but you do get tired.”

Alyth looks to Chieftains founder member Paddy Moloney for lessons in staying power: “If Paddy can do it at 72 then the rest of us shouldn’t stay up so long at the bar.” She added: “I did feel a bit shell-shocked when I came back from that Chieftains tour. When you’ve been away on tour and come back you think, ‘oh, what will I do with myself? What do I do now?”

An American tour with The Chieftains is a big affair, although some of their biggest venues, such as Carnegie Hall, were missed out this year in anticipation of next year’s 50th Anniversary tour.

As Alyth said: “If Americans are going to go out in and see an Irish act in the run-up to St Patrick’s Day, then they’ll go and see The Chieftains.”

Touring under the auspices of such a huge band makes for quite a different experience to gigging solo: “There isn’t the same pressure if I’m doing a gig with The Chieftains because its their gig, obviously. I can relax a bit. I like doing my own gigs but I also like the variety of work that comes from working with different bands.”

Alyth certainly isn’t short on variety. The Chieftains’ touring schedule gears up again at the end of May, beginning in Ireland and taking in various festivals including Lorient. Then, in June, Alyth will be heading back to America again – this time with The Step Crew.

The Global Music Foundation also provide something different in the form of their unique and intensely rich cultural and music experience.  Alyth has been working with the foundation – who combine performing with educational projects – for nearly two years now and is just back from Sitges near Barcelona.

She was there to perform as part of the Open Secrets project, which showcases two Catalan poets alongside the foundation’s musicians and singers. An album from that project was also recorded in January – in Italy – and is due for release imminently.

Alyth said: “The thing about the foundation is that people come from all over the world and perform together. It’s really interesting actually. The common language is music. I’m singing two songs in English but I’m also singing two songs in Gaelic, and they had never heard Gaelic before.

“The lovely thing about them is that because they are such good musicians, and so respectful, they give me the space to do what I want to do. Open Secrets is my first album with them – they do different projects with various musicians – and it’s actually very beautiful. It’s quite mellow. It’s jazz but not crazy jazz. It’s the kind of music you can just sit and listen to.”

Alyth in actress mode with Ron Emslie in rehearsal for Right Lines' Whisky Kisses (photo Callum Mackay)

Music is not the only string to Alyth’s bow, of course. She can also act and was doing Sleeping Beauty with the famous Dundee Rep theatre company over pantomime season. It was 12 shows a week for 11 weeks.

“It was brilliant but it was hard work. You have no time to do anything apart from eat, work, sleep. That finished on the 8th January and I went home on the 9th. I hadn’t seen my husband for a whiley.” She added: “I think our last stint apart was five weeks. We’ve had a lot of that over the last while. It’s been a bit difficult.”

A few days at home in Stornoway with her husband and the rest of her trusted band, in among all that madness and mayhem. No wonder Mrs Eccles was looking forward to it.

Alyth McCormack is at An Lanntair, Stornoway, on 30 April 2011.

© Katie Laing, 2011

Links

• Alyth McCormack
• An Lanntair

IN THE summer of 2010 I received an email from Ian Stephen inviting me to participate in the exhibition Is a thing lost…if you know where it is?, to be shown at An Lanntair in Storonoway in March 2011.

The multi-media project had journeys at the heart of it, he said – mostly sea journeys – which range from Brittany to Iceland with detours to the Shiants, St. Kilda, Denmark and Finland, forming a metaphorical chart. My own practice lies in that area so it sounded good to me.

Is A Thing Lost (photo Mhairi Law)

The title itself stems from a Lewis story.The cook having thrown the cutlery overboard with the washing up water has to confess to the skipper what he’s done,  and pose the question ‘Is a thing lost…if you know where it is?’ You know for sure where the thing is but you can’t get at it…

In essence, the project became an exploration of storytelling in many forms, manifested in prints, film, music, photography and painting, with sixteen artists in all showing their work. The opening on the 25^th March was well attended, with a  good spattering of  folk from further south as well as locally.

a vessel restricted in her ability to manoeuvre can’t keep out of the way

a storyteller can only make an echo of what’s already there

an artist looks inside out for something not there yet (IS and EW 2010)

Is A Thing Lost (photo Mhairi Law)

The concept of connection is strong throughout,  from the underlying theme of the project with its numerous sea routes and journeys, to the individual works within it. Stories are retold from different angles and standing points, overlapping to produce a common ground.

Ian Stephen and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé produced (amongst other works) a series of three photo-polymer prints with Highland Print Studio: Stac Biorach (St Kilda), Allein Duinn (The Shiants), and Limfjord (the story of KIng Lindorm) – island maps and images recomposed with the text of the story as the visual medium. Although literal in approach, the images create metaphorical space for the viewer to interpret their own versions of the stories and  close the distance between the islands which are geographically many miles apart.

Screen printed interventions on garments, also by IS and EW, use textiles as a vehicle for communication. Hung from a line in two opposite  corners of the main gallery Cutty Sarks and Long Johns are printed with the nautical symbol for ‘a restricted vessel…’, presenting a bold visual barrier with a sense of enclosing and restricting the space they inhabit whilst creating a dialogue not only between themselves but the other works.

Morven Gregor and Gerry Loose, both whom were involved in one of the initial voyages, Crossing Alba – rowing a boat through the Forth and Clyde Canal – tell of their visually peaceful inland journey through photography and text, a sharp contrast to some of the  turbulent sea images in the rougher waters of Ian’s film Croiseag, showing potent images of the crossing from Port Nis to Suile Sgeir and Stromness on the Lewis sgoth, Jubilee.

A film by Sean Martin and Louise Milne, A Boat Retold, is a documentary about a return voyage to the Shiants of the rebuilt vessel Broad Bay. The dominant voice of the film seemed to belong to the vessel itself and the relationship to its home waters in the Hebrides.

Andy Mackinnon’s atmospheric film Sruth nam Fear Gorm also has the Shiants at the heart of it, this time depicting the gruesome story of the Blue Men who are said to haunt the turbulent waters around the islands, a story that would put fear into the heart of any sailor. Maggie Nicols and Peter Urpeth created dynamic soundtracks to both films.

Is A Thing Lost (photo Mhairi Law)

If boats can tell stories then sections of boats can certainly suggest them. Ian Stephen’s large weathered and dressed larch plank Stràc from the Lewis sgoth Jubilee sits with a  quiet but powerful presence on a main wall in the gallery inscribed with  gaelic text (“seall nas fhaide nam bàgh as leithne” – look wider than the broadest bay, and is kept company by Falmadair, Sean Ziehm-Stephen and Innes Smith’s carefully crafted tiller, also for Jubilee. Both ooze a multitude of untold stories through their sense of use and history.

Another stràc is suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the gallery, this time one of nine planks used to reproduce the shape of the boat Emily. Colin Myers, a former shipwright and crew member on the voyage to Sula Sgeir on Jubilee in 2010, was asked to produce a drawing imagining the cut plank shapes which make up the complex shape of an Orkney boat.  The eloquent drawing sits side by side with a  photo of Emily by Ian, forming a strong relationship between the three related works.

The formats of diptych and tripytch were a common format in many of the works, expressing more than one side of a story. Colin Myers also produced a trio of digital images relating to the sgoth Jubilee.

From a closer perspective, my own contribution and approach centres around the imaginary journey of a found piece of timber on a trip to Iceland. The timber had apparently travelled the length of a remote glacier where there are no trees, human habitation or man-made constructions of any kind.

Is A Thing Lost (photo Mhairi Law)

It then journeyed to Scotland (in my bag via Icelandair) where it was paired with a similar piece of timber found on a similarly remote section of Scotland’s west coast. The subsequent morphing of the two timbers into one gave them a new identity while connecting both stories and land masses.

To complete the installation I created two diptych paintings from the areas where the timbers were found: the Vatnajokull area in Iceland, and the Shiant Isles on the west coast of Scotland. It was important that the presence of Iceland and Scotland was incorporated into these works in a physical sense, so lava dust from Mt. Hekla and spring water from the Shiants was used in conjunction with graphite and paint to produce the images.

I also contributed a short audio visual piece with an ambiguous image (in terms of place) overlaid with an old Icelandic song. If you listen with half an ear, it could be an old Scots voice singing, such is the feel and sound of it.

The film was alternately looped with another film of images of St. Kilda, Boraraigh, by IS. A reminder of how, in spite of any superficial differences between the Nordic cultures, they are are essentially similar in many respects, with songs and stories often overlapping in subject and imagery.

The spaces at An Lanntair – which include most of the arts centre on three levels –  have been well thought out and utilised, inluding a looped projection on the main stair wall and the lower foyer. On the highest level, colourful banners printed by Highland Print Studio and created by local school children with John McNaught in an education outreach programme, protrude into the bar space and welcome visitors to an area not usually open to the public.

Visually the show as a whole is rich and varied, the tactile elements successfully producing texture and balance with the other works, resulting in a natural flow and rhythm.

Outside the arts centre, the exhibition extends to the Sail Loft on the harbour, home of IS and his artworks – also to the drawings of David Connearn and the Baltic paintings of Mikko Paakkola. Visitors are invited (now by appointment: 01851 705 320) to walk down from the gallery to view the works and to participate in the theme of journey… .

The project was concluded with a dynamic event at An Lanntair with performances by Ian Stephen, Maggie Nicols, Maggie Smith and Peter Urpeth, who brought the various elements of the show together with storytelling and music, including the participants of Maggie Nicols sound improvisation workshop held earlier in the day.

Maggie Smith and Ian Stephen (photo Mhairi Law)

This type of event was well suited to the venue and introduced the audience to a form of music not staged at An Lanntair before – a positive move for an outward looking arts centre.

Looking to the future, the various elements which make up  the exhibition produce a large degree of flexibility when it comes to showing the project elsewhere; allowing  it to be rebuilt without compromise in many types of venue regardless of size. It could focus on single aspects alone, eg, film, or a show of prints, or relate to one particular area (eg, the Shiants) or could be purely performance based.

It could also include guest artists at any stage, enriching the cultural aspect. Ian is keen for the exhibition to travel and venues within the UK and overseas  are being currently being explored. Ian can be contacted at:  ian@ianstephen.co.uk

© Pat Law, 2011

Links

• Ian Stephen
• Pat Law

IN THESE very columns I’ve expressed the opinion that the successful Events  and Cinema programme at An Lanntair can risk being a tad on the safe side.

It’s wonderful to be able to say from the heart that two recent weekends in the Stornoway Arts Centre have been occupied by  events with a fair degree of the experimental. Iain Finlay Macleod’s new play has been written about on Northings by Mark Fisher and by myself in the West Highland Free Press, but I’d like now to look back and consider the events linked to the ongoing exhibition project, “Is a thing lost…..if you know where it is?”, running at An Lanntair until 7 May 2011.

Peter Urpeth and Ian Stephen (photo Mhairi Law)

When I was invited to lead a multi-venue project by An Lanntair and Creative Scotland, I saw the opportunities provided by the combined gallery and theatre space in Stornoway as a real opportunity. The building has been designed so the art is not contained in the gallery space. So from the beginning I hoped to be able to commission works which would lead to live performance in the auditorium and screening in a real cinema environment. At times, it looked like just too much effort, to attempt to make a bridge between two separate programmes of activities.

Jazz or improvised music rarely achieves the audience the performers deserve – and that is true even in a city environment where there has been an established scene. But an Lanntair already provided the template to encourage an audience to try something out with current experience.

Past successes, for me, have happened when a cutting edge group, in contemporary dance for example, have provided workshops which have then fed into the live performance. Young musicians have also attended workshops led by innovative jazz musicians and their parents and friends have boosted the audience for a performance which could be challenging.

These links with the audience have made the work more accessible. So the event on the 26 March aimed to provide the security of a known starting point – a story in fact – and then allow performers a very open brief to give them scope to respond to that story.

The pattern was simple – commission two new short films, both linked to the Shiant Islands but taking a very different approach. Commission new music for both films with a common denominator – the improvisational pianist Peter Urpeth – but again, taking a very different tonal approach. The event would move the two new films, seen in more intimate format in the gallery, onto the big screen. And the film music would also come out into the open space as live improvisation.

The whole project is an exploration of the different forms a story can take – an examination of the risks and gains of moving it from one form to another. So a voyage from one Island to another can be documented by one participant as a minute dissection of the hours spent sick and incapable from moving from one protected bunk – or the story can be compressed into tiny vignettes of an external viewpoint by another.

The starting story for the Saturday event was outlined in collaboration with the very natural but compelling storyteller Maggie Smith. We took the story behind the song ‘Ailein Duinn’, but taking the viewpoint of that song – the female view of a sea-tragedy along similar lines to those navigated by the late Lewis writer Norman Malcolm Macdonald in his verse-drama Anna Caimbeul.

Norman referred to his work as an attempt to create a Japanese Noh play in Gaelic. So I’d argue that it’s nothing new to take a more experimental or cross-cultural approach to a story embedded in our own local geography.

Peter then laid down some melody lines from the song, on piano, but leaving space in plenty between the variations. This was the basis for his part in the soundtrack of A Boat Retold, made for this project by Sean Martin and Louise Milne.

The documentary has a narrative, but expressed in the way a poem tells a story – not always following a sequence of beginning, middle and end, but looking for the more elusive connections that take you below surfaces of meaning. Improvisation on flute, by Norman Chalmers, recorded live at the Shiants, was another key element.

The boat Broad Bay was built in Orkney in 1912 but rebuilt from the keel up in Lewis, very early in our current millennium. Is it the same boat? The question was explored by following a voyage to the Shiant Islands in the new boat, as an echo of an earlier adventure, examined in the Radio Scotland series Voyagers, in 1998.

The documentary follows a line you might trace to the works of Peter Watkins (Culloden and The War Games) rather than a more conventional approach. The same directors have been showing their last documentary along an international trail of film festivals. It is a study of the great Scottish film director Bill Douglas. The approach hinges on Douglas’s fascination with early cinema equipment, like magic lanterns.

As a kind of homage (like the storytellers nod to Anna Caimbeul), A Boat Retold alternates between HD clarity and occasional use of Super 8 film to balance story and mood.

Andy Mackinnon took a sustained expressionistic approach to his own new film. Sruth nam Fear Gorm (Blue Men of the Stream) is an intense study of the Shiants legend. His opening shot is an absolute gift – the chain of Islands as a mirage floating above the surface of the sea.

It was taken during a winter voyage when the temperature change caused the familiar icon to take a new form. The first section has Urpeth’s music as interplay with vocal improvisation by the internationally renowned Maggie Nicols.

This gives way to the recorded sea-sound – its own music behind the dance of wind against tide conditions which betray the suggestions of the lost souls of generations of mariners.

Peter Urpeth and Maggie Nicols (photo Mhairi Law)

The screen was removed at this point and the evening given over to Urpeth and Nicols. It was a rare opportunity to bring together two artists who have worked together in the past. They went for it – and this time the piano was not spare but busy and rapid, with the energy required to balance the inventive tirade of syllables and snatches of melody which were let loose by Nicols.

It was intense, and I found myself moving in and out of the improv. When it took a hold you became completely lost in its insistence. Most of the audience stayed with it. I spoke to one – a woman who loves the sea but also rightly has awe of it.  She said the improv evoked wind in rigging and weather between islands.

I’d say that reaction made the evening worthwhile. I’m grateful to the whole of the an Lanntair organisation as well as to the artists and the funders who trusted a growing team far enough to come this far. The project continues.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

Links

• Is A Thing Lost …
• Ian Stephen
• Maggie Nicols
• Peter Urpeth

Open all year, Mon-Sat 10.00-17.30 and during performances.

DONALD URQUHART has for many years been involved in making work in landscape. Often this is in collaboration with architects, and arguably this strand of the painter’s work reached one its most satisfying forms in the collaborative work An Turas, installed in Tiree.

It’s not so much a ferry terminal as an invitation. You are provided with sufficient shelter to look out on a landscape framed by the sensitive lines of the building you have entered.

Detail from work by Lauro Trujillo Munoz (photo Ian Stephen)

He was also a key player in the sky-lining details of the rebuilt Eden Court Theatre and Reich and Hall’s groundbreaking approach to a huge scale public building, Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow, which opened last year.

But Donald is also an entertainer and a teacher. I’ve heard him tell a novel in a night, Jura-assisted, and I’ve also seen him as a sensitive teacher. He is joint director of an innovative Masters Degree course at Edinburgh College of Art. Recently, he has built on his long-standing relationship with An Lanntair to help form a bridge between the current course and the people of Lewis.

The Press and Journal recently carried a feature where Jimmy Jam Jars (a guy who has to wear very thick lenses) described his day out at Losgaintir, with a group of students met in the Criterion Bar the night before. He came along for the spin but no doubt contributed his own insights on fast-changing island life to the Art, Space and Nature group

This is how Donald describes the course: “Art, Space & Nature is an operational field of overlapping disciplines engaging with both site and context. As such, our pattern of operation allows an intense period of research through fieldwork, a period of creative response and then presentation. Prior to An Lanntair in Stornoway we visited Orkney and presented at the Pier from 2006-2010.”

In October I described an installation at ECA’s Tent Gallery, mapping a provisional response to what was the first visit to Lewis for most of a very cosmopolitan group. Some months later, the images and thinking have been filtered and absorbed. There is now an installation in the foyer and bar areas of An Lanntair, which is a completely different show to the one mounted in the Tent.

This process is interesting in itself. It’s not that the initial works were sketches or studies for later development – rather that one response was more immediate and the other more considered.

It would be good to see, as a future possibility in the course, the opportunity to show both of these in the same building.

I’ve always felt the entrance to An Lanntair is one of the best spaces in the building. It’s always a compromise when a shop and a box-office and the entrance to a theatre are combined with a gallery. But the exterior walls of the main gallery and the stairway present opportunities.

These were restored and skillfully used in the previous show (Echo by the Ullapool-based Peter White and Jon Miller). The Art, Space and Nature group, describing themselves in the current title as “Interlopers”, spotted the opportunities and grasped them.

Work by Lauro Trujillo Munoz (photo Kristina King)

Not all the artists returned to Lewis this time. Some, like Sinéad Bracken, had a well-formed idea which needed determination and group-commitment to achieve. Others could send their pre-made work with installation notes.

It seems to me that this in itself was an exemplary process – a team game where those in Edinburgh saw to the meticulous labeling of work and a striking poster. And there are advantages in a smaller team carrying out the installation.

Sinéad, like many before her, was struck by that curve of Losgaintir, abeam Taransaigh and under Ben Dhu. She asked a certain island poet to make a short form of a published poem relating to the location. This was then traced by helpers by walking the language. The GPS mapping of that track is then shown.

Visually it’s as if the language has been translated into Japanese, and yet you detect familiar words. The action has remade the poem as another work.

Joseph Calleja and Rosalie Mono de Froideville have collaborated on another work based on remaking perceived images. You see a grid of stock Island images – the usual subjects. The catch which makes you think beyond them is how they were realized.

The artists sent their snapshots to an address in China. For a very small sum, these are then rendered as paintings on canvas and posted back. It’s a bit like prawns and salmon being exported from the islands for processing, then being returned to our own supermarkets for retailing.

The poster is also the interpretative material, and all the information required is there in a succinct form. Take Inbal Droval’s description of her successful minimalist meditation on perception: “If an open curtain reveals a view then an open sail blocks it.”  The experience of a team-building trip on the sgoth an Sulaire has also resulted in work by Christine Morrison. Her video takes the boat’s eye, forward looking. It is the constant, and the horizon changes constantly.

There’s a line like the horizon all the way through a triptych of works by Laura Trujillo Muñoz. This is one of the few works which is a development of the idea initially proposed in The Tent.  The idea of questoning the connotations of the words for “island” is elegantly expressed.

I-Chern Lai frames an image of a beach, but there are two beaches, from a polarized geography. And the reflections from across the road or your own shadow add further layers.

Work by I-Chern Lai (photo Kristina King)

Queena Hsiung brings a “new tactic” to a 2D form by expressing it as a 3D form. Kristina King dramatizes the rich mix of Atlantic and Pacific cultures by showing her sufboard cover, in Harris tweed. Catriona Gilbert’s “Butter Black” is not a sauce for a skate but an observation of the landscape which is within a landscape by closely observing peat.

This is an exhibition bristling with ideas, but these are thought through and all have them have found coherent and interesting visual expression.

© Ian Stephen, 2011

Links

• An Lanntair
• Edinburgh College of Art
• Ian Stephen

ANDY KIRKPATRICK’S Off The Wall was billed as a comedy evening by a stand-up mountaineer. I sat for the first half at the peripheries, as an Lanntair was packed near capacity.  It was the wrong side to be able to report in detail what went on. The presentation takes the form of a slideshow but the voiceover is delivered with manic intensity.

The images were stunning and Andy Kirkpatrick’s own audio-visual material flawless. But the sound was not sharp enough for this audience-member to cope with the Sheffield twang and the rhythms which come at a pace that means the monologue has to interrupt itself to keep to speed.

Mountaineer, author and comedian Andy Kirkpatrick

My problem was that the talk-through style meant that the mountaineer-comedian’s voice was shifting from the screen to the sector a little stage right of the middle of the audience. If you were out further from the sightline you were struggling. Still, I thought the back and sometimes side of his head were quite presentable in a stocky, determined kind of way.

But I still caught the offhand commentary and followed the digital dot up the routes to realise that this  modest seeming chap is describing an ascent of the North Face of the Eiger. Yes, that is the one in the movie where two men with bodies like gods die trying to fulfill the route as part of the great resurgence of national German pride.

But maybe that film also indicated that all climbers are really racing themselves. This performance caught every bit of that tension – like Steve Coogan in the Alps. Except that Kirkpatrick has completed a series of the world’s most technically demanding climbs. So if he wasn’t funny it would still be interesting.

So I asked around at the interval and found that most people had been able to tune in to the pace and the accent. I moved to the middle of the auditorium at the front row and tuned in to the detail. I’m so grateful that I did because something huge was delivered with the lightest touch possible.

The Gaelic word nàdarrachd is also in Stornoway lingo because it has a connotation that “naturalness’ just doesn’t seem to cover. I’d say it applied to Kirkpatrick’s personality.  He is able to make connections with people he’s never met before, sometimes at the foot of mountains where the act of mutual trust is a matter of life and death. He seems to revel in the offbeat challenges and in characters of people who have to do things a little different to most of us.

Some of the characters he brings to us on stage have no choice – they have had terrible accidents or have been wounded in warfare.  It takes a while, enjoying the banter, now that I’ve tuned into the pace and have a sightline, to realise he has returned again and again to one of the world’s toughest vertical climbs.  And it seems that Captain Kirk was there too.

Andy Kirkpatrick on a wall in Patagonia (© Andy Kirkpatrick)

I think I know how his storytelling works. He relives the routes each time he relates the adventure. We returned to a section of El Capitan’s Reticent Wall, to meet challenge after challenge. El Capitan is a 3000-foot (910 m) vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, located on the north side of Yosemite Valley, near its western end. When they say “wall”, that’s a fair description. It’s a climb that’s mainly vertical and involves means of hauling your own mass up the pins and wedges that can protect you when you slip.

The nature of the rock came alive for us. But Kirkpatrick also sketched a portrait of the personality of his girlfriend and companion on one climb of this wall. Karen Darke has been paraplegic since a climbing accident. She has reached Olympic standard in a cycle powered by movement of hands rather than legs.  She had the determination needed to attempt this grueling ascent. And though he never said it, Kirkpatrick clearly had the wit and guts and sheer bolshy humanity needed to sign-up for helping her get to the top.

There were also little asides like his story of pairing up with the couple (via the Isle of Lesbos) who were grand banter but hadn’t actually done much climbing. They were freaked on day one, but somehow we followed a brilliantly presented summary which showed  not only Karen but the two  assistants all achieving the climb.

And then there was a return to the challenge of climbing it solo. And solo in 24 hours. And in the company of two latter-day Californian freak brothers who were talking that chilled-out sterotype quite seriously. They got to the top too.

And finally there was a return with a man who had risen from the ranks to become a British army Major, but is now also a paraplegic. However, this is a survivor who depends on a drug cocktail with a heavy morphine element just to function.  The ascent was filmed and Kirkpatrick gave his voice a few minutes break as we were drawn into superb footage which caught the sheer physical struggle of this damaged man’s fight to continue one of the most physically arduous feats it’s possible to imagine.

And then there’s the logistic nightmare of having to  evacuate solids from your body. The leader’s answer to that one was bagels – no food but bagels and eating the minimum because the one hour it would take to perform the evacuation of the bowels could mean the difference between success and failure in a geography where savage weather systems move in fast. Bears are prowling ready to make the most of the solo climbers who judged it wrong.

Again, we shared in the relief and triumph of seeing the Major helped over the top. Kirkpatrick made light of it all, never stressed the role of the trainer and motivator and technical guru who brought himself and a whole tribe of others, some of them with disadvantages it’s near impossible to imagine, to personal triumph.

There’s no script – he might have a set of gags that he can include but I’m sure his monologues work because he is back with these people in that place.

I met him afterwards and he talked a bit about nearly drowning with Karen, canoeing off Cape Wrath.  I’ve not long returned from navigating these waters in a 27ft open boat and I found it arduous. And yes, he was funny as he was describing it all – well, it did have a happy ending. I don’t use the word “inspiring” lightly but I’d say this was a man who inspired us in the most irreverent way.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

Links

• Andy Kirkpatrick

• Karen Darke

• Ian Stephen

IAN STEPHEN reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of the Stornoway art centre

SO IT’S 25 years on and three founding figures of An Lanntair are lined up to give their thoughts on this birthday occasion. And they are all thoughtful as well as justifiably proud. There is mention of a fourth figure – Robbie Neish, who is no longer with us, but his timeless Lantern logo is projected to remind us of a clear original concept.

Malcolm Maclean, coming from a background of artist-led initiatives like the Peacock Gallery in Aberdeen, made it clear that the idea behind the gallery had three aspects from the start. One was to showcase local artists, building on the large body of work and the large audience for the annual open exhibition.

An Lanntair in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis

Before the An Lanntair project this was hung in the difficult space of the town hall. So they would open up a professional space to present work from abroad as well as home. Then they’d explore the export potential of sending out work with an island identity to the wider world.

Sam Maynard told the story of Ali Farka Toure, the late great African bluesman, crossing on the Suilven, praying all the time because crossing salt water was a very strange thing to do. He was absolutely right in that of course, but since then, a chain of musicians and singers, representing many countries and styles, has made the crossing.

Andy Bruce was reflective and analytical. I had the feeling his eye was to the future and I’m going to try to take a lead from that. First I’ll tell you a bit more about the opening night then I’m going to take you on a quick tour of post-party conversations. But the fact that so many people wanted to talk about An Lanntair, what the present organisation is doing right and what’s seen as work still to be done, is a success in itself.

Roddy Murray, Director of An Lanntair since its inception, put on a different hat. It wasn’t a party hat. It was an introduction to Peter Capaldi and a lead into a live chat show. We used to look to Malky’s exhibition concepts; Sam’s images on the posters; the quirky architecture of Andy’s Christmas cards and then the bone dry wit of the director’s letters.

Those in the know would look again at the VHS of Local Hero and yes, there was our man as one of the boys in the band. But memorabilia of art school bands, showed, amongst others, Messrs Capaldi and Murray and their drummer who now seems to be a millionaire chat show host in the States.

That all went on a bit long for an audience with empty stomachs but we were beginning to hit a special seam of conversation, as Roddy posed the questions that got under the skin of the actor/director. Which was now most important to Capaldi and why? This produced a proper short story of dashed hope and humane redemption, in a sway from Glasgow to Hollywood. The man at the gates of a huge breakthrough tips the driver of the limo who is taking him to a meeting. But the driver has been instructed to wait. He knows it’s not going to last long. When he drives the deflated Capaldi away from the bright lights, he gives him the tip back.

Peter Capaldi in The Loop

The evening went on into food and raffles and auctions and music. The building was opened up by lifting the moveable screens that separate the bar and restaurant areas from the theatre-cinema space. But the dancing never happened.

Face the West were in a 3 piece format so you never quite got the oomph that would have been needed to get it all moving. There was not a cent short of their commitment, as always, and the tunes were lively and the playing full-on. This was an audience that had been behaving for a long time and people just wanted to chat.

They’re still chatting. Now I’m working with the centre this year, developing a multi-partner project and I’m not in a hurry to bite a hand that’s feeding me. But it’s my turn to don another cap and this duty is to be fair to the felt views of people in and out of the organisation.

I spoke later that night to a person who was involved in the transition to the new building and the need to build an audience for a different scale of space. She noted how many of the original staff are still with the centre. She saw this as something positive, the loyalty it inspired. How the project got under your skin, how it was now central to the town.

Some days later I asked someone who’s bum is on the seat of nearly every event and nearly every film. He was passionate. He said, much though it was a huge part of his life, there were serious issues. He felt that an Arts Centre which has such a proportion of public money should be putting on at least some films which were not mainstream.

Ian Stephen on stage

Some big commercial films also only had a small audience so there should be some old classics and space for international films and more arthouse cinema. He made the analogy with Sabhal Mor in Skye, with a vibrant film-scene. These things could be built-up. Links with the film-club for programming input had all fallen through. Room for any input seemed to have fallen through.

When it came to theatre, he also felt a huge assett was being underused. I suggested that there was some bad luck involved as well as perhaps a lack of experience of the contemporary Scots theatre world. It was a bit unfortunate that strong links with the Traverse were pursued when that organisation was pretty well marking time in terms of energy and innovation.

Different from the days when innovative productions of Norman Malcolm Macdonald’s Japanese Noh plays in Gaelic were mounted first. At that time there was also strong energy in locally produced theatre. Companies like Point Players, Broad Bay drama group and Stornoway Thespians were attempting adventurous projects on shoestring budgets and goodwill.

I thought then of the huge community effort involved in the mounting of Macdonald’s Portrona in a dodgy transit shed on No. 1 pier. With the exception of the second take of Kevin Macneil’s The Callanish Stoned, I don’t think Theatre Hebrides or other partners have yet hit again the strong note that will extend the local audience further.

I suggested that the music programme was strong, presenting a balanced spectrum of quality performances. Attendances seem healthy, making an amazing transition from a 50 seat to a 250 seat venue. There are loyalties – returning regulars and a highly successful partnership with the Hebridean Celtic Festival.

Aye, he said, but it’s mostly re-active. What about the commission that would push that fine baby grand piano? What about open rehearsals to develop new audiences. Demonstrations of an open access to public facilities. With the right safeguards of course. What about when that lady called Neen arranged the Jack Bruce concert in the Cabarfeidh hotel. Where was that audacity in the current programming? And a bit of nerve and flair.

Times are tight and you can’t blame people for playing safe. You need to get people through the door or there won’t be a project at all. But I’d look to stronger links between the themes in a visual arts programme and the performance events, perhaps film too. I don’t think the potential for joining up the sections of the project has been realised.

Except for the education side. Now we’ll jump to another conversation, on yesterday’s packed ferry. A couple were interested enough to think and talk while qeueing for the breakfast. They thought this was possibly the most successful aspect of the current project. Themes on exhibition often led into outreach workshops. That side was strong. So what was weak?

Now these are supporters, minded to be faithful, but they used some phrases which kept coming up in discussions with as wide a range of An Lanntair users as I could find in a week.

Their impression was that a certain distance between the staff and the public remained. That people who worked within the building had their heads down and were very difficult to engage with. That input was not really very welcome.

That got me thinking about the visual art end of the ship. The current show reveals an effort to integrate a theme through the whole building, including works in the bar and other spaces. Even if this process has not yet been extended very much to the programming of events, it seems to me essential.

In fact I thought the Alec Finlay nestbox pieces in the bar worked best in the whole space. The Donald Urquhart works which I remember seeing in the old building were just too cramped, hung in the foyer. I think the concept of carrying the lines out of the gallery was absolutely right but its execution needs a fresh approach. For me the whole building needs a thorough audit, in visual terms. There is a clutter still, evidence of a lack of clarity in policy as well as the daily grind of just keeping things going.

It’s a practical building and the theatre/cinema compromise works. The potentials for carrying different kinds of work through the space are huge, but it needs a fresh eye to do this. A recent education project made a tentative approach to a promenade performance and I think there is scope here.

Ali Farka Toure

Sadly the exterior of the building is not looking that great. The architecture is again a compromise to begin with, unlike the clarity of the concept and lines and execution of Reaich and Hall’s recent extension to The Pier Arts Centre. And now that some of the hoo-hah has been re-housed, the fine architecture in the Highland Printmakers’ Studio building in Bank Street in Inverness shines out. But a few things don’t help the present appearance of An Lanntair. These take the eye away for the tower itself, which is its strongest feature.

The light has been out in the strong simple public work installed at the Frances Street approach. If you choose a work that depends on an electrical connection then you have to be fair to the artist and to the public and maintain it. The silverish doors which conceal various technical necessities are your welcome from the seaward side. For a long time, they have been kept from orbit by an intervention of jury-rigged padlocks which is not very elegant. A forlorn sign is wind-blown beside it. Paintwork on stone or timber gets a hammering here but the maintenance schedule has to deal with that.

Small points add to considerable weight. But let’s say now, the vision of the three or four founders has given a great facility to the town. Over the years there are exhibitions and works of theatre and concerts and education projects of lasting importance. It’s difficult to imagine the town without An Lanntair. And a lot of the issues raised could be applied equally to any organisation once it reaches a certain size.

But at the end of the week I went to a packed library cafe to hear a programme of readings and music organised by Ryan Van Winkle, poet in residence at the Scottish Poetry Library. The programme was held together by Winkle’s wit and warmth and by fine songs. These ranged from a setting of a famous Yeats poem to excellent quirky blues delivered with the zap of a stand-up. One musician sprinted off to join the bluegrass brigade playing the Arts Centre.

Now you’ve got to hand it to the travelling players for the initiative to link their tour to an existing gig – and to the flexibility of the library staff for making it happen. Now could this be a way forward – An Lanntair’s programme seeking links with other appropriate venues? So there is space for work, across all the arts, that is a little less safe

© Ian Stephen, 2010

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• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

Les Amoureux (photo - Eammon McGoldrick)

STORIES have never gone out of fashion. Amongst the gameboys and the joysticks, narratives still thrive. Some are timeless and some are re-invented, like Angela Carter’s dreamworld retellings of fairy tales and fantasies.

Kally Lloyd-Jones made her debut in directing opera last year when Scottish Opera’s tour of Kátya Kabanová visited many Highland venues, including this one [it returns to Eden Court in early May – Ed.]. Her own Company Chordelia has been given the vote of confidence implied by a flexible funding agreement with the Scottish Arts Council. As director, choreographer and lead dancer, she visited the Lewis arts centre again with the company’s elaborate production of Carter’s story Les Amoureux.

The company also includes Jonothan Campbell, builder of a very effective set, complete with a coffin icon cut-in at a slit and a slant. The visual imagery gave a clue to an approach which provided plenty pleasures for devotees of gothic entertainment. Campbell and Lloyd-Jones have worked together before at An Lanntair, in Aye Productions excellent piece of physical theatre, Sealskin Trousers.

It seems to me that the current production is part of a quest to find contemporary applications of musical theatre. Dance is the foremost element but the set is close to sculpture. There are occasional speeches, if not dialogue, and one character sings.

Think of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations – a woman unable to escape her own story. The imagery of decayed dresses and interminable waiting would be claustrophobic if it were not for the restrained passion escaping into dance moves. But most of the dance is held in rein.

It’s not at all minimal – there are so many things going on ¬ but it’s all orchestrated so that neither dance, nor music nor imagery is overwhelming. The story is told and the audience is held. Like most dance-based pieces the duration has to be short – partly to do with the endurance of the performers and partly the concentration of the audience.

For me, the dream quality was emphasized by Damien Thantrey’s deep and disturbing singing as the soldier. A picture emerged of characters trapped in their own destinies and humane enough to be moving, at times.

But mostly it was baroque entertainment. And here, the inescapable question for any reviewer is the issue of taste. My own taste in theatre and dance verges on the minimal. So a production as elaborate as this is challenging in a way. This is where you have to leave the personal aside and say, it works well on its own terms.

But I’ve got to think of the stunning moments of dance, like the two shadows (Amelia Cardwell and Freya Jeffs) who are restricted in their movement but vibrant within that. And the restrained presence of Linda Duncan McLaughlin as The Keeper. And the haunting solo of Lloyd-Jones with her elongated fingernails (growing in death or limbo?) declining the grammar of desperation.

And perhaps there could be an issue of trusting that the simpler iconography says it all. And maybe, just maybe, the whole production could be could be that bit simpler.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

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• Company Chordelia

Dick Gaughan (photo - Sally Greenberg)

IT’S MONDAY morning, a dreich one, and the vinyl is on the deck. In the form of Handful of Earth. There are a few CDs at the ready too. This is an aspect of the aftermath of the week-end. I went to Gaughan’s return to An Lanntair, arranged as part of the 25th year celebrations. The singer, guitarist and sometimes songwriter has been a regular on the programme. I saw him recently sharing the stage with Brian Macneil, a long-time collaborator. This was a solo gig.

When Handful of Earth came out in 1981 I was at a sell-out concert at Edinburgh Folk Festival. I went away clutching the album and it’s still one of the few possessions that matter to me. Nor long after, I got a call from one Rita Hunter inviting me to tell stories at Dingwall, not realising that I’d be opening for one of the most powerful performers. I think my own first piece was lost in nerves, but Gaughan was generous as are most artists who are secure in their voice.

So I went to the show on Friday as one of the faithful but one who had to raise the question of development – what has changed in the performance style, the songs, or anything else in thirty years of performing similar material? I only had to walk down the road. Gaughan traveled towards Ullapool, heard the ferry was being cancelled and drove the wild road to Skye and through that Island to catch the Uig ferry. That’s commitment.

For a kick-off, some of the songs have changed. Or rather, new ones are often introduced so the repertoire is growing all the time. I’d say also, that this man has transformed the need to constantly tune a guitar that is being pushed hard into something that has become a main element of the performance. His introductions contain elements of storytelling (in a Northern Irish tradition), political rant in a hybrid of trade-union and presbyterian oratory styles, and a hard-edged stand-up comedy of bitter ironies.

Al these are now welded so the spoken words are as crafted as the guitar playing. But neither seems to be so well-made that the brilliance is distracting. I think I’m trying to say we had the privilege of witnessing a master at work. More than that, we were part of it, because a Gaughan performance depends on engagement with his audience. This was an appreciative one.

We were caught by the variations of familiar riffs in the tuning, so there’s an unconscious guessing game going on as you’re focusing on the banter. And sure enough the favourites come. Phil Colclough’s Song For Ireland shines like the scales of sea-bass, gasping from the ocean to the surf. The learned diction of a Burns’ song’s celebration of nature is disrupted with the jazz of the Leith-Irish combinaton.

But I think there’s another noticeable development, even when we’re hearing these songs Gaughan was using to storm that Festival back in 1981. The growl in the voice has become another instrument. It occurs with the warning of menace, like a haunting foghorn in a North Sea haar. And then it’s balanced with the sheer joy of the tune picked out and rung. And I think there’s less melody in the voice, less slowing of the singing to allow space for that – instead it happens through the guitar. It leavens the political content and the genuine sadness carried by well-chosen songs.

The tricky phrasing also lit Brian Macneill’s St Kilda song in a new way. So that’s the answer. The local audience won’t tire of a hero’s regular return if the poetry of it all has rhythms as lively as this. And no diminishing of the passion.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

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• Dick Gaughan
• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

MACNEIL was reminiscing. Thinking back to the old an Lanntair. Up above the town-hall, that room with the raised, oak-floored platform and a shape that made it just right for acoustic and near-acoustic gigs. Once he gave the cue, I was thinking back too.

Willie Campbell (© Ria Macleod)

One man and a guitar. One woman and a voice. Adrian Byron Burns with one set of gizmos to do his Hendrix medley. Willie Campbell to raise that melodious whining voice that becomes pop-pibroch.

They’re planning to rip that interior apart now. I think the council thinks it needs more offices. But the boys were on the stage in the new building. The project is 25 years old, not the building.

Kevin MacNeil and Willie Campbell opened the gig, part of a programme celebrating an Lanntair’s quarter century. (More of this story later ) It was a good example of the advantages of the new venue. There were not many empty seats. In the olden days, Alex Macdonald, the events co-ordinator, would have had to hire a hotel.

It’s easy to forget that as you settle into the raked seat and glance back to the sound desk, just where it should be as the nervous players are nodding to Mike, the resident sound-guy. They needn’t have worried. This was a local audience in a town coming awake properly after a deep freeze. We were out for a good night.

For those of you who have not heard it yet, this is what they do. A rhythm is set up. A fairly minimal chord or two enters. There could be percussion that’s hardly there (though the musician should make less fuss about finding the various bits and pieces).

MacNeil speaks over that small swell. His voice is very low-key, not much variation but somehow the plain-ness makes you concentrate. I think it’s a bit like kids fiddling with a piece of string when they’re listening to a story. You shouldn’t try to stop them because they’re usually concentrating deeper, as one other part of their mind is engaged on something else.

Then, usually, Campbell lifts his extraordinary voice and an insistent melody nags away at you till you give way to it. It works. They introduce some variations on this way of working and a few jokes. Some of the imagery in the poetry is haunting. The saxophone seahorses remind me very much of Iain Crichton Smith’s ability to let the unconscious surface. But I think the words are cleverly left more plain, to allow space for the melodies to intone them. And then there’s a flourish.

There were some older pieces but some new material too – more of that shortly as well.

The interval gave time for a proper ensemble to assemble on stage. The Open Day Rotation seems to be a bit freeform in its characters. Aside from Willie Campbell, I recognized Bubbles, the rugby-playing drummer. The bass player looks like a guy not to tangle with either.

The rhythms were very plain again, and very solid. They left space for some fine guitar work from Rod Morrison (normally in the band with the excellent name Kroftwerk), and piano from Fiona Mackenzie.

Just when you were tuning in to all that, cello and viola entered. It was asking a lot of the sound-balance, too much really, but the atmosphere built up just fine. What you could hear of the piano was kept minimal again and that was good because the harmonies of Willie, still giving his all, and Fiona Mackenzie, were superb.

There was one more guest appearance from a resident Irish lady, Sinead Cunningham. Her voice was a complete contrast to Mackenzie’s, and also just stunning against Campbell’s.

So what we had was a treat, really. I don’t think you could call the whole show tight or well-balanced. It might have lacked a bit of the drive it would need to work in an away game. But there were some great tunes, and Campbell’s own lyrics are arresting.

The clever stroke was to surprise MacNeil at the end with an invitation to join the jam. Campbell handed him a sheet of paper and asked him to get on with it. There was genuine surprise as the poet read the musician’s lyric before the tune took off. We got all that and an encore as well.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

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• Kevin MacNeil
• Willie Campbell
• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

IT’S GOT to be said – it was an inspired piece of programming. The placing of a show which depends on light and is a celebration of light, just when we’ve turned the corner of winter, makes very good sense. And after a short closure, people were coming through the door again and the movies were on again and hibernation was over in the city of Stornoway.

Beads Installation (Photo - Ian Stephen)

Joe Mahony has had a long term love-affair with lenses and light. He is that rare kind of artist who is able to transfer his enthusiasm for a medium to students he enables. Stuath Solais – Light Matters is an apt and witty title for the work shown – one of a series of shows made with local groups from Grianan Day Centre, Catch 23, Ardseileach, Lews Castle College, Lifestyle and APU.

Light does matter, and the brightness catches the visions of a wide range of people. Many of them have special needs, but on the evidence of this show all the contributors have very clear and well focussed visions of what they wish to create.

The tone is set by a projection emanating from two modest painted boxes on the floor. I was drawn down to see the kaleidoscope images forming in one of these. It took a bit of standing back to see that Helen Macleod’s selection of images were being projected high, to make full use of the space above eye-level in this gallery.

A light box mounted on the opposing wall alternates transport icons with more patterned images. The particular modern Massey Fergusson and the double-decker bus are both breeds from a body of cultural images on books or screens rather than what you’d commonly see on the island of Lewis. So in a way they are very close to the patterned shapes in that they are decorative.

There is a tent on the floor in the form of a pyramid. It’s lit from within and the paintings which are illuminated bring together the work of several artists. My favourite image is the sphynx in shades.

Another floor-mounted work presents imagery printed out on geometric shapes, which I’m reliably informed are dodecahedrons. This time it’s the work of a single artist – Janice Smith. And Donney Murray’s very recognizable comic book style shouts out from a strategically placed poster. But his vision is assisted by several other artists. It’s quite a statement – “I did not break the law – I am the law.” And the boldness of the visual presentation well matches the language. Marvel-lous.

A dvd on an iMac gathers a range of video work. My favourite was the road movie starring one man in his electric buggy. It seemed to have all the power of a Harley Davidson, moving along a still photographic landscape. You could follow the progress, hovering above a single track road leading out to infinity, or maybe just to a road end before the sea. Mind you, it seemed quite capable of gliding over water.

The digital fantasy worlds of Annie Maciver had a similar large scale ambition, realised as UV painting. These works seemed to me to show Joe’s working practice of providing the means – whether it’s software or another technical solution so the individual artist or group of artists can make what they imagine. I can’t think of many things more important in the arts.

The centerpiece is an amazing group achievment. It’s billed as a record-breaking hama bead sculpture. A curved panel draws a vista of the exterior of the gallery, through the space. The imagery seems to composed of a photo montage. It’s as if an image has become slightly pixellated on a strange screen. It’s impressive and fun. Faces and other elements are completely recognizable.

I’m qualified to say this because one element is the sgoth Niseach, an Sulaire which I’ve been know to skipper, time to time. It is completely accurate – unlike the more styllised version of the same image which appears as part of a lino-mosaic installation in the ferry-terminal.

© Ian Stephen, 2010

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Alasdair White (© Louis De Carlo)

THERE WERE gigs and rumours of gigs. Out past the comfort zone, illuminated with halogen and neon, even into the utter dark which signifies a side of Broad Bay, aye even out as far as Coll, the caravans of homecome islanders and works-nights-out ventured far. And the rumours did say that the Vatersay Boys were well supported and that they gave of fuel for dance with due diligence even as they have performed from Castlebay to Lochinver in former days.

And in the very heart of the city, armbands for The Hazey Janes, freshly transported from the metropolis of Dundee, in the nightclub known as Era were being traded at the hour of the day when many dinners were still being consumed. But a small convoy continued along the environs of south beach to the arts centre known as an Lanntair, a green and red beacon signifying festivity. In that place was assembled a great band of warriors in the field of folk-rock, amplified and extended for the occasion.

But the heroes were rested at the start of the battle. The singer songwriter known as Sean Harrison led his own extended troupe in progressively downbeat songs sung with great sadness. The voice of a woman of Ireland brought subtle change and the harmonies of a female local voice brought alternation of tone. But the auditorium experienced the danger of the sweep of chords being sufficient to lull rather than stimulate, with small variation. However the hypnotism of the voice of the main practitioner was also sufficient to please and give good measure of joy.

And when the seasoned campaigner of the White camp and of the Battlefield Band, worked his bow alongside that of the local Ms Hepburn and that joined energy was balanced with driving accordian and keyboard of manic persuasion, it could be said indeed that the very fabric of the building was shaken and also stirred and a small number of dancers took to the air.

OK, so there could have been more folk at an Lanntair, and perhaps the large number of events was a bit ambitious for the population of Lewis, but Face The West played as if they were at the Carnegie Hall – the New York one rather than the Iona one. I’ve probably followed the progress of this band for about a year now, and I have report that their development is a phenomenon.

Alasdair White’s fiddle was of course a marvel, but there were no weak links. I’d say the main shift is in the driving force and the variations in the rhythms. DC MacMillan was an exciting but reliable drummer, weaving intricate, Indie/ Dance beats with more traditional fare. It seemed that the band would look to him to get the lift. Drum and guitar interplay was especially lively. And then the whole band would go for it, jigs and reels.

Keith Morrison never gives as little as 100 percent. His performance on keyboards and stagecrafted movement borders on the manic, but it’s directed to a purpose and effective in carrying it out. His use of Synths tinge some of the tracks in an up-to-date electro glo. This is a showband even without the high caliber guests.

There were waltzes. And they were indeed waltzed by a straggle of superbly dressed survivors of office parties. But the pace never dropped too far and the finale was a triumph.

Now I’m certain that those who went to Back Football Club were rewarded with the consistent quality dance music of the Barra brigade. And I can’t comment on Hazey Janes as I only heard a few riffs in the flypast on the way home. But our own gang was unanimous we’d made the right choice for entertainment on the continent of Lewis, on the 18th day of the last month of the year nine.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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• Face The West

I CAME from a building in Orkney to one in Stornoway. The Pier Arts Centre was developed around an impressive collection of works and the home of the project is a building on a pier, already reaching out for connections anywhere out on the sea routes. I’d seen the orchestrated gathering of Roger Ackling works, fully discussed on these pages by Morag Macinnes.

Muilnean Beaga Leòdhais – The Norse Mills Of Lewis (© Ian Stephen)

I stumbled, after the two ferry ride, into the an Lanntair gallery. This is in a wholly new building, housing a project without a permanent collection as a basis, in a place without an apparent strong tradition of visual art.

On the face of it the present Lewis show is not what you would call contemporary art. It’s a documentation of ways meal was ground in this locality, mainly under Norse influence. This subject has long been a passion of Finlay Macleod and I was lucky enough to catch him to explain why it’s still important.

His conversation took the sea route and described the production of mill wheels in Norway and their transportation by ship to the settlements and colonies. He described a shipwreck which betrayed the extent of an industry. But when he nodded to an extant example of the production line, still fit for use but leaning back on a white wall, you could see why he argues that such elegance is art in its own right.

Indeed the tone of the show is that of a restrained aesthetic with some kinship to the exhibition available to our Orcadian neighbours. But whereas Ackling retrieves the vestiges of a wooden object and draws on it with burning rays of light, these millstones are driven by harnessed water to a fundamental purpose.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is of course mounted a bit off-centre in a superbly judged use of the unusual space that the L-shaped gallery offers. James Crawford, a longtime collaborator with Macleod on the restoration of several Norse Mills on Lewis, has built a model that appears to be full scale.

Despite its purely practical reason for being made, the machinery of these mills is a refinement of basic engineering which you could call minimal. I don’t see how one blade could be taken away. The angle of the feed of the corn, the size of the paddle in relation to the forces it has to cope with – all these things contribute to the design, the way the functions of a boat are part of the reason for its evolved shape.

Like a vernacular boat, which of course is of Norse origin in design, whether on Lewis or Orkney, the refinements which have contributed to the evolved pattern have not happened in one or two generations.

The largest shift was from a stone with a hollow in it, where the meal was simply pounded by another appropriate stone, to the realisation that running water is an unstoppable force and that engineering could make best use of it. These mills are sited in the areas where the landscape factors are correct. And of course the materials, being gleaned from what is available locally are harmonic in that landscape.

You still can’t help wonder, though, at how these works look similar to some of the land-art interventions by some of Ackling’s contemporaries, like Hamish Fulton and Chris Drury. And it seemed to me that practical objects such as the system of drystone storage cleits on Hirta are often more refined and sensitive works that the ones done as art – such as the weaker Andy Goldsworthy exhibition which occupied an Lanntair recently.

But so much of the impact of an exhibition – or practical or decorative or conceptual art – is in its presentation. There have been all too many lines of frames in an Lanntair of late. This display, curated by Jon Macleod, uses a sound knowledge of the space to full advantage. Like Ackling’s use of the interlocking galleries in the Pier, that means leaving blank walls and offsetting minimal plinths or installed works to use an area that is more than the sum of the distance along the walls.

Photographs by Leila Angus are held by crocodile hooks. Drawings of close-up details by John Love and architectural drawings of a Lewis cornmill kiln by Alick Matheson are placed in just the right position to provide their information. This is a well-researched exhibition. It gathers important objects, explains their context and displays them in a powerful way.

And there’s analysis as well as gathering. Another frame shows prints from manuscripts, Mogul, Kashmiri, Punjabi and Persian, to show designs of water-driven mill of striking similarity. Again it reminds me of the way a boat-shape will re-occur in different continents. People will re-shape and modify a design again and again till it becomes efficient and so elegant. Like stories, another work of art which tends to re-occur in similar forms from culture to culture. They show the ability of human beings to arrive independently at a similar solution.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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• An Lanntair
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Adrian Byron Burns

THIS SOLO appearance by Adrian Byron Burns was a reminder of how the whole Stornoway arts centre project has seen an enormous shift of scale in a few years. I saw him play up above the old town hall in the intimate venue, oak floor and slightly raised platform – perfect for one man and two guitars, maybe an amp or two. But luckily no clutter of pedals and gadgets.

We were all a bit worried how sell-out intimate gigs like Adrian’s and Martin Taylor’s would transfer to an auditorium with about four times the area and seats. The present an Lanntair is a sensible compromise of cinema and theatre needs.

At the bar beforehand I spoke to some folk who’d come along on the strength of that last gig. They were not regulars but had gone out to hear a respected exponent of blues and rock, an ace guitarist with a big voice. I’d gone along to Adrian’s first Stornoway outing because I knew the guy when I was 17 years old. We were both members of the Baha’i Faith then and that big guy’s guitar rang out through youth hostels and summer schools and vans and flats and caravans.

Don’t think I was aware then that this man earned his spurs opening tours for Neil Young and Alexis Korner. And I missed out on the Jimmy Jones and the Vagabonds days. But I’m catching up. You can hear a sample of his singing on the artist’s website, a Myspace link to a track with Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings.

Last Friday, there was still no clutter of audio-aids. Burns plays two guitars with hugely different tones. He also sings in hugely different tones but of course can ring the changes from one to the other through the same song.

Now this is the crunch question. In voice as well as in guitar playing we have a virtuoso artist. And a master craftsman. Since most of the material has been developed over years and refers back to Hendrix, Young, Simon, Sting and further to blues classics, is there a danger that the awesome talents are limited by being restricted to skilful variations on songs which are now classics?

Of course that’s a real danger. The risk is highest when he plays a whole range of Hendrix excerpts, a medley where the themes are bent and explored before giving you back the security of the riffs that are part of your formative culture. Yet even in that piece, the idea is not to make a sampler but an arrangement. Really it’s a new piece but moving in and out of recognized territory.

I was reminded of recordings of Mingus playing in Stuttgart and Paris and incorporating snatches of old time songs we got at primary six music classes, led from the straw loudspeakers linked to the school’s wireless set. A new music is being made from existing material and it’s not only a homage.

In some songs, I enjoyed the play of the shift from falsetto to baritone but longed for a settling into a simple rendering of a good lyric. Then you’d get it – whether it was in the Bill Withers soul classic ‘Ain’t No Sunshine,…’ or a superb version of Booker T Jones’ ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’ – more true to the blues root than the Cream version which we all hammered on our backroom Dansettes.

Burns played two self-penned songs, one in each half. Both were solid, but ‘Xenophobia Blues’ is haunting and blurs the distinctions, the borders between genres. Some might call this jazz. Some might call the whole performance of ringing shifts and changes a sort of jazz. And the dialogue and short bursts of political commentary are a part of it too.

Burns is currently playing in a three-piece with Henry Thomas and Jim Mullen. Let’s see him back this way again soon, solo or in that company. You can’t categorise what this man does so you could as easily call it Celtic as anything else if that’s what it takes to get the band back here for the big festival.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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MY GRANDFATHER would just need to quote the first few lines of “There is no new thing under……” to get the Sunday night debate going. Of course it’s nothing new to play music live to a projected silent film, but The Southwell Collective’s Highlands and Islands tour takes the concept into some new territory.

Still from St Kilda (courtesy of Scottish Screen)

The starting points, in an evening of two voyages, are both islands considered to be “at the edge”. But the films which are screened to their live music accompaniment could scarcely be more different.

St Kilda followed an expedition mounted to bring relief to the population of Hiort in the St Kilda archipelago after a winter when the supply ship failed to cross that particular forty miles of interesting water. But the philanthropic aspect was mixed up with newspaper publicity, tourism and curiosity.

The enthusiastic film-maker has made an invaluable travel-logue but “the natives” are treated pretty much like Innuit people were until all too recently. The Hiortachs show off their cliff skills and their artefacts to the visitors, but the camera does not linger long enough to let anyone tell their own story. The storyboard captions jump in with a jaunty note and that is perfectly caught by the guitar which responds to the jerky movements and dizzy cliffs.

But this is the aperitif. Jean Epstein was an experimental film-maker whose drama Finis Terrae, set at the Atlantic end of Brittany, is an astonishing work in its own terms. But it seems incredible that it was made in 1929. Some of the expressive photography, lingering on the detail which is telling a large part of the story, seems more reminiscent of Tarkovsky than any more contemporary parallel.

And it’s a timeless story of misunderstanding, anger, trial and redemption which gives the musicians huge scope to respond. Percussion was added to the guitars, clarinets oboe and electronics to build the response. I can’t say what the scope for improvisation is within the scored music but I’d imagine there is some space.

An Lanntair lends itself perfectly to this approach and it would be fine to see the organisation originate a work which would fully explore the potentials of a space which combines the ability to show high quality projection and achieve excellent sound in live performance.

I’m thinking of a film maker like Bill Macleod (Gaelic versions of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and Crowdie and Cream), a local man with a lot of experience behind him and an eye for the image which can tell a large part of a story with no dialogue.

I was privileged to be at one of the last public nights in The Lews Castle before its closing for safety reasons. A range of silent movies was played, and Duncan Major Morrison, who had done this often in the past, played live piano to the imagery one more time. The chirpy alternated with pathos. Perfect.

I’d say this new experiment was a success and the choice of films was excellent. But I’d also say that some elements did not work so well. When it comes to the film, you have to accept that what now seems to be flaws are linked to its strengths and are a part of the time when it was made.

The groupings of waiting women in Ouessant seem just too operatic, and there is a gesture and a faint too many. But you accept that for the superbly understated performances of non-professional actors showing the dark tensions which are under any community, and especially one that has to fight so hard with warring natural elements.

I was navigating 10 miles from the coast of Ouessant last autumn. The visibility was poor and my mind was seeing the lines of reefs, more stark than Mangersta or even those of the St Kilda group. Epstein’s photography brings these and the tide and the light on the water and the threatening fog right into the theatre.

The music lets go to the expressive, and usually served the film well. I did however have a couple of quibbles. The percussion was just too dominant at times – a more subtle build up would have created more tension. I wondered why the songs, which sounded a bit weak in English, were not the hypnotic Breton chants like those of the Sardinieres. And the voice-over, translating the French storyboard titles was weak, not coming out over the music.

That said, this was a very moving performance and demonstrated that there is still great scope in telling a story with little or no dialogue but expressive film and music.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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• Southwell Collective
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IAN STEPHEN chronicles his journey with three more Lewis-based artists to the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea

FOUR LEWIS-BASED artists left home to travel to Åland. The an Lanntair exchange is a return for an excellent exhibition installed in the Stornoway arts centre last year by a group from these Baltic islands. So there’s no pressure on Jon Macleod, Moira Maclean, Joe Mahony and myself.

The show will be mounted in a former dairy so the venue is geared more towards contemporary art and installation than hanging pictures. The project was devised and organised by Jon, who is the Visual Arts officer at an Lanntair, but who also has travelled widely to take part in artist residencies.

There is a working theme of “domestic shamanism”, but the artists are encouraged to respond to the situation. That means a bit of space left to think on your feet. So we are all armed with the prefabrication of possible works.

The Exhibition in Aland (© Ian Stephen, 2009)

Projection will be a strong element but it’s possible that a performance element may enter. Moira is a painter by trade who has built up an audience and a market for her work but she is perhaps best known for her excursions behind the facades of domestic interiors with their own histories.

She made a powerful installation as part of the new an Lanntair’s opening show, based on the layers of wallpaper from The Sail Loft – a historic building on the other side of the harbour. And she built a minature Lewis room as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Home event.

We all know the visit is about more than installing an exhibition. Hopefully there should be a chance to respond, to begin a dialogue

Jon’s own work often uses faded fragments of language and a journey into fragments of past and present lives. Often it is expressed in different forms of print medium but it can take different forms of expression.

Joe has many concerns and many skills but with an emphasis on lens-based work. His last installation at an Lanntair involved setting up red umbellas and filming their reaction to a west side Lewis gale. So it’s possible that the breeze from our Islands may be transferred back to the Baltic.

I’m interested in taking a story with me, a Lewis version of an iconic tale which must re-occur in many different settings and cultures. I hope to find a good shamanistic way of rooting it in another group of Islands but may of course find that it is there already.

I had a lot of help developing the idea from an education project just completed at an Lanntair. The singer and actor Anna Murray and myself have been developing the work of many primary school-aged children on the islands into a performance to celebrate the visit of the historic herring-drifter Reaper.

The Exhibition in Aland (© Ian Stephen, 2009)

We had a few days to install the show in the old dairy. This is certainly a place for contemporary art. Along the road there is a fine museum. We have been to an opening – invited guests to hear a range of speakers including the Prime Minister of Finland. There is much discussion about the quality of his Swedish.

This is when I realise that I have brought a work, realised in the Finnish language, to a group of Islands where the speaking of Swedish is central to identity. Good that I’ve also brought a film where the language and stories which prompted an action are replaced with piano improvisation. That should be international.

Talking of International – this is the week when the local team are drawn to play Athletico Madrid. There is a buzz building while, along the harbour, fleets of shiny botomed dinghies and keelboats are ready for the Island Games which will start in a few weeks.

Our space, Galleri Kakelhallen. has rough walls, mostly, but two sites are ideal for projection. This makes it easy to plan the show – reducing the possibilities. And Moira needs strong light for one work and a wide wall for another. Like Joe, she has chosen to make a labour-intensive piece. Unlike Joe, it is in her normal working practice – so there is not the same sense of risk and tension.

Moira has taken wallpaper samples, salvaged from various old homes. It is a domestic archaeology. She casts the shadow of a scrapbook type image of a pram to the wall and paints the outline in pale blue and silver. Then the domestic debris is arranged to fill part of the shape.

Joe is also concerned with shadows. Or reflections. He has painstakenly assembled the negative plastic rolls from a series of fax messages. When held to the light, you can see a reverse imagery of mapping and language. But the work is delicate and the examination of the concept will only work well if the result looks interesting. For the first few days it looked – to anyone else – like a series of bin-bags.

Ian Stephen - the blue men of the Shiants - from children's workshop devised with Anna Murray at Garenin, Lewis

Jon has taken birch-bark from the islands, salvaged during his residency on Kökar. There is a series of three. A strong shape is readable in deep blues on the weathered silver. It is a triangle – the gable end of a Lewis or an Åland house.

A similar shape will eventually be projected on a wall. But the video of the gable reacting to shifting light has been taken from under the water. So it is a sea-creature’s view of a human domestic shape.

We take a break. We go to the island of Kökar. (sounds like cherka). Satu Kiljunen is one of the artist’s whose work was in the museum show, opened by the Prime Minister. She is established – a teacher and also one of the hundred artists in Finland supported by the government. She is also generous. Jon is now a friend, following his winter residency on Kökar – an experience which would have been a trial for some.

I wake early and walk by a bay to watch a muskrat sunning itself and observe me in turn. It is the perspective that’s in Jon’s video. After a morning sauna, wood-fired, we are all taken in a traditional Åland open boat – but with a viable though antique Finnish petrol engine – to an Island where there is an astonishing piece of architecture. A timeless log house is built into rocks that could be on Iona – pink granite. The smell of the oil treatment of new roof shingles fills the calm air.
It was touch and go whether Moira and Joe could make the trip. We all know the visit is about more than installing an exhibition. Hopefully there should be a chance to respond, to begin a dialogue. But Jon and I know our work will be realised in time – the others don’t yet know that for sure.

Well, I didn’t either, because, late Saturday, there was still no means of introducing a decent sound quality to the gallery. The right man was scheduled to come on Monday. But there’s a big conference – the shipping company, Viking line… and he’s the engineer so….

So I decide there’s no point in worrying about what I can’t sort. I’ve played with an amplifier, with my own portable small speakers. I’ve decided that it’s better to have no sound and remake the work again than have bad sound. That’s OK.

And a poem comes, from conversation with Satu – as we walk the high ground behind her home. We have strong support and the beginnings of strong friendship already. So I know I can ask to have this new poem made in Swedish.

We are back, relaxed and glowing, from the Kökar adventure. Roddy, the an Lanntair director is good at lights. He tunes the spots on Moira’s installation of 33 bird-skulls, one for each year of her life, so the reflection adds another angle. Independently, all the artists have used a variation of reflection, refraction or reversed imagery in their work. This was not discussed in detail but happened during the installation.

Jon gives up looking for the right brackets for a glass shelf to show more curls of bark. He finds a domestic mirror and washes it with emulsion. It happens in minutes and it’s perfect. There is a domestic echo and a hint of the other works but the gleanings from the natural world are returned. It’s clear that they’re valued.

Joe turns the corner in the last few hours. His bin bag-like hanging is transformed so it’s like a Chinese scroll. There is a hint of red to highlight a route through the mapping. The idea is realised but it also looks good. It chimes with his showing of a previously made work – how an installation of red umbreallas respond to a Lewis gale. I’m not the only one who thinks it seems Japanese as local artists, friends of Jon, come for a preview.

The Exhibition in Aland (© Ian Stephen, 2009)

Joe’s work is deeply considered but sharp in focus. That’s another part of the analogy with Japanese aesthetics. He sets up a challenging process but it’s not an end in itself. He is studying a possibility. Both these possibilities – the wind-blown umbrellas filmed in a landscape where the colour is edited out – and the negatives of the fax roll – they are now things you can see and enjoy.

Jon’s work is complete when he pours peat-ash from Lewis into stencilled shapes. Of course one element of that shape is from a Lewis sheiling and one is from his Island residency in this area. It’s possible that these will be walked on and that’s accepted.

My librarian friend has written her translation on the wall. The sound engineer arrives and it’s sorted in minutes – high quality floor speakers with their own power. The poem on sail battens has found its own shape – initially ordered and then disrupted by wild forces. Only in stories can you control the wind and not for very long. Sooner or later a last knot will be untied and the winds of Cape Horn will come to Åland.

Or the west side of the Hebrides, Peter Urpeth’s piano music was developed in response to the imagery in my own short film. He played, silent movie style, to the dance of a bone netting-needle. But it could easily have been developed for Jon’s projection, or for Joe’s installation or for the dance of the red umbrellas. It could well have accompanied the pregnant Moira as the icon of the pram took shape during a process which was really a performance.

Talking of performances, only Roddy and Moira got to the match, looking through railings. They reported back. The local side lost by only 2 goals to 1 to the mighty champions. A respectable result.

Here’s the poem.

the definition of ice –
when a fox walks the bay

evidence of elk, crusted now
as a nightingale is in full throat

small sign of the non-tidal surge
so water just covers clay

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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IAN STEPHEN continues his account of the Lewis artists’ foray to the Baltic

THERE’S A kind of a circle on a wall. A kind of halo of islands. You can’t tell where the gaps are. It would be difficult to navigate without local knowledge or electronic aids. Not impossible but tricky. This is a painting by Pive Toivonen. She lives in the former Pilot’s house on the island of Högsåra. Pive was one of the Island artists who showed at an Lanntair about a year ago.

The image reminds me of the view from the high lounge in the huge ferry that took Jon and me from Mariehamn to Turko – that’s from the town on Åland island to Finland’s second city. We were sleepy – up late after seeing the other Lewis artists and the an Lanntair director to the bus that would take them to the Stockholm ferry.

Mikko's studio (photo - Ian Stephen)

We were keen to continue the searoad movie that bit longer. Consolidate the links with the Finnish mainland and Island artists to our Hebridean one. That’s what took us to Turko and a vista that reminded me of all these Japanese prints. There are countless islands in this archipelago. That guy who’s slept on all Scottish islands over a certain size – he should come here. They would keep him out of mischief for a while.

Finnish names on quality tools in the hardware store are very like Japanese ones. I think Makitas are Japanese but they sound quite Finnish. And the asesthetics are similar. In the design-ware shop, the clean elegant lines remind you of an interior where raku pots can stand on the appropriate section of timber.

We are met in Turko by Mikko Paakkola who took part in the opening exhibition in the new an Lanntair. One of the themes was Baltic links. Mikko painted with Baltic mud – a metaphor for trade and ballast. He also sewed canvas from a Stornoway sail loft to join canvas from across the North Sea so the seam was a horizon in his paintings which were almost seascapes.

Now he’s painting on metal as well as canvas. But his interests and the techniques he uses to explore them have not changed much. We’ve gone from the tight family in a tiny flat to a basic studio in the basement of another block of flats and seen how one artist finds a way of making what he needs to make. With the support of his family. And in turn how the family make decisions which will work for all.

Painting party (photo - Ian Stephen)

One daughter leaves to get her connection to Helsinki to return to studies in Pairs. Mikko is helping to organize an exhibition – notes, footnotes and printing – so Kaise, his wife, gives us a tour of public and commercial galleries in Turko before we catch our bus.

The driver takes pity on us in the heavy rain and goes the extra kilometer from the crossroads to the ferry. Pive also thinks we might be bedraggled and takes her car across to meet us.

Somehow the plans to go on to Helsinki or go back to Koker to fish for perch – they all evaporate. We settle into a quiet household where days are filled with discussing future arts projects and walking the shorelines, looking to islands. We meet a couple from a neighbouring island who come to eat a dinner of elk, oven-baked in beer. Veronika is an actor and Adam is an artist from Poland who has made his home here. It seems that Polish and Hebridean humour is compatible.

Pive and Kyösti, her partner, are planning a voyage. They have bought a 37ft yacht, now in Sweden, and they will shortly sail her home. Of course we consider sailing projects and meetings at various lats and longs.

We take part in a painting party. This is how peats and fanks and so many things used to be done on Lewis. Pive is making coffee and sandwiches of rye bread and her brother’s best Hereford beef-ham. Big Jon and me find overalls and roll up sleeves. It’s a calm day though the pace is pretty steady. We scrape loose paint off this historic wooden pilot-house and we apply new breathable paint.

Pilot's house - detail (photo - Ian Stephen)

Pive is a bit shocked to find the new paint is buttermilk rather than white. It’s not her decision. She rents the house and it has to be painted to a plan that is historically authentic. It’s not so different a colour from the old sail loft in Stornoway. I own a house there but I still can’t choose the colour or type of paint.

Just before I left home I had to deliver tools and materials to a workshop I use at Benside, Lewis. It’s beside a house I used to part-own and a studio I developed with European grant aid. I watched a pile of discarded materials grow – sound timbers, some of them 2 years old and black guttering, some of it two years old, some of it 13 years old, replaced with new white shiny plastic. A wooden house, like a wooden boat is part of a way of life. It’s not the right choice for some people.

And that studio, with its own accommodation, would be ideal for maintaining exchanges like this. Returning hospitality. But it’s not mine any longer – part of the price of being free to move to my present house. And it’s not in public ownership.

It’s difficult to explain the pain from watching a material you’ve found or stipulated or fixed being ripped off when it doesn’t need renewing. That’s different from agreeing that the exposed gable ends need a low maintenance protection against Lewis gales. Now, being in the painting squad in Högsåra, assembled to care for the old pilot’s house – it’s like therapy.

The eaves are coated in white which has weathered like a raku pot. I photograph them before scraping and repainting. I feel for Jon, my team-mate on this adventure. He has put in an offer for a house and croft on Lewis and it’s been accepted. I sense he’s awake some nights. All I can say is that it might be good to be a bit pragmatic. Things you think are for your whole life might not be.

Jon has spread the remnants of Lewis peat ash, to stain a bleached elk horn. Shamanistic exchanges. I might make something of the photographs of the painted timber. But I know I’ve got to tell stories, in writing and try to make them bigger than my own experience but also quieter. There’s no escaping duty. Especially not on islands.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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Work by Donald Urqhuart in An Lanntair (photo - Ian Stephen)

THE FIRST TIME I painted a boat blue and grey was a bit of an opportunist accident.

The grey might well have fallen of the back of a warship. But it was stunning as a contrast to the peely wally Baltic blue on the topsides. Donald Urquhart is a man who likes these hues. But he also likes the idea of balance and counterpoint.

This is his first show in the new gallery but an Lanntair devotees will remember an excellent exhibition in the old town hall setting. Both of Urquhart’s Stornoway shows have been built for the occasion, not merely a re-run of a previous exhibition. I can remember a series of small scale works based on the slightly variegated patterns within peat banks.

The technique of painting over photographs was used in the earlier show and is continued in this one. The artist steered me to the Gerard Richter exhibition in the Fruitmarket Gallery some years ago – and this is certainly an influence. But so is the pure minimalism of Sol Le Witt, the austere line drawings of David Connearn and the shapes of Donald Judd’s sculpture.

But the gap of years has meant that the emerging artist is now pretty much a mainstream contemporary Scottish figure, recently elected to the RSA and working within Edinburgh College of Art.

I would say that the concerns of the work have not changed but the confidence required to bring forward its expression has increased. In the interim, the artist has carried out many large scale public works particularly in the landscape. I was intrigued by the an Turras project on Tiree. A former shelter for the queue for the ferry became a building in which purpose was a long way down the list of priorities. The pure shape and unobtrusive materials make a tunnel to drive your vision with some velocity down to the end panels which expose the sea view.

And in a way this exhibition just installed in an Lanntair is really architecture. The individual works are built with symbiotic panels of near monochrome colour balanced with the textured greys which suggest fronds of the organic world. So the built and the grown are together.

Now to the individual parts.

Lined Sky is a series of 5 works. The cliché of clouds is revitalized as vertical bands of blue cut divisions to dissect the greys. It’s like music and it’s like the accurate cuts of refraction – sometimes on the North Minch the light through the sky is very like the rays cast from a protractor. It’s all done in gouache on silver gelatin. I think it’s about ways of looking at, but not necessarily dividing, the shifting skies.

The long wall is occupied by the Gaelic alphabet where each abstract letter corresponds to a species of tree. The line of works turns a corner. The series demonstrates the variations within the pattern. As with language, the individual sound implied by the letter says one thing but the ordered combinations amount to something more complex.

Donald Urquhart has now travelled widely to devise make and install work. Two planes, Lofoten uses the triptych form to offset graphite drawings of what could be details from the natural world with what again seems to be monochrome blocks of colour but of course there must be variations within variations.

The minimalism is taken further in the work made in Kyoto, Japan, where 5 pale lines break the block. This installation places the work right on a divide in the gallery back wall so again the architecture of the building is part of the composition. This use of the space as it stands, is used to best effect in a new study of the glen burn at Valtos, where the line of colour and greys is carried round the corner. The gallery wall is a part of the work which is painted directly onto it.

You could argue that the minimal tendency risks being taken too far at times, as in Harris Drawing, in graphite, where you have to look closely to see any movement in the work at all, rather than a solid block of colour.

But Two Drawings About Distance makes the intention explicit. It’s difficult to define scale in the work – there could be a close-up of the veins in leaves or it could be a distant shot of trees. It’s about perspective and that dizzy sense of scale which brings you back to the landscape – back from from the most refined expression of it.

I was reminded of a phrase by the American poet George Oppen where he talks about the need to sound out poetry to test if the language is doing what it should. He describes the sense of it as being like rails in the night, reaching out, going the distance.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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Maggie MacInnes

PERFORMANCES by Maggie MacInnes have for this writer always had something of a qualitative difference from those of other singers performing songs from the Scottish Gaelic tradition. The difference stems entirely from Maggie’s direct family relationship to a tradition of song which evolved in the Islands of Barra, Vatersay, Mingulay, Eriskay and South Uist and which stretches back for more than three centuries.

Maggie’s repertoire comes largely from the songs she learned from her mother, the great Gaelic singer from the Isle of Barra, Flora MacNeil, who, of course, in turn had heard and learned the songs from her own mother, her extended family and from the island community in which she grew up.

Although largely drawn from the song traditions of that small archipelago at the southern tip of the Outer Hebrides, Maggie constantly turns-up surprises in her performances in the form of unfamiliar if not totally unique songs; unfamiliar variations of now familiar songs in the contemporary Gaelic repertoire; and familiar songs that only became familiar to us as a consequence of her mother’s resilient preservation of them.

But the uniqueness of the repertoire, although of great interest for those who love this tradition of song, is not the only element of the Gaelic tradition that Maggie has acquired, and in which she herself is now firmly placed.

Maggie performs these great and rare songs with an emotion and an intimacy that surely can only come from her in-the-blood proximity to these songs in their original domestic rather than concert hall setting. Many of the songs she sings, just like her mother before her, have been a part of her real lived life for as long as she has had a life. The songs, of course, continue to evolve and live in their contemporary setting, but the idea of what a performance is, is surely different between those who have the songs as a part of their lives and then sing them on stage and those who learn them as one might learn lieder, however much the singer might love the learned material.

This brings to her performance an uncontrived naturalness and at times a raw heartfeltness that is nothing short of captivating.

The trio of Maggie singing and playing clarsach, Brian MacAlpine on keyboards and accordion and Anna Massie on guitar (with or without the wandering capo) generate a subtle yet emphatic pallet of accompaniment, at times sparse, at others gently swinging with lilting syncopations, and then with rapid-fire reeling.

Maggie at times utilises the clarsach in this mix for cross-rhythmic phrases and punctuations that add a different colour dimension to the arrangements, so much so that this trio perform with impact of at least a quintet. But then, in Brian and Anna, Maggie has chosen wisely from amongst the crop of the very finest musicians in contemporary Scottish music.

The set, which apart from its foundations in the environs of Barra, testified to the extent to which this is a diverse tradition of songs largely by and about the experiences of women, focused on Maggie’s recent project exploring and recording the songs of Mingulay, which is now available as a new CD – A Fagail Mhiughalaigh (Leaving Mingulay).

Two songs in particular from this sequence (which also have Vatersay connections), the fishing song Leis an Lurgainn and Oran Na Raiders Bhatersaigh (Song of the Vatersay Raiders), testify to the sheer struggle for existence that the community endured before the final clearance of the island in 1912, and both also document the fact that Mingulay had its own local versions and variations of many songs.

Another song with Mingulay connections, the Luadh Cha Teid Mise, was given a particularly forceful and spirited performance.

The set also included Sraid Na h-Eala, A Fhleasgaich Oig is Ceanalta, Thig an Smeorach as t-Earrach (which Maggie’s mother learned from the singing of the great Lewis Gaelic singer, Joan MacKenzie), Dh’eirich mi gu moch Diluain, and Gradh Geal Mo Chridh (aka The Eriskay Love Lilt, here sung in a traditional form), along with two Burn’s songs (in English) that included an arresting version of My Heart Is In The Highlands, and closed with a contemporary Gaelic song of great beauty, Blair Douglas’s Solus M’aigh.

The theatre space at Stornoway’s An Lanntair arts centre is particularly well suited to this scale and type of performance, ideal for what was a real celebration of traditional and contemporary Gaelic culture in its heartland.

© Peter Urpeth, 2009

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Grinneas Nan Eilean

THE TEMPERATURE rose on the day of the opening of the open exhibition for fine, applied and indeed any art produced by Western Isles residents. This meant that I had a serious date, priming the flanks of a community-owned boat so I got to the party a little late. Often a good idea. Several people, a glass ahead of me, gave of their opinions.

The Newton painter, an experienced and dependable practioner, drew the line on the high but not all that long walls of an Lanntair, and gave his own solutions of just how to hang that huge and disparate body of work. He said the maximum number of entries per artist should be reduced and a cleaner hang found, with partitions used if necessary to increase the linear space.

The Uig engineer and one of the finest craftsmen I know pointed out his own new departure into painting and talked me through the works which had hit him. He remembered the start of this annual show, in the old town hall and said it was all working fine except it should be in the summer to show our residents’ response to their own environment to our visitors.

Of course there is no reason to assume that the residents will choose to make art which relates at all to the place they live ,although of course it is, without prejudice, the finest and most varied of damp desert-type landscapes in the world. But it is amazing how much of the work on show does respond to this environment.

There are established artists doing pretty much what you expect them to do. There are others, making some departures, others just finding their personal response. New residents and new artists.

I wouldn’t like to hang this show. But I’d like to commend the efforts made to keep it democratic and find enough space to let individual works say what they have to.

There is a workable strategy. A gap as you move up the stairs is filled by a large and strong David Miles canvas. Highly coloured works sit on one wall and works that need to be seen as a series are grouped together. The well-lit space in the hallway is the photographic collection. Seascapes are close enough for comparison.

Let’s zoom into some details. It’s not possible to describe everyone’s work so just look at this as an idiosyncratic tour.

Iain Brady’s curving distortions sweep energy into reliefs broken by a trademark seabird image. This type of work is now his own personal map of our coastline. Ruth O Dell’s timeless drawing is behind her impressionistic studies of the close bonds between humans and the animals they keep, still a key part of the way of life for many on these Islands.

Jon Macleod and Catherine Maclean both have stories behind their visual images. Macleod’s screenprints contain language-like fragments of decaying libraries beside subdued imagery. Maclean’s constructions are mysterious fragments which only hint at the stories they carry.

A line of the plastic shells of shotgun cartridges is spaced over the end of a roll of tape. The colours and composition work with each other but it’s difficult to say exactly how they relate. But they do. Her trademark nails and staples become very near minimalist sculpture. In fact I wondered if she might take that venture even further to the sparse ground.

Mairi Morrison can show a small subdued study of a human-built structure out on the moor or she can let go to drama. Her shipwreck scene also has the quality of a sculpture. It made me think of a poster for an opera still to be composed or a cover for a book to be written.

Geoff Stear shows three very spare large paintings and the most sparse of all seems to me the most successful. They have the washed out tone of terrain bleached by wind. G E Coutts paints on board and it’s very close to monochrome in one, with paint applied to look a bit like Japanese inks. Just that splash of colour in another, enough to lift attention.

Simon Rivett’s work shown here seems to me like a development into a new simplicity but still prompted by fascination with the way light hits hills. S Tod does go for ink only and the speed of the medium is an effective way of catching our fast clouds. This is the eye of someone who spends many hours seeing light across moor, either from a car in transit or from activity that lets you linger in landscape longer than is usual.

In complete contrast, the artist signed as Rille shows several works reminiscent of Alan Davie but with their own wild quality – signs of someone who has found a love of the medium of paint and can’t help but let go into it. It seems to me that the medium is expressing something from the unconscious rather than studying what you can see any day. And the work looks good beside a bold but disciplined demonstration of the quilter’s art by Deirdre Macdonald.

The show is very rich in applied art. There is painted ceramic work, metalwork, demonstrations of the ancient art of the felter but in contemporary design and colour. Timber is another favoured medium. Here it’s possible that the design element is a bit less developed than the gift of seeing particular qualities in the wood. There is no shortage of the skill and confidence to work the material.

Uisdean Paterson has translated two of the Lewis chessmen to timber but in a detailed study that makes so many recent attempts look very crude. Here, accuracy is the aim. Whereas Ian McHardy makes witty interventions in driftwood so there is an Easter Island look about some of them. This is carried into full shamansitic idiom by Simant Bostoc. His staffs of dark bog oak carry symbols highlit in gold leaf.

For me the work of applied art which combined innovation with skill and feel for the materials was the mad Tibetan headgear shown by Netty Sopata. Harris tweed meets with Thai silk in a hand-stitched simple strong shape. The two fabrics are joined and there is just enough contrast, just enough association for the dissonance to work.

The strength of the photography section was no surprise after several very strong recent showings of local work in the foyer and bar areas. Some photographs here are based almost completely on strong clear observation. Duncan Macsween’s Frozen Seaweed simply catches a stunning winter image. Barbara Myers takes a very similar subject and catches the astonishing green caught under ice. Three separate images caught by Suzy Harper are composed in one frame so the details give you clues to a whole interior world.

In other photos, the technical challenge of realising a subject seems to be what prompted the main interest. That’s sometimes no bad motivation, whether the subject is out in the landscape in shifting light or if it’s a series of contrasting objects arranged on a shell. We could be studying domestic animals or our human interventions in landscape.

And in the photography, as in the paintings, drawings and works of applied art, the work sometimes leaves you with the feeling that an artist has spent years working within rules and then has taken the chance to break free. But it’s not really freestyle – the understanding of structure is behind the work. There’s a tiny Kenneth Burns piece which takes seascape down to one close detail. And there’s a Colin Myers photograph of a breaking wave which slows the exposure just enough to emphasise the sense of its structure.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

THE MOVEABLE feast gathered under the term Lewis Women was originated for An Lanntair’s opening events programme back in autumn of 2005 but taken up as a continuing idea by the Heb Celt Festival as well as the Arts Centre. It’s in the nature of the show that new faces and voices will appear as some of the established performers are unavailable. Last Friday’s version proved that the idea has no signs of fatigue.

Neither did any of the divas. I feel quite well placed to comment on this as I felt it necessary to continue bantering and sipping wine with two of the four women in the team. This continued well into the Saturday, purely in the interests of researching this very notice.

I can thus inform the music audience of the north that it is entirely possible that an honorary man may well join the group for future appearances. The après concert kitchen ceilidh featured a near neighbour of Ms Murray from the Back district, decidedly male but very heavily influenced by Janis Joplin.

But the official staged event had a hefty dollop of soul in its tones. Sadly Mary Smith, with her powerful voice, rhythms of rowing and smiling shade of wry in her dry-ish and always informative intros, had lost her voice. She joined the bustling house and seemed to be enjoying what she heard.

How could she not? It must be immensely rewarding for those who’ve taught as well as performed, to keep a strong vernacular culture moving, to share the stage with a new generation. The two younger women overcame any shyness to take their place as equals. And it has to be said that Ms Macaskill as well as Ms Murray seems to have found a way of keeping fearsomely young.

A pattern emerged. There would be the ensemble pieces, with differing feature spots. These would give way to solo spots. And then it would all come together again. Most moving for me was a very rhythmic group version of Murdo Macfarlane’s song ‘1914’.

The lyric has the lover marching off to Fort George, as if to be a rigger on the Clyde or one who follows the migration of the herring as the fishing goes from the Broch to Baltasound. But then the lover at home states that each year she will see the geese return but never her own young man. He has joined the ranks of so many from villages or cities, all over Europe, with the blood run out of them and all washed by the same rain.

Ishbel took the lead voice on that one, but the arrangement and the pace of the marching was the performance of an ensemble. Anna reminded me often of the willingness to bend tunes very naturally into something close to swing.

I’ve been returning recently to the excellent 1999 album from Lochshore – Trì Nithean – Three things. Her ability to project powerful sound from her slim form and to generate presence must be linked to her gift for performance in theatre and film.

Catriona Watt has a background in different forms of music but her singing on Friday had very little trace of anything you would think consciously studied. Learning is worn lightly. Her voice has a rich warm tone and there’s no hurry in it. Once the boat was pushed out she was gliding on the sea. And she has that performer’s knack of making each person in the audience feel they are being addressed personally.

None of these women are short of wit. It all builds to a performance where the intros and interplay are a seamless part of the show. Ishbel’s wit is a fair bit more dry than gin. Anna’s is fast as a cutag (a herring knife). I would say it seems that Catriona’s wit has a warmth about it.

But when Isobel Ann Martin overcame her nerves and started gabbing to the audience as if they were indeed already at the kitchen table, we had stand-up comedy. Like the others, the chat was not only about communicating out from under the lights to faces you can’t see. All four women seemed to me to be
building up to the moment when the voice was tuned to the particular song.

Ms Martin’s singing is like great pipe music. You’re mesmerised by the notes and variations but never to the point where the emotion in the music is subjugated. This was an exciting performance though never obtrusive.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

Iain Macrae

IT’S NOT easy to tour theatre shows in the Highlands and Islands. Facilities have improved, Transport links are better but it’s still not easy. The new Theatre Hebrides show continues the company policies of commissioning new work from the home area, looking outward to touring it and giving work to practitioners from the outer Islands.

This one aims to make a virtue of the demands of adapting to venues with differing levels of provision for theatre. It’s a one-man show, a virtuoso piece giving the very experienced Iain Macrae a chance to demonstrate his range.

The set, designed by Theatre Hebrides artistic director, Muriel Ann Macleod, is clean, elegant and very practical. It’s a section of a not very good hotel room and though you never see outside, you get that out-of-season chill.

I’ve seen Eric John Macdonald, a writer from the Uig district of Lewis, at work before. He responded to a tight commission to write a 15-minute promenade piece in response to the history of domestic and commercial life of one harbourside building in Stornoway.

His piece had a natural pace and rhythm but the local concerns were placed in the light of a swatch of European history. Within the local, his study of generations interacting was specific but also timeless and placeless at the best moments.

His writing here takes some huge risks. The premise is that an ageing actor is touring the Highlands with a one man show based on Edgar Allen Poe. Never mind the ominous raven, the subject is the worm of death. We glimpse one scene – where the actor enacts Poe’s deep fear of being buried alive. Of course the implication is that the man who delivers this drama is himself in a kind of living death.

He was Brodie – a kind of Dr Finlay of prime time TV. The series was killed and his career tumbled. It’s impossible not to think of the background story to The Killing of Sister George (Frank Marcus, 1964) where the dominant central character is axed from a broadcast serial. There are also nods to a screen genre of the subject – as the character’s career becomes more desperate he or she rages but is forced to attempt to assess how worthwhile all these pretences have been.

And there is a hint of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer – but instead of a reflective litany of Highland place names we have the cynical repetition of the name ‘Kinloch … somewhere’.

Macdonald takes a further risk. His actor is a pretty well unmitigated bastard. Between his lines we see the arrogance, manipulation and self-deceit which have left a debris of fractured relationships.

I saw a run-through before the first performance. Now bear in mind the last theatre work I’ve seen was the impressive The Tailor of Inverness – a work that’s been honed from tours and an award-winning run at the Fringe. And a family story that had to be told at the heart of it. One that must speak for the forgotten armies of unheroic survivors, caught up in the terrain between huge masses of power.

So I saw this rehearsal in a cold studio between the business of the day. It held me so I had no choice but to wait, late, to the conclusion. The set proved a key element – and the mirror cut to an angle is a simply brilliant device. The slant of that mirror shows other facets of Macrae’s face and body-tension. It also implies glimpses of his character’s fading charm but very few hints of human warmth.

The facets of his actor-character are revealed as much from the oblique angles of his stories as from the narrative drive of them. His relationships have been held only as long as they fit his career. When pain is imminent, it is time to escape.

But from another angle you could say that a domineering father who sees acting as dressed-up pretence is a hard bit of psychology to cope with. And the adulation that is offered to the media star is a weird aspect of human behaviour that certainly didn’t stop with TV series of the 1960s or any other decade since.

But Macdonald’s play is I think, more exploration than satire. It reminded me of another one-man show on the subject of death. Russel Hunter (Lonely in television’s Callan series) performed a series of plays by W Gordon Smith. This one, opened at the then very ecletic Wick Festival early in the 1980s, was a series of meditations on death. Its central image wasn’t a mirror but the electric chair which claimed the Rosenburgs, reputed traitors to the United States at the height of Cold War tension.

Macdonald uses less overt dramatic devices to hold interest and tension. There is a gruesome fascination in waiting for hopeful signs of humanity, beyond the actor’s personality, to be dashed again. There is awareness of the huge possibilities for theatre to explore what really is human. There is humour in abundance but the dark sharp humour is like that in a story translated from the Czech original.

Most of all there is wit, delivered expertly by an actor with experience and versatility and his own charm. Macrae seems at the height of his powers and the writing and direction give him scope.

Of course it’s all a bit too long at this stage but I wouldn’t mind betting that a few performances will see it tightened so the pace and wit become fearsome. Already it’s a strong piece, well worth turning out for. The production could well indicate a direction for Theatre Hebrides – perhaps a series of similar works.

Kinloch … Somewhere tours in the Highlands & Islands until 7 March 2009

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Theatre Hebrides

Christine Primrose and Brian Ó hEadhra

LOVE, EH? Does the light of your life’s singing make even the lark keep schtum? Are you besotted with someone who needs no cosmetically enhancing products? Would you never let this person carry peats, no matter how long you’d gone without a supply?

The late Lewis bard Murdo Macfarlane could apparently answer yes to all of these questions – and that gathering winter fuel rider was the deciding factor for Christine Primrose, whose soulful expression brought Macfarlane’s Mhorag to three-dimensional life in this latest airing of Dhachaigh.

Primrose was one of four Lewis singers featured in a celebration of the bard’s songs and his spirit, through works in sympathy with his own. It takes its cue from the Macfarlane exhibition staged in 2002 by the estimable Stornoway arts centre, An Lanntair, which in turn inspired an opening concert at the Hebcelt 2007 festival and the subsequent CD, Dhachaigh (Home), released last year.

Encompassing recordings of Paul Mounsey’s majestic overture and finale and notably sunny on-screen images that made one wonder why Macfarlane ever left Lewis in the first place – his homesickness and speedy return from Canada being a recurring theme – the concert gave the lie to the notion, often circulated by Gaels themselves, that Gaelic song is a miserablist’s paradise.

Sure, there were periods of longing and gory wartime images, the latter adding an element of defiance to Ishbel MacAskill’s calm, soothing tones as she sang Macfarlane’s World War 1 reflection, Naoi Ceud Deug’s a Ceithir Deug, with its depiction of young Gaels’ blood draining into the Flanders soil. But the overall mood conveyed was that, whatever disaster should befall, the joy of life, love and mischief (what on earth is happening to that goat in that closing puirt-a-beul?) will overcome it.

Joining Primrose and MacAskill on stage left, Fiona Mackenzie lent her youthful, almost girlish engagement, while Calum Alex MacMillan sang with typical richness and Dublin Gael Brian Ó hEadhra (guitar), Aberdeenshire’s Fraser Fifield (soprano saxophone and whistles) and Lewisman Alasdair White (fiddle and cittern) provided accompaniment and instrumental interludes.

MacMillan is a wonderful singer, almost luxuriating in the baritone register, and his remembrance of the Iolaire disaster, sung to White’s simple but very effective fiddle drones, and his depiction of a drought in Tobair Tobair Siolaidh, atmospherically enhanced by Fifield’s saxophone and electronic effects, were contrasting highlights.

Ó hEadhra’s nostalgic Taladh Na Beinne Guirme, written in a style not dissimilar to Macfarlane’s, was one of several anthemic songs that, alongside the inevitable Macfarlane classic Canan Nan Gaidheal, underlined the uplifting and indeed celebratory nature of a thoroughly enjoyable presentation.

Sponsored by Scottish Power.

© Rob Adams, 2009

Links

• Celtic Connections
• An Lanntair
• Hebridean Celtic Festival
  

Ado Matheson

THE ISLE OF LEWIS claimed ownership of its arts centre the other night. The events programme is normally a well-balanced but reactive selection of touring music, theatre and dance events. There are a few sad omissions. Birds of Paradise theatre company are usually well worth catching, but Lewis audiences have been deprived of that chance for the last two tours.

And I found the travel off the island to see V-amps production of Fleeto (reviewed on Northings by Mark Fisher) well worth the miles. That’s two companies who should be booked next opportunity. But the Ado Matheson gig shows that an Lanntair is open to suggestions in its programming. A near full-house on a dirty October Tuesday proves that local people will turn out for one of their boys.

The performer in question would be past the boy stage if it weren’t for the fact that a resident of Stornoway can carry that description well into the four score and ten. So he’s a fair bit to go. Ado was the local guitar and song legend when I were a lad. He disappeared to London. You heard things from time to time. He played on a tour with Iggy Pop.

He surfaced at an early Theatre Hebrides do, mid-to-late 90s. There was a tarpaulin over scaffolding and you worried about the relationship between electricity and driving rain. It was the cellar of the Lewis Hotel and the cabaret prepared the way for Ado on lead. He recruited the back-up and gave the crowd the rock and roll they had not even known they needed. I remember the guitar playing was better than ever, quiet virtuoso touches but within tight frameworks.

This time we were in a comfortable venue with a good steep rake to the seats and beers and drams in plastic. The banter was going long before the performance began. It was interesting to compare the bald patches. You realise the ageing process could have left you slightly worse off. But there was no mistaking the period influence once the first acoustic chords rang. It is of course Van the Man, and that was made explicit with a nice jazzy ‘Moondance’ and a later request.

Romance was in the air without shame. Two bonny guitars were caught by the spot and the centre’s well-miked baby grand. The solo performer has hung on to his own hair very well. He’s now father of the more famous Hans – the offspring who played Dr Zhivago in the last TV version – and indeed who plays percussion on Matheson’s new CD, Out On The Islands.

I felt the performance was missing an element and soon the soloist did ask the audience to create their own clapping and stomping. Which they did with no further persuasion. Everyone was out for a good time. And we got our money’s worth from a commited performance. Album samples on the web show simple, bold backings.

On the night, guitar, and in one song, piano, were solid but held in check to allow the self-penned songs their scope. Mood was good with a Country-flavoured whine that suits the Stornoway voice very well. Matheson was clearly moved by the support and by the merry banter coming from the community seated before him. He responded with the passion they sought and the deal was done.

Don’t throw me out of town fellow Lewis folk, but there are buts. The tone was that bit too elegiac. Inclusion of a Lonnie Donegon version of ‘It Takes a Worried Man’ was a masterstroke, but for me revealed what would make this return of the local hero a show that could well travel elsewhere. We simply needed a bit more variety in the tone.

And OK, I’m a poet by trade and too fussy about lyrics. My singer-songwriter cousin keeps telling me that songs are different. But I’ve been looking at different lyrics lately, including Proclaimer songs. And I think songs that ring best have a quirky memorable twist in the language – defeating expectations of which word comes next.

I think some of Ado’s lyrics lull too much – they are a contemporary exile’s songs after all. Next album, I’d ban two words, cove – “ancient” and “ocean”. And let the guitar do a bit more of the talking.

But the melody lines and guitar picking were real strengths and I kept feeling that this was so nearly there. A jam session would be good. What about an Lanntair trying to get this man to work with some local young musicians and throwing the doors open again to let us hear the results?

© Ian Stephen, 2008

Links

• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

The Blank Album

A BITING breeze over the bins and takeaways and other urban ornaments in the city of Stornoway. Darkness has returned to evenings so it was time to patronise An Lanntair again. The mainly local audience was united in not really knowing what to expect.

The Blank Album is billed as dance, music, comedy. The producer Natasha Gilmore is a choreographer but her work ranges through site-specific installations to music video. I realised I’d seen her work for theatre in Cumbernauld’s recent intense and driven staging of The Wasp Factory.

So there was me, who usually likes contemporary dance but hits the arts wall at conventional music theatre. With my mate who can handle classical opera but doesn’t get what dance is about. United in our faint understanding of popular music today. What they call punk now sounds pretty melodic to me and I don’t know what Indie means.

Think I’ve a clue ’bout drum and bass which maybe takes us a shade along the track to the quirky eclectic delight of Shooglenifty. The bass player Quee MacArthur is a collaborator in composing for that band but he also uses a wide range of electric and acoustic music with sampled sound to create work for many performers including Boilerhouse and The X Factor Dance Company.

His billing as the composer definitely held sway in these latitudes. We were met with a line up of instruments. You wondered if they would just get up and start moving by themselves. Cello and fiddle looked pretty authentic but at least one of the instruments looked made to bend in mid air. In the days when I had hair I had a conceptual one very like it. A lot of guitars. And the images on flyers and posters strengthens that expectation of up-front tongue-in-cheek rock group mayhem.

The performance includes all that in a witty satirical way but much more. The form of the work is the compilation of an album. The music styles are varied but there are catchy possible singles spaced between the more free pieces. The band members are spiky dressers and the sexual tensions, rivalries and shades of interaction are dramatised in both music and movement.

You’ve got the mad ego of the up-front guy who is allowed to run with that but only as long as it’s an asset to the band. You have the shift from the cello as a sombre background tone to a dancing solo instrument. The bow is a gentle wand repairing rifts but then it’s a whip cracking out in desperation.

It’s difficult to describe how the music and movement work together. You get a clue from their website (see below). Music videos here are more restrained than the performance but the integration of visual elements to the rhythms of the footage is tight.

I think many of us went away a bit puzzled as to what it was we’d experienced. My friend who doesn’t get dance found it witty but also moving in places. At times there were laughs out loud and there were games to warm up the audience. But unlike some of the excesses of rock and roll in my younger days, we always came back to a close and humane study of the way people play with each other. On or off the stage.

I’ll leave you with a memory of one part of the show. A dancer is performing a headstand. But one of the hands supporting her is on the chest of one of the other band members. The tension is present but in balance. She then sings, minimal but quite moving lines.

But she is also slowly pedalling her legs, perhaps for balance. Which transmits of course through her body tension to the chest of the guy on the floor. And the reflection of these leg movements is another part of the dance, caught by the simple lighting.

There is a virtuoso element but it serves a purpose. I can’t say why I found that moving but I wasn’t the only one who did. There are chances to catch this show again next year. If you’re within traveling distance don’t miss it.

The Blank Album can be seen at the Garrison Theatre, Shetland, on 11 February 2009; the Sunart Centre, Strontian, on 26 February 2009; and the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, on 17 April 2009.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

Links

• The Blank Album
• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen

Director’s Statement: Roddy Murray

THE ORIGINAL An Lanntair – as a venue – bears little resemblance to that which opened in October 2005. But there is a strong thread of continuity in key personnel and in the programming ethic and philosophy.

Creatively An Lanntair is a lantern – a beacon – a lighthouse. The venue is both a receptacle and an instrument for the organisation’s vision, energy and ideas. We have a fully flexible 200-seat auditorium with moveable seats and ‘disappearing’ walls, which has the capacity and capability of accommodating everything from theatre and concerts to ceilidh, club-nights, cinema, conferences, even weddings. Not to mention gallery, education rooms, meeting rooms and a great bar and restaurant. It’s generous, comprehensive, distinctive, and it’s intimate.

Director Roddy Murray and programmer Alex Macdonald come up with the answers.

NORTHINGS: When was the venue established?

RODDY: An Lanntair opened on 8 March 1985. The current venue opened on 1 October 2005. That breaks down roughly into the first 10 years to take root and develop; the second to campaign for and deliver the new centre. The second half felt longer.

NORTHINGS: What famous names have taken to the stage?

ALEX: It depends on your definition of “famous”. Personally I was particularly pleased to see Michael Duchet appear in An Lanntair as part of the Savoy Duchet Cajun Band – literally the most famous Cajun outfit in the world. But, equally dependant on what you are into, people have been excited by appearances by Martin Simpson, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, actress Una Maclean, writers Ian Banks and Muriel Gray, the T’ang Quartet from Singapore or Fergie Macdonald. All are famous in their own way! These days we can add Julie Fowlis to that list of the “famous” as well.

NORTHINGS: What are your big ideas for the future of the venue?

ALEX: As far as the performing arts programme is concerned, I would just like to continue providing a balanced programme for the public. Literally Pirates of Penzance one day and Pirates of the Carribean the next. I hope that never changes.

I also hope that we continue to promote the Gaelic and traditional arts in particular. We have so many talented singers, artists, writers and musicians from the Islands who now have a state of the art venue on their doorstep.

RODDY: The big idea, strategically, is really about extending out from the venue – putting more spokes on the hub. Helping develop the artistic community locally and internationally.

NORTHINGS: Does the venue have a ghost?

ALEX: Not at the moment, but given that we now also show film, when we do I hope its Johnny Depp.

NORTHINGS: What was your worst disaster?

ALEX: Disasters are few and far between, thankfully, and there’s nothing we haven’t been able to cope with.

RODDY: Maybe you’re forgetting Sunday 16 December 2007 when the main hot water boiler burst in the top floor plant room. By the time I was notified, it had percolated through the staff room, stairwell, restaurant servery and main kitchen, dissolving acres of plasterboard in the process and frying the electrics. Water was about a foot deep in the main switch room and we had to put emergency calls in to TRANSCO and SSE. Only during annual maintenance, 3 weeks later, when the forestage came up, did we realize that it had also flooded under the hardwood floor in the auditorium. Which had buckled, and from which we subsequently pumped about 3,000 litres.

NORTHINGS: And what was your biggest triumph?

RODDY: “…these two imposters….” The biggest triumph is that the place actually got built. It was a close thing indeed a few times. The shame is that it was difficult to enjoy it at the outset as there were so many operational issues to overcome and consolidate. One challenge segued into another.

ALEX: Getting the place up and running in time for the Mod in October 2005. Since then, I would say creating our own events such as “Lewis Women” or “Dhachaidh”, or releasing our second CD “The Days Flash Past”. We don’t just stage events, we create them as well. Most recently it would be winning the Venue of the Year in the Scottish Traditional Music awards.

NORTHINGS: If you could have any artist in the world for a one-off special, who would it be and why?

RODDY: I’d still like Bob Dylan, but would settle happily for Gillian Welch.

ALEX: At the moment I would like it to be guitarist Jerry Douglas, who I saw recently at Celtic Connections. And I think that may be achievable with a word in the right ear, so watch this space.

AJ: Why should people look forward to visiting your venue?

ALEX: I think those that haven’t been here yet will be pleasantly surprised. We offer a programme that is comparable with any arts centre in Britain, but in a unique environment. Several people have commented that the building could be in any city in the world – but one look out the window reminds you that it certainly isn’t just any other place.

RODDY: Great staff, professionalism, proficiency, hospitality, technical back-up, acoustics, audience and ambience. I remember Martin Taylor saying on stage that he wanted to move in here!

© HI-Arts, 2008

Links

• An Lanntair

Box Club (© Box Club)

YOU KNOW that west coast line, skillfully lifted and embedded in an Iain Macdonald song: “I went to a fight and a dance broke out.” It’s not really a trade descriptions act job because you’re getting both experiences. A bit like going to Shakespeare and getting these daft comic bits and very welcome too – the bawdy keeper at the gate before the immense tragedy of marching armies.

Well, the Box Club gig was a bit like that. I caught them in An Lanntair but this tour also included Eden Court. I would have crossed the Minch in a Northerly to catch the crack again. In fact I did, kind of by accident, a few days later. There I was, at the ferry terminal, saying cheerio but the conversation wasn’t finished. So I got on the ferry too, and saw the band, on return from the tour, with the banter still flying around the ship.

That’s what made me realise a Box Club night is two gigs for the price of one. See all these mumbling, non-verbal, it’s all in the music, type of performers – I’ve no problem at all with that approach. But, down deep, got a memory of these Leadbelly and Humblebum and Dylan and John Prine and Arlo Guthrie albums when the talk and the music is just all stuck in there together with no seams.

And that’s what Box Club do. It’s an itinerant gang of storytellers. I mean a no-shit/plenty of shit, alternating, sad and happy, islands and continents, full-firing, multi-cylinder, storytelling machine.

An Lanntair took-off because these guys made contact and gave out the stories behind or between the tunes with generosity. The tune-titles are wee poems but also cues for the yarn behind them and one by one, these individuals do their stand-up solo at the mike and reveal where the sounds came from.

This could be with the charm of Mairearad Green or the gentle touch of John Somerville, who brought the character of his 97-year-old Czech grandmother on to the stage with him. She was there.

But let’s take that example and see how it all works. John gives the title – and introduces the tune. It’s kitchen-table intimacy. And then this very haunting melody shines with the personality of this woman we’ve never met. But we have.

And then it gets rumbustious. Mike Newton prowled and paced, but is not really the wild extrovert guitar man he seems. The spaces are judged and the lines laid down. All in sympathy. The bass (Duncan Lyall) and kit or bodhran (Martin O’Neil) didn’t need to display a thing. Just worked with flair, necessary and sufficient to the purpose of driving all that energy – but so well that the whole rhythm section could be the subject of pretended rivalry from the four front-line boxes. You can only rip the piss in public if there’s nothing to fear.

Gary Innes and Angus Lyon complete the front-line, bringing vast experience to the party. These guys started young. They’re a good advert for it.

I had to be persuaded to leave my own kitchen in the Ides of March but that was a good tip. If you haven’t already caught up with these civilized marauders, have a treat. If you have, you won’t need any persuading to hear them again and catch the yarns.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

Links

• Box Club
• An Lanntair

Fraser Fifield Band

THE GRAND thing about this forum is the opportunity to add, change, revise or update what’s been said. So it’s great that Sue Wilson caught the Fraser Fifield Band’s collaboration with the Nedyalko Nedyalkov Quartet at Celtic Connections right at the start of February.

It could well be that the combined bands have responded to initial reactions because the An Lanntair performance was a sustained Ginsberg wail of weird joy and persistent melodies [with the wail of the storm winds thrown in – the bands were stuck on Lewis and had to cancel their Kinloss date scheduled for Friday. Let’s hope they made Inverness on Saturday – Ed.].

It was good that the visiting musicians were given space to let the audience home in on their sound before the Scottish team added other layers. But there was something very Gaelic in the resonance of a music which needed to build and build like waves becoming surf. Sympathetic strings from the gadulka resonated, while a sharper mandolin-like instrument, the tamboura, did the driving. A far-ranging wooden flute took off like a flock of larks and we were away.

Once these guys had the well-filled auditorium following, we were introduced to a new element. Stoimenka Nedyalkova looked calm on stage and bided her time till she let loose the strongest passion, her voice, another instrument, new to us. She would also have been strong singing unaccompanied, but the total jazz brought us the tone of a country of extremes.  I get the feeling the sun can be hot and the winters savage.

Only after that did some members of Fifield’s team walk on to let their instrument find its partner. The two percussionists held back but were always present until the moment when a more assertive rhythm sent its signal. The guitar man made a perfect fit with the tamboura and we had a more insistent rhythm. The flute came back in and only after that did Fifield’s own subtle flute, soprano sax or big set of pipes compound the sound. So this is a revised formula – probably a much better one than throwing all the troops on stage.

The programme then shifted between a Bulgarian emphasis, a Scottish jazz one, a vocal one, and these soaring moments when the whole thing had a big momentum.

Fifield’s own stage presence is modest. He could trust the music to say it all. This is a band which allows strong solos but always returns to the unified groundswell. I understand why the sound can be a bit lulling to some. I imagine in a large-scale venue, it might not be heard to advantage. But in the steeply-raked wee auditorium, in our downtown island metropolis, it was necessary and sufficient to the purpose of escaping a tough time of year.

Every tap and chord counted so it’s unfair to single out any player. But it’s got to be said, with all that subtlety about, Graeme Stephen’s funky jazz guitar was the engine. And before you start, no he’s not any relation – not even a second cousin.

Often it reminded me of Sean O’Rourke’s fine band The Keltz – a 3 piece which has Eastern and Irish elements in the jazz. Their recordings stand up to many revisits. I have a feeling  that the CD just produced from this Bulgarian-Scottish collaboration will also stand up to close scrutiny.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

Links

• Tune Up

The Bongilee and Mrs MacLeod.

THEATRE HEBRIDES have a plan. Unusual departure from the normal island way of doing things, but that’s the point. The company have a long track record of originating new works of theatre, but making a bridge to allow access to a new audience.

There is a basis in island cultural heritage but a will to invent and the guts to take risks. So before enthusing about their current production of Kevin Macneil’s “The Callanish Stoned”, I’d like to give some context.

Past productions have included a large scale community play, “Portrona”, written by Norman Malcolm Macdonald. Macdonald later made a version of the work as a novel (still available from Birlinn). It contains the finest writing on the Iolaire disaster I’ve encountered and some of the lines from the play/novel are the resonant poetry of a people defined by the seas that surround them.

The performances took place in a disused transit shed on Number One pier and combined the work of committed amateurs with telling use of professional skills.

The town did become a real community again, with the shop-owners dressed for the occasion, in period costume. Gaelic choirs and drama groups worked together with English language groups and local enthusiasts of classical music.

Then there was “An Clo Mor” by Henry Adam. A draughty disused mill was filled to capacity in wintry conditions as the politics of the Harris Tweed industry were dramatised. As driving hail filtered into the building we huddled together to be completely engaged by simple staging and superb acting.

Again, challenges were met by local performers playing to the peak of their skills. Domhnall Ruadh is an experienced actor, writer and director but his performance of a Harris Tweed godfather was masterful. We have links to local history. The production contains quality heritage elements but the aims are wider. Issues are examined.

The current production is seeking a connection with a younger audience as well as providing quality entertainment for old guys like me, already committed to supporting theatre.

Kevin Macneil writes poetry and fiction and is probably best known for his novel “The Stornoway Way.” The play shares some of the tone of the book, including the style of humour. But I think the disciplines of theatre and the need to develop work as a team game have sharpened the wit and tightened up the plot.

But it’s still commendably bizarre. The first night was a full house and there was a high proportion of younger folk there, first stop on a proper SY Friday night out.

It’s a road movie with a limited stretch of tarmac – Stornoway to Callanish. But it’s a mental one in more ways than one. Two mates who are of course called Lewis and Harris join forces with a blone (female of the species) with wheels, or rather her dope-dealing, hard man brother’s wheels.

She wants to be a writer but she’s more interested in Kerouac than the bard William Ross. The ghost of the latter is also on the road. So is our antihero’s mother, on the chase, to bring her boy back to righteousness or at least give him the tongue lashing of a lifetime.

That’s simple enough but it gets a bit more complicated. There’s a liberal minister, a challenged petrol-station attendant, the aforementioned stray bard out of his time, a homicidal hillbilly crofter who might have walked off a Tarantino set.

And a genuine SY (Stornoway) hardman, the sort of cove (male of the species) who goes to a fight and a dance breaks out (as in Iain Macdonald’s song). By the way, all these dudes are played by the same virtuoso actor, David Walker.

A dippy hippy on a bicycle and the hardman’s extremely blonde moll are also played with gusto by the same actor, Fiona Morrison, but this is one performance which would benefit from a bit of toning down.

All these elements were already in the previous production along with the use of projection and a haunting guitar soundtrack written by Willie Campbell but finely played this time by Rod Morison.

The projection of Neil McConnell’s restrained filming of urban and rural Lewis is used to stronger effect this time round but I felt, with all the action and gags and wit to contend with, the guitar chords could have been allowed to linger that bit longer, providing a little more space.

Lighting, staging, sound and all the technical aspects are designed to be simple and strong, effective in a tour which will include a range of venues. The movement of the actors on stage is also more choreographed and all the better for it. All the visual and audio effects work together in a bold but unfussy way.

The big development is the characterisation. The central performances of the lad and his mother (David Rennie-Fitzgerald and Carina Macleod) are excellent and that bit more rounded than in the previous run. We can believe in the more humane aspect to both. They are no longer just devices to run through the witty script.

Some of the other characters are, like those in Fielding’s own road movie, “Tom Jones”, more stock comic ones but they are offset by these central ones who show glimpses of human warmth.

Newcomer Gemma McGee is confident, funny and tender. Ruairidh Maciver, as the sidekick in green hair, is consistently strong. So the range of skilled performers is growing with the range of the audience.

Most of the jokes will resonate in other small towns. I don’t see why it shouldn’t work well in Wales and Ireland. But there’s a few gags won’t cross the Minch. Mind you, we wouldn’t worry about that in a play written in Glasgowspeak or Geordie, so fair’s fair.

(The Callanish Stoned plays at Aultbea Hall (16 October), The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen (17 October), Craigmonie Centre, Drumnadrochit (Drama na h-Alba, 18, 20 and 21 October), and Biggar Corn Exchange (23 October)

© Ian Stephen, 2007

Links

• Theatre Hebrides
• Dràma Na h-Alba

Macdara Vallely in Voice of the Sea.

IT SEEMED like one event too many. Some of us in Stornoway had not quite come down from party mode since the Heb Celt. Others were fatigued. The visitors were enjoying sunshine whilst a lot of the country was flooding. So it took an effort to enter the theatre to experience another show about the Clearances.

But Macdara Vallely won a Fringe First with another show, ‘Peacefire’. in 2004, and they don’t give these away in lucky bags. I was interested in seeing how two performers would combine music and storytelling. I think the publicity sold the performance short. What you got was a dynamic sweep of culture, presented in the simplest way with positive aggression and superb technique.

A spotlight shone on the musician’s chair. Uillean pipes and wood flutes at the ready. Another light hit on a pile of sand with a pocket-sized radio, the style that used to be called a tranny. A figure emerged from the sand and his voice alternated with the radio broadcasts, offset and overlapping with haunting, wailing heartstopping and heartening playing.

That was it. No projection. No dancing, except for the fingers of the musician, Ivan Goff, and the body of the storyteller, Macdara Vallely. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against dancing and projection, but how many productions have we all seen in recent years where one element too many is introduced. And the focus falls from the language or the movements that drive it.

This wasn’t about the clearances really. It was asking how what matters in our lives, lived at the Atlantic edge, will continue. It was more Beckett than McGrath. One Island was being evacuated. One voice remains to join the strands of loose narratives and throw that compelling net far and wide.

You get a break from the intensity of that voice by following the parallel story of more contemporary exile and loss that unfolds as news updates of a Search and Rescue mission. But there are so many rhythms within the narrative and so much humour and vitality in the main narrative that you are eager to go back to it.

If I try to describe the contents it will sound wetter than water – the legends of Fionn himself, leading on to those of his son, and all joined up. But within that simple framework you have a quality of devising and delivery that evokes Greek or Shakespearean comedy and tragedy. I was reminded of something else and only afterwords realised it was the story of David and Absalom.

Often a fine piece of theatre gets one outing, a wee tour and it’s gone. All this audience, I think, were very grateful to those who funded or hosted this performance. I’d certainly go again.

© Ian Stephen, 2007

Exploded View by Joe Mahony.

REMEMBER the shimmering 3D pictures you found in special corn-flakes packets if you buried deep? You held the small plastic images up so the light hit them at different angles. Then they came alive.

Well, imagine three of these, but as large rectangles, spaced together so they relate but don’t interfere. They are photographs which move. Shapes on slopes are human interventions in an awesome landscape. As the youth of Stornoway would say, pretty random, man.

But Joe Mahony’s random interventions, which could be as simple as repetitions of the shape of a blown-out umbrella, are carefully planned. Nothing is left behind in the windblasted west side of this particular Island.

This is a man with a lifelong love affair with lenses. So the still or moving images are trusted. They communicate Joe’s results to the An Lanntair audience which has not witnessed one crazy Irish Aussie install his umbrellas in a glen in a gale.

So you enter Stornoway’s art centre which presents very fine opportunities to show visual art thoughout the building and not just in the large L-shaped gallery.

Joe’s shimmering photos are spaced beside a wall left white. The restrained hanging emphasizes a parallel with Japanese prints. So does a contemporary suggestion of calligraphy spaced at the sides – perhaps the Ordnance Survey grid reference of the locations. These are like resonant titles but in numbers.

When you enter the gallery, the work becomes fully 3-dimensional. I think he’s used his wide range of digital image techniques to make sculpture. The blown out red brollies are composed on a black laquered rack on the long part of the L.

They are still now, but two projections, on facing walls, show what happened. The elements are allowed. A splash of rain on the lens is left – so you get the feeling this man was engaged in a battle, a campaign with no time for fuss. The strength of the wind has risen beyond the ability of the hairy mic to dull it down fully.

The shapes of mangled red are completely abstract against a setting greyed by the Atlantic front. You become lost in it, looking from time to time from screen to screen. Sometimes it appears that they are in synch. Not for long.

The shots are held for a long time but new angles enter. Once this temporary installation has been set up (in a location on Great Bernera) the artist is lost in the act of observation. It takes clinical precision to achieve a work like this. In fact, the result is exactly as the artist described it would be when he planned the installation and the recording and presentation of it.

Except that the wind and rain have had their effect. That can’t be controlled, only noted. The elements are the main players in this drama. It’s an opera of the landscape. You see no suggestion of the human figure, except that an umbrella, even a wind-tangled one, hints of the human. But it’s as if you are on the set of a Kurosawa movie.

The exhibition is one result of a Partners project. Joe Mahony has had a year-long residency with An Lanntair, linked to the Grianan Centre. In the past few weeks, his work with the clients at Grianan has been shown.

Again the show was a fine use of the space, alternating comic-book posters with video and sound recordings. Individual voices came through loud and clear. For me it was a more interesting and humane presentation than the huge slick Gilbert and George works presently on show at the Tate Modern.

Fair play, though, that the artist who has enabled other people to express themselves so well now presents his own vision. The imagery and sound is in one way specific, but in another timeless and placeless.

It would be good to see the process of new work originated in these Islands being exported to suitable galleries. Stornoway used to be a world ranking trading port for herring. Joe Mahony’s work can cross any local or national boundaries even though it could never be compressed into a barrel.

© Ian Stephen, 2007

Links

• An Lanntair