THE CHAIR of An Talla Solais, Dave Falconer, has been working towards this exhibition for years.

IT CELEBRATES the art of the print, by showcasing work produced by a wide range of artists at two institutions: the Highland Print Studio, in Inverness, and Hot Bed Press, in Manchester. The resulting exhibition is eclectic and enthralling.

Untitled (collograph) by Jan Breckenridge

There are many different printing techniques on display, and linocuts sit next to much more high tech prints, without explanation or apology. The show is therefore not an introduction to the methods of print, although if that is your interest, there are workshop opportunities at the gallery while the exhibition is on.

The work of both studios is blended without making it obvious which artists are from which area. Arguably this means that the exhibition misses the opportunity of allowing comparisons to be made, but the result is pleasingly diverse.

The stand-out print is an extraordinary seascape of the Shiant Islands, which is actually formed through clever use of greyscales on a printout of a traditional Hebridean story as told by Ian Stephen in a collaboration between him and artist Emmanuelle Waeckerlé and printer John McNaught. Another Ian Stephen story forms part of a print of Fair Isle, created in collaboration with Christine Morrison.

John McNaught’s own work is also story-based, with brightly coloured cartoons of footballers with associated bizarre tales. These are works that take substantial time to absorb.

Other pieces are much more immediate. My favourites are Katy Spong’s wildlife prints, of which there are two in this show. Roebuck at the Forest Edge is a beautifully atmospheric dusky image, appropriately hung in the corner of the big room in the gallery, as if about to vanish from sight. Arrival is marvellous image of geese landing, their splashing almost audible and their bright red feet making best use of the limited range of colours in the print.

Presumably because of the inking methods used to produce the prints, the use of colour is often limited and several of the artists make wonderful effects with a narrow palette. I particularly enjoyed Carolyn Murphy’s linocuts; the stark green Fern is an effective study of form, Morlich a dramatic black and white shore scene, and the demonic Scottish Shee captures the essence of ram in a few brilliantly chosen marks.

Brian MacBeath uses a few vibrant colours in his starkly simple, strangely beautiful abstracts, and Jane Frere achieves an explosion of raw emotion in her questioning What’s the colour of betrayal?

A piece I kept returning to was Elisabeth Shepherd’s Four Pansies, apparently the same image printed with four different colour combinations, the result a meditation on petal shape and shade. Another piece of hers, In the Country, is also mesmeric, with its delicate ferns, butterflies and orchids in a composition with surprising depth, while Josephine’s Poppies is a stunning burst of red. These are subjects with a real risk of being merely pretty, transformed into pieces that use colour to achieve affects that are both arresting and contemplative.

Some of the artists do amazing things in black and white. Samuel Horsley’s work features strange creatures with mammalian skulls and four legs, but their wiry hair and weird proportions and postures make them somehow both insect-like and full of feeling. Anne Campbell’s screenprint I never enjoyed anything as much as the sheiling is an evocative piece reaching back in time, the printed images and space giving the sense of both memory and forgetting. Irena Przby captures the essence of tree in Frosty Tree, and of water in Flow, and her apparently simple illustrated books of legends and myths use imagery that seems timeless, making best use of print techniques connecting back to early woodcuts.

The show is a fine demonstration of the diversity of effects that can be achieved by transferring images from one surface to another. The constraints of colouration and of the marks possible on the engraved surface often seem to be transformed into methods of achieving emphasis and style. This is an intriguing exhibition. Anyone interested in the potential of print should make their way to Ullapool to see it.

© Mandy Haggith, 2013

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• An Talla Solais

The 2012 Members’ Show this year will encompass all this, and more. Photographers Peter Haring and Iain Sarjeant are two members who have exhibited previously in Members’ Shows and in the West Coast Open exhibitions at an talla solais. This exhibition will have a focus on their work, in one of the gallery rooms. Abstracted images from winter landscapes and portraiture will hang in the first room. The exhibition will continue from these elegant and beautiful images to the rest of the show, in which these themes amongst others will feature again in various works and mediums including photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and craft.

15th September – 7th October 2012

10 – 4 pm Daily Admission Free

an talla solais Ullapool Visual Arts

Market Street, Ullapool, IV26 2XE

Source: an talla solais

AN Talla Solais is so full of the sea, with two exhibitions on maritime themes, you can almost smell the salt and hear the spray.

AFTER the success of their ‘wee boats’ fundraising exhibition last year, Mara is made up of a glittering shoal of tiny artworks gifted by dozens of local artists. Here are mosaics, tapestries, paintings, drawings, all on a miniature scale, and every possible expression of the sea: waves, dunes, fish, seaweed, gannets and gulls, shells and creels, boats, lighthouses, turtles and seahorses.

Fiona Hutchison - Quiet Harbour

If you want a bucket and spade, there are lots to choose from, with or without sand, and in this ingenious exhibition, everyone can afford a work of art of their own. There is a silent auction running until Monday 20 August, and after that, any remaining pieces will go on sale in aid of this community-run gallery.

The jostle and exuberance of the Mara show is balanced by the meditative calm of Fiona Hutchison’s sea tapestries. The centre piece of Where Two Tides Meet is a huge wall hanging, a gorgeous watery sea and skyscape with mesmerising cloud lights and patterns of ripples and flow. Like many of the works, it is predominantly pale blue and white, with just a few flecks of red in the sky bringing life to the cool blue, and it is this restrained palette that gives all the works in this show their sense of serenity.

The wall hanging is titled ‘How Calm the Wild Water’, a phrase from a G F Dutton poem. It’s an apt title, as the water shown is both calm and wild. Look closely at its textures and the rhythm of the weaving, and it begins to splash and spume. It reminds us that underneath the gentleness of colour and a rippling surface, the sea holds unlimited power.

Fiona Hutchison - Where Two Tides Meet

Other works are also inspired by poetry. ‘Sea Door’, inspired by a George Mackay Brown, has a darker colouring with rich, painterly shades of purple and another reminder of the deadly power of the ocean. A few other works, like ‘Midnight Sea Mist’, also explore those night-time blues, but mostly the tapestries are as light as a morning on the water.

Some of the work is small scale, and you must look closely at the clever way that threads echo ripples and show surf breaking splashily out of the underlying weave. With wool, silk, linen, nylon and paper fibres, the motion of water ruffles across these images. Some are recognisable seascapes, the moon’s reflection, or a loose wave-washed ocean, while others are more abstract arrangements of glass and fibres, evoking the paraphernalia of harbours: nets and lines, boxes and buoys.

Some of the most intriguing works are those where, instead of a woven fabric as the base, Fiona uses paper. Three beautiful images of rain, with lovely splodges and stains, are stitched onto tracing paper. A line of ripples is evoked by blue paper folded and sewn into a complex and highly tactile corrugation.

Fiona Hutchison - White Water

Breaking out of two dimensions, Fiona has included a delightful little woven boat, threads of spray spilling across its gunwhales, not taking itself too seriously. She’s a sailor too, and no doubt a dab hand at knots.

It’s the big watery hangings that really dazzle in this exhibition, tapestries like ‘Where Two Tides Meet’, with its thrilling thrash of white water under a pondering sky. The warp and weft is manipulated so deftly it is as if the images have been painted with thread, or woven with light. The result are richly textured images that combine the wildness of the ocean with peaceful mystery.

© Mandy Haggith, 2012

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• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog

IT IS hard to imagine two more different forms of art being exhibited together than the two shows currently on display at An Talla Solais.

TWO rooms are filled with Sutherland landscape pictures, by husband and wife Hazel and Cyril Reed, while the smaller room is converted into a kind of secret chamber containing a multi-media installation by Gill Russell. One is entirely figurative, the other conceptual. One devoted to the outdoor world, the other concerned with our internal lives.

Reach

Gill Russell’s work is an experience to have alone, if possible. It is contained within a deeply darkened room, entered through blankets as if into a sweat lodge or sacred tent. Within, shamanic symbols (feathers, antlers) hang in an eerie blue light.

A sound track of voices ranges around themes of belief, faith in a creator, insistence that science can explain everything, religious doctrine and cosmology, a panoply of views declaimed, murmured, ranted and whispered into a tapestry of sound. The voiced opinions are from the Pope to Richard Dawkins, everywhere on the spectrum in between these two, and beyond, into the ridiculous, with even Monty Python making it into the mix. It is impossible to follow every word, but it seems to invite us to question our own beliefs. Which of these voices do I agree with? Who, if anyone, is talking sense here?

There are two edifices in the room, both containing ghostly white hands, lit with the same blue light. A single hand grasps, for what? Meaning? A pair of hands is held up in the position of prayer. Spend too long reflecting on these disembodied limbs and they soon become spooky.

But in the corner, there’s a third object, like a womb inside the womb-room, a fruit containing a suspended seed. Its mouth is furry, and its textured interior seems to capture and concentrate light. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I like it. One of the voices on the track mentions, ‘the long wait between seed and fruit’.

There is space in here for responses to life’s big questions in other forms than science or religion. References to a creator bring the artist into the room, as if she is also in here groping around in the dark for answers.

Back out in the light, we return to the Highlands. In the real world it is glorious May weather, but on the gallery walls all the seasons are present. In Cyril Reed’s room winter features a lot and it is something of a shock to be reminded of snow. The painting I find most striking contrasts its bright white with the orange and brown of vegetation by the shore of Loch Fleet. The wind is visibly tousling the dead grasses in a cold, bright light.

There’s motion also in the billowing cloud of smoke from a wild fire in ‘Hill Burn’ above a huddle of houses. The habitations in these landscapes are at first inconspicuous, as if the human element is a minor part of a land where greater forces of nature dominate. Storm clouds, a sky filled with snow, a shaft of light onto water, colours reflected in snow, shadows among trees, autumn winds, are all in the foreground of the paintings: moments of drama caught in very particular places.

Next door, Hazel Reed paints in cloth. Her textile landscape images are of many of the same places as her husband’s, and in some ways have a more literal accuracy of representation of the landscapes when viewed at a distance. But unlike his paintings, which reveal the painterly marks of acrylic on brush, Hazel’s work, close up, has a wealth of texture and crafty detail that give them a fascinating quality of sculpted objects.

Each piece consists of dozens of different coloured pieces of fabric: silks, netting, ribbons and felt, intricately layered and placed to build up the picture. Paint is used too, and on top of this, freehand machine-embroidery stitching with a mixture of threads, adding another surface of texture to the image.

The choices of views that Hazel creates are intriguing, with lots of unusual perspectives – a shoreline looked down on from a height, and several tall thin images, just giving us a slice of a grander vista. The colour combinations are often beautiful, my favourite being an exquisite mix of dark blues and gold, in ‘Sunlit Shore’. Also marvellous is an image of a stormy coast, with layers of rock, grass, beach and 7 wheeling sea birds in a brooding sky. The intricate textures also work well in representing agriculture, with sharp angles of arable fields and fences picked out in stitching.

The sourcing of fabrics and threads for each picture is, Hazel says, by far the most time-consuming aspect of the work. Anyone with the slightest delight in haberdashery will revel in the skill on display here.

Both Hazel and Cyril are doing events associated with their exhibition, with Cyril doing a painting demonstration and Hazel running a workshop on her textile techniques.

© Mandy Haggith, 2012

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• An Talla Solais
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• Mandy Haggith
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THE TALL SHIPS are back in Ullapool, or it seems that way, thanks to an exhibition called LK243 Undersail at An Talla Solais, which evokes the 2011 race from Waterford in Ireland all the way to Halmstad in Sweden.

THE SHIPS called in at Ullapool, and this exhibition traces the path of one of them, through the record created by Imi Maufe, who was on board vessel LK243 as artist in residence during the voyage.

Artist Imi Maufe on board ship

At the heart of the exhibition is a neat little wooden ‘bunk box’, designed to fit into a tiny berth, but instead of the trinkets and personal belongings you might expect to be in it, it is filled with badges, wooden ‘postcards’, little notebooks, and a miniature video screen. The entire exhibition is designed to be housed in this box, or, as in this case, for some of its contents to explode out onto the walls of a gallery.

The wall pieces include screenprinted images, mostly simple but effective evocations of the view out of a porthole, with bold colour and line capturing key moments cartoon-style. There are also bunk curtains, and both these and the screenprints feature four word phrases, which come from the journey record.

Each hour, the position of the boat was plotted, and coupled with a four word phrase for each, this forms the record. Taken together they are evocative and amusing. A few examples will give a flavour: ‘Early Morning Island Sillhouettes’, ‘Dophins Jump Through Rainbows’, ‘Eerie Screaming Bird Sound’, ‘Dodging Tankers In Dark’, ‘Fun With Foreign Languages’, ‘Drawing Maps On Beach’,’Hourly Chart Position Charted’, ‘Oldest Boat For Now’ and ‘Increasing Uncertainty From Thursday’.

Work from LK243 Under Sail

Participants in the journey and observers have been invited, as fellow travellers, to draw pictures of boats, or record memories of other sea voyages and these are included in the log. This gives a flavour of the thronging masses of people who collectively make up the Tall Ships Race.

The video, some sections of which could make you seasick, is mostly footage of the sail, plus showing how the artist printed positions on wooden postcards, then hurled them into the sea at various stages of the journey. Miraculously some of these have been found, returned to the artist and added to the exhibition. Taken all together it’s a rich picture that gives a real sense of a sea voyage enjoyed by a host of maritime people.

An Leabhar Mor

The second part of the exhibition is also a touring show of words, but this one has been on a worldwide voyage that has lasted many years. An Leabhar Mor na Gaidhlig (The Great Book of Gaelic) has, as its title suggests, a book at its centre. It is one of my favourite books, a vast and colourful celebration of Gaelic poetry, from Scotland and Ireland, from the earliest known written verses to new work by living bards. It is appropriate that its visit to Ullapool should coincide with the book festival which always pays such creative respect to the mother tongue of this corner of the world.

Yet An Leabhar Mor is much more than a book of poetry. Each poem is printed in both its original Gaelic and in translation, and in addition it is given a full page of illustration. Each of these illustrations is created through collaboration between a calligrapher and an artist, and many of the resulting pieces are little masterpieces of visual art. The exhibition allows these works to be seen at full scale, thus really enhancing the experience of the book’. Although the reproductions are excellent, the texture and full impact of some of the pieces is only possible by seeing them framed on a wall.

It is surprising that many of the pieces selected for the exhibition are monochrome, because the overall impact of the book is that is richly colourful.

Some of my favourites include Stan Clementsmith’s marvellous tree/people image illustrating Uilleam Neill’s poem ‘De a Thug Ort Sgriobhach sa Ghaidhlig?'(What compelled you to write in Gaelic?). The lines include ‘Oh horo, won’t I be joyful / speaking to each tree that’s there’, and the tree image conveys all that joy, along with the beautifully calligraphied words, ‘Bridhinn ris gach craoibh a thi’innte’. For a Gaelic learner, such accessible combinations of word and image are gratifying.

Tree-related calligraphy by Reitlin Murphy also graces Iain Joyce’s intriguing coloured lithograph for Claocho (Transfigured) by Cathal O’Searcaigh, in which he is ‘getting ready to become a tree.’ And again, in Norman Shaw’s dense etching for Iain MacGillEathain’s ‘Am Bard an Canada’, who is ‘alone in this gloomy woodland’.

There is much in this exhibition to make you ponder about the way the languages and artforms of these islands can reach out to each other across the boundaries of politics and discipline. This is most powerfully shown by Doug Cocker’s austere, severe, drawing of a building, responding to Liam O’Muirthile’s poem ‘Tairseacha’ (Threshholds). The calligraphy, by Aisling O’Beirn, highlights the challenges of crossing boundaries, making the worlds strange by laying them out in artificially even groups of five letters, with X to mark the end of one word and the start of another. Thus Einne Amuigh Thar Tairseacha? becomes the unintelligible EINNE.XAMUI.GHXTH. ARXTA.IRSEA.CHA?X

My favourite piece of all, though, enhanced by a reading of the poem by Aonghas MacNeacail, is a brilliant response by Frances Walker to Ian Chrichton Smith’s poem ‘Aig a Chladh’ (At the Cemetary), about the burial of ‘my neighbour lying under the bee / that is humming among sweet flowers.’ The picture shows a congregation of black-hatted and clothed people making their way past a forest of white graves. Beyond, in a pulse of colour made even more powerful by the lack of other colour in the exhibition, shimmers the silvery-blue sea, across which all these words and images have journeyed.

© Mandy Haggith, 2012

Links

• An Talla Solais
• An Leabhar Mor
• Mandy Haggith
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog

CURRENTLY on show on the first and second level theatre foyers at Eden Court Theatre, the 8th annual exhibition by members of An Talla Solais sees the group exhibiting outside their home base in Ullapool for the first time.

ATS are a valuable resource on the West Coast, running a community arts centre, holding workshops, classes, exhibitions and events for artists and makers of all abilities. This latest exhibition of 2D work reflects the diversity of the group, with established artists such as James Hawkins and Peter White exhibiting alongside emerging and recreational artists. It is great to see a trajectory of art practice both professional and recreational in the exhibition and to be able to see the group’s activities presented to a wider public audience. All over the Highlands and Islands such grass roots groups are an essential part of the cultural infrastructure and public exhibitions by organisations such as ATS are important in making this creative work in the community more visible.

James Lumsden - ATS Suite 9

Two works by James Lumsden, ATS Suite 8 & 9 in graphite powder and acrylic on card are an intriguing combination of formal composition, a vertical triptych of dark and light and the resistance of two media. This ambiguity between what at first glance feels like black and white photography and the process that reveals itself on closer inspection is extremely appealing. ATS Suite No.9 is like witnessing a chemical reaction; that magical moment in the darkroom as the image begins to emerge, part design, part accident depending on the variables involved. Like a suspended moment of exposure, the image invites the imagination into surreal contemplation of form.

Martin Howard’s black and white digital print Journey leads the viewer convincingly into the photograph in a gentle diagonal ascent from the foreground along a white stone path to a small shrine overshadowed by a cypress tree, traditionally a symbol of death and mourning. Tonal contrast in the image, the presence of light and a dead tree to the left of the image present the viewer with a narrative of the spirit; an inward journey of the eye and mind. Ian Sarjeant’s black and white photographic print Ripples also provides a welcome opportunity to pause in contemplation with its inky immersive circular rhythms.

Rachel Grant - Still Life with Seed Head

Original printmaking is well represented by Rachel Grant’s Still Life With Seed Head (Printmaking and mixed media) in a palette of vintage green, pink and alizarin, a nicely layered composition of interior domestic design and organic elements. Emma Noble’s Relief Prints 2 & 3 create balance through finely tuned form, colour and pattern. The geometric abstraction of Under The Bridge (Relief Print 2 1/1) is perhaps the strongest example, in a subdued palette of yellows, greys and accents of orange, bold form and tonality creating a unified composition. Within simplified pictorial elements subtle variations of mark create a multi-layered surface which begs closer inspection. Phill James’s Man On A Ferry (Etching) provides a more immediate response to subject through direct mark on the etching plate, the profile of the figure drawn almost in caricature, with random marks of the surface containing an energy all of their own. This lone first impression begs an observational series.

Dorothy Francis’s In Dreams (Mixed Media) successfully draws the eye into its immersive interior of blue and purple, the pattern of the quilt and the grid of the window echoing each other as portals of dreaming. The sleeping figure visited by an apparition of self or kin feels illustrative in its origins and use of collage is effective, rendering the ghostly figure drawn in pencil opaque and ethereal, yet strangely tactile in the artist’s use of fragile, textured paper.

Martin Howard - Journey

Celia Garbutt’s Warsaw (Acrylic) recalls De Chirico and Miro in the empty facades of buildings, surreal shadow and simplified forms. The acidic yellow light of the streetlamp and the silhouette of birds confined within the same eye-like form, create an eerily atmospheric image of composite ideas. Although these elements are intriguing, the composition as a whole leads the viewer quite literally into a corner perspective of a painted set, rather than into a more expansive reality – or Surreality – that the viewer’s mind can wander into. The dream-like quality of Garbutt’s acrylics is appealing and has potential; however, greater consideration could to be given to the crafting of the image and how the artist leads the viewer into the painting as a result in order to strengthen future work.

Rhiannon Van Muysen’s wonderful mixed media works are subtly evocative of landscape and thoroughly immersed in creative process. Two square composition works, Retreat ( pencil, frozen ink and iron melted into paper), present a symbiotic relationship between technique and ideas. The artist’s handling of materials evokes the fusion of ancient rock, while the pencil outline of mountains remains barely visible, each image suspended on fragile paper within the frame. The artist’s delicate alchemy of bled ink, in grey, black and umber accented with a fine streak of blue are exciting in their experimentation and associative range. A larger scale work like After The Melt is on one level an exploration of materials and surface textures but also reads like a vast aerial perspective of land seen from above. This shifting perspective lead by the artist’s experimentation with her chosen media is invigorating, and it will be interesting to see how Van Muysen’s work continues to develop.

This is a varied and interesting exhibition and although frustratingly the space restricts ATS members work to two dimensions, it is gratifying to see the group’s work reaching a wider audience in a central Highland location.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

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• An Talla Solais

AT THIS time of year there is usually a members’ show at An Talla Solais in Ullapool.

This year they called for 3D objects, and the result, called Lustre, is a small but pleasing exhibition of sculpture and craft work. A few big pieces dominate the space. Up on one wall, a concrete and wire sculpture, suggestive of a crocodile’s gaping mouth, immediately grabs my attention. It is by Susan Brown, whose drawings of a vortex stood out at the West Coast Open exhibition. Next to it is a copper-wire sculpture, called ‘Life Through Space’, which is strangely organic in form, like an orange squid.

Susan Brown - To See Through

Also very striking is a fine-wire-and-bead representation of constellations, called ‘An Hour Before Dawn’, by John MacIntyre. The shadows cast behind it enhance the delicacy of the piece. Two big, glossy wooden sculptures by David Marshall celebrate the natural muscular shapes and textures of the wood but are also partially carved. The fingers on one piece seem a perfect way to reflect this blend of the tree’s own creativity and that of the artists’ hand.

John McIntyre - An Hour Before Dawn

My favourite piece of the show stands in one corner: a felt man raising a foaming beer mug (the piece is called ‘Slainte Mhath’). Made by Meryl Carr, he has big brown feet (filled with stones, I gather) and his green tunic and shirt would make him a fairy-tale rustic, except his face, with bulbous nose and veins standing out in his forehead, is far too realistic for that.

Artist Books by Joanna Wright

Frances Fogg has made several boats out of driftwood, stones and sea-smoothed glass, sticks and cloth, which seem to have been washed up from the shore and are soon to sail off out of their frames. Then there are lots of little pieces in glass cases, among them Joanna Wright’s little artist books. ‘Roof’ is made of iron and print, and is surprisingly delicate. Even more so is ‘Something settled here and took’, an organic gathering of flowers and ideas, revealing an eclectic and attentive creative process.

One of the sculptures by Barbara Peffers, called ‘Nothing is Lost’, also seems to address this aspect of creativity – all kinds of different materials, soft and hard, even a fish, are bursting out of a filing cabinet. I also took note of some pretty textiles by Eiream Strange, an appealing owl by Jennifer Morrison, and a rolling horse by Evelyn Peffers. It’s a shame that David Bastow’s beautifully turned wooden pieces are behind glass, thus can’t be stroked, but a gleaming silver tiny cup by Charlotte Watters is shown off well in the bright light of the case.

Charlotte is one of a group of An Talla Solais members who are embarking on a new enterprise called the Market Street Collective, a co-operative of seven artists who have taken over one of the rooms in the gallery to use as a shop, from now until Christmas. If it works well they hope to open again from April next year. The other artists are printmaker Phil James, weaver Flora Bush, felter Meryl Carr (the maker of the green man), jewellery-creator Merlin Planterose, painter and textile artist Celia Charity and bookbinder Jan Breckenridge. In addition to selling their own work, the shop welcomes guest artists and they have plans to feature an artist of the month. Some of the guests’ work from that stands out are Fergus Stewart’s pottery and two lovely ceramic hares by Paul and Jill Szeiler.

Charlotte Watters - Prosthetic and Fragment

Giving a room over to a commercial group is possibly a controversial move for the gallery. An Talla Solais’ motivation, as a community arts organisation, is to give practical support to the livelihoods of local artists – particularly welcome in the difficult economic climate. An Talla Solais will take a small percentage of sales made in the shop, and the members of the collective are volunteering to sit in the gallery, thereby allowing it to open longer hours. They hope that the presence of the shop will make the gallery attractive to a wider range of people, bringing some folk through the doors who would otherwise not visit an art exhibition.

There seems good potential for synergy between the two organisations, and it is a way for the gallery to get some benefit from commercial activity without having to trade directly itself. It will be interesting to watch how the partnership develops.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog

FOUR VIEWS is an exhibition of work by four artists with connections to Ullapool.

The veteran of the four is Dick Lindsay, who presents pieces from throughout his long life. Although Dick’s early pictures show that he had talent as a young man, he did not take his art seriously until he ‘got down to business’ after retiring aged 69, and over the subsequent more than two decades his work has become increasingly vivid.

Work by Dick Lindsay

Most of his pieces are in pen and ink, conjuring light and shade with tiny marks. In breath-taking detail, he captures patterns and forms that seem photographic in quality. A picture of Ullapool harbour has three-dimensional cloud formations, which on closer examination are just an implausible mixture of ink marks and blank paper, yet standing back, the clouds fluff back to seeming reality.

He captures a gleam of light on the curving hull of a boat in its shed. An outstanding coloured ink drawing of Isabella Rossellini reveals her as sad, but radiant, with eyes that follow you around the room. The best of his drawings give such realistic renderings of weather, animals and people that they seem caught in motion.

Rhona Joan Macleod - The Church Where I Was Christened

Rhona Joan Macleod’s landscapes seem innocent and almost childlike by comparison. In a range of watercolours and acrylics, they include slightly wonky renditions of Inverness streets and buildings, and dreamy rural views in gentle colours. There are several linocuts, which are particularly pleasing, with wild weather skies captured in a few strokes and a wash of watery colour. A picture of the standing stones at Callanish has a brooding sense of presence in the stones. The Church Where I Was Christened, sepia toned, evokes earlier, simpler times.

There’s no sepia at all in Simon Mackenzie’s palate, but he uses every other colour imaginable in his explosive paintings. Most are abstracts, yet evoke a range of natural subjects: flames, trees, water, sky. There is lava in wax and paint, and blossom in joyful blue and white.

Work by Simon Mackenzie

Blown Into Colour is a warm celebration in positive tones. Big Bang renders the creation of the universe in spots and splatters of furiously colourful paint, with stars emerging from streaks of nothing. Petroleum is a rainbow sheen in a cave of darkness. Bursting the Banks is a river in spate, full of wild energy splashing out of its frame. This is a room full of drama, the whole spectrum harvested with passion and force.

Equally colourful but much more delicate are the textiles and books of Pam McDonald, who paints with fabrics and stitches together fragments of life into beautiful wholes. There is work here of exquisite complexity, like Sylvia’s Box, a big collage made from the contents of a sewing box, with lace, buttons, paper cuttings, patchwork templates and image fragments combined into a conceptual portrait, like a map of a psyche. A fold-out book of Jedburgh Abbey contains pages of glimpses and glances, as if looking back through time.

Work by Pam Macdonald

Some of the most fascinating of Pam’s pieces are artist books, compendia of ideas and experimentation with stitches and edges, fabric layering effects and explorations of geometry, which give a sense of endless curiosity with colour, texture and pattern. She starts somewhere in the world of embroidery but ends up taking us into an artistic heartland where she seems to be asking intriguing and difficult questions about how to look and feel and make something beautiful. These are tactile pieces begging to be stroked and touched, deliciously rich in colour and dense with thoughtful and skilful handiwork.

The work of these four artists shows such huge variation of practices and materials it is hard to believe it all has the same landscape as its common inspiration.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog

WHY are pots so much cheaper than paintings? Put it another way, why is the art of a painter considered so much more valuable than that of a ceramicist?

An Talla Solais is currently filled with ceramic art demonstrating without question that this is a medium rich in form, colour, graphic power and humour. From the classical beauty of Fergus Stewart’s bowls to Allison Weightman’s organic forms, from the delicate foliage effects on Helen Michie’s work to Alex Johannsen’s comic dogs, this show makes clear the variety of expressive options that can be used by ceramic artists.

Although the exhibition’s title indicates that smoke is the medium, as well as painting with fire, these makers paint with earth, salt and a plethora of minerals.

Allison Weightman

The star of the show is Allison Weightman, whose beautiful pieces range from huge, glistening, pregnant forms to just-hatched seed-pods. There are genie-refuges begging to be rubbed and elegant jars waiting to be balanced on a head, along with pleasingly curvaceous stoppered pots.

Her colours include fire-heart copper and turquoise, with exquisitely complex patterning of their surfaces.  Cupola, a sculpture of a mosque-like building surrounded by a flock of hanging ceramic white birds, is a response to a poem by Russian poet Vladimir Vysotksy, and the motion of the birds and their shadows, somehow suggesting their calls, is a far cry from the stereotype of ceramics as static and heavy.

Helen Michie’s work similarly defies this stereotype, with strange and beautiful marine shapes and hanging tiles imprinted by delicate natural materials like seaweed, birch leaves and ferns.

Helen Mitchie - Seaweed

There is paradox in baking the ephemeral softness of thistle-down into the enduring solidity of clay. In such pieces, and in her saggar-fired patterns of flowing sand, she catches a fleeting moment in time and makes it permanent.

Fergus Stewart makes functional pottery in many forms and colours, but his work presented here is limited to bowls, and blue-glazed bowls at that.

Bowls by Fergus Stewart

At first there is something odd about seeing pots just like those used on a daily basis for soup and salad in an art gallery, but by showing us just blue bowls, Fergus forces us to see more clearly their elegant shape, and more importantly to look at the subtle beauty of their salt glazes, like star-bursts or summer skies. A zen opportunity was perhaps missed by not giving them a room of their own in the gallery.

Alex Johannsen’s pieces acknowledge, in a tongue-in-cheek way, their ancestry in the mantelpiece china dog, though his Auld Wifies, complete with rollers, specs and fag, might have something to say about that.

Work by Alex Johannsen

As well as contributing pots to the show, Allison Weightman has ensured it is a real community exhibition, having encouraged dozens of people to get involved in creating tiny pots, which were fired in a pit at the gallery’s Open Day in late August.

The result of this process is a glass-case full of little polished pieces, arranged like a museum showcase of archaeological finds, and as we look at the rows of dimpled shapes we expect to see labels telling us they have been dug up from a Neolithic burial chamber or a Viking hoard.

The ceramics shared the gallery with paintings of pots and mixed media works. The three-dimensional pottery mostly outshines the squares on the walls, although some of the paintings do stand up to the competition.

Peter White brings not only three bowls, but also their luminous emptiness into the room, and Joanna Wright has an intriguing sequence representing Islamic pots in the British Museum, painted on a mosaic with different textures suggesting lights and atmospheres of distant places and times.

Peter Haring’s delicate photographic glimpses of a Buddha statue gave more hints of the ancient world traditions of ceramics.

Many of the paintings were still-life representations of jugs and bowls, which struggled to do justice to the real thing, yet, strangely, their prices outstripped the ceramics, often by a significant degree. The question of value was hard to ignore: what makes a painting worth £400 when the beautiful pot it represents can be yours for £40?

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog

I ENTER the exhibition of James Lumsden’s paintings, knowing that the walls will be filled with nothing more than blocks of colour, fully expecting to be baffled. I leave, to coin a cliché, enlightened.

I had assumed that for an artist to shun depiction and work in purely abstract forms involved some kind of arrogance and I did not expect to like the result. Now I think that actually it requires something more like humility to present such non-figurative pieces, giving an audience the opportunity to experience the raw emotional response to pure colour.

Work from the exhibition in An Talla Solais

Although the paintings don’t set out to represent anything in particular, James says that he is happy if we find objects or landscapes in the work, and he seems unworried, if somewhat bemused, as people walk around, interpreting marks and blobs as animals (‘a conger eel chasing a fish’) or even people. Indeed I could not help but see some pieces consisting of two bands of colour as landscapes – a horizontal line seems to divide water and air, suggesting a lochan reflecting sky or sunset over the ocean. The paintings are dense with light and atmosphere and somehow don’t seem truly abstract at all.

Yet, the works I enjoyed the most are impossible to view as naturalistic in any way. A big red ‘Contained Painting’ is in fact barely contained by its two narrow side-stripes of black and white. The red is so vibrant, so warm, and it glows so powerfully that it seems to flow out from its containment to fill the whole room, reflecting its red blaze out into the space.

The intensely shiny quality of all these works means they act as pools of colour-filled light, bathing us as we walk around the exhibition. Thus a room full of predominantly blue pictures ends up with a cooler, airier feeling than the room dominated by that hot red. The corridors present pictures, made while James was artist in residence at An Talla Solais in 2010, of monochrome graphite and acrylic, full of interesting textures, offering a pause between the colour-filled rooms.
The smallest room is the most highly charged. Windowless, and thus perhaps concentrating its light, it has about a dozen pieces called ‘Fugue’, specially created for this exhibition. The idea of a fugue, in which a melodic phrase is used over and over in different ways, is a metaphor for the process of creating these works. Each is made of up to 40 layers of acrylic paint, gradually building up a counterpoint of colour over a period of months.

James says that his colour choices are unplanned and intuitive. Many of the panels are divided into two horizontally, and his choice of where to make the break occurs spontaneously. After a few layers of paint are done a natural place to divide the piece into two emerges as a flaw, suggesting a line, which he then makes ruler-straight, setting up progressive contrast between the colour above and that below.

As each layer of paint is worked, marks and blots happen, and these inconsistencies in tone are crucial. What appears at first glance to be a monochrome slab with fixed lines – harsh, shiny, cerebral – reveals itself to be much more subtle, almost fluid, with tones that seem to ripple as the surface catches changes in the light or movement in the room.

I suspect that in a different light, at a different time of day, all kinds of other tones than those I saw would be observable from the depths of the images. Even though the acrylic they are made of is hard and immutable, it seems as if underlying layers of colour could well up from within them.

Many of the pieces are called ‘Liquid Light’, and they evoke rippling water and stranger effects, like aurora, with a fleeting quality. Some dark dualities, neon green over dark grey for example, are positively creepy, while others are warming, even joyful.

There is space to find anything we like in James Lumsden’s minimalist artworks and I wonder why they are so satisfying to look at. Is it precisely because they allow our egos and imaginations so much room to play?

As a result of this exhibition I have realised a tendency in myself to expect an artist to be someone who is trying to thrust their big personality into the world. I go to a gallery seeking entertainment, or insight, to be told a story or shown the world in a new way. But here, instead, are rectangles of coloured acrylic with nothing more than a shiny surface and some suggestions of texture. The content that I expect to be shown is missing.

Yet in these busy, information-drenched times, it is actually a great relief to be freed from content. What remains is a kind of meditative space. Having no ‘things’ to look at is an invitation to stop thinking: there’s nothing to work out, no narrative to follow, no message to decipher. There is nothing except pure colour to respond to. And, to my amazement and delight, I find that my ability to respond to pure colour is alive and well and, what’s more, the response feels good.

An intriguingly atmospheric and thought-provoking exhibition.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog

TALL Ships are due to arrive in Ullapool next weekend (from 15 July 2011) on their way to Shetland, but the celebrations have already begun at An Talla Solais, with a flotilla of small ships, created by members of the community and friends of the art centre.

The small ships are pictures of yachts and dinghies, pirates and fishermen, in every setting from harbours to the open ocean. Each of the 150 images has been painted, drawn, carved, modelled, collaged or otherwise conjured onto a diminutive tile of marine plywood. Collectively they form a colourful and joyous display called Fleet.

Ceramic tiles from Fleet

Quite apart from their artistic merits, which are considerable, the small ships are raising funds for the centre, which receives no public funding. There was a silent auction at the weekend, and any left unsold will be on sale until the end of July. What better souvenir could there be of the ‘nautical fever’ gripping the west coast?

Alongside Fleet are two other art exhibitions with a marine flavour: moody seascape etchings by Jason Hicklin, and a unique collection of work by Joanne B Kaar and Lynn Taylor, called Westland.

Joanne B Kaar is a Scottish paper artist and Lynn Taylor is a New Zealand printmaker and visual artist. Together they have created an extraordinary interpretation of the journey of The Westland, which set off from Tail o’ the Bank in Caithness in 1879, taking emigrants on an 84 day voyage to Port Chalmers in New Zealand. The work arose when Joanne spent time as artist in residence at Mary-Ann’s Cottage (Dunnet, Caithness), home of William Young, one of the emigrants. The blog of her residency (see below) is an enthralling cornucopia of art and history.

At the heart of the exhibition are a set of log books. Most of Joanne B Kaar’s work consists of hand-made paper, and she used this to recreate the original log of the journey. Both she and Lynn kept a log for 84 days in 2009, as a parallel to the original sailing, recording the shipping forecast, the passage of boats in Caithness and responses to the diary of one of the emigrants, Jonathan Moscrop, who recorded everything from sickness to rats to peculiar events onboard the ship.

Westland

Beyond the log books, Joanne has created a seemingly endless flow of reconstructions and imaginings to do with the journey and the sailors, most of them made of paper. But these are unusual paper objects. There is a hooded raincoat, made waterproof with a Japanese brown stain, called Kakashiki, and a ‘ditty bag’, which was the traditional bag made by apprentice sail-makers, involving every stitch they would need to use.

Books are made with peat incorporated into the paper, others with remnants of Scalpay linen. Inside frames are abstract collages made of paper, stitching, driftwood and ink drawings, some called ‘boats and ropes’, dense with wordless thoughts about how the makers of boats went about their work. Bringing the textures of old boats to life, these are celebrations by a modern day craft maker of the detailed handiwork of the makers of the past. And there is string – marvellous string!

The exhibition contains less of Lynn’s work than Joanne’s, but it has a similar flavour of painstaking technique coupled with a mindset that deeply inhabits the past. Seemingly simple pieces, like a tea cup and two doilies encrusted with salt, bring vividly to the senses the experience of the Westland’s passengers spending weeks on end in a salt-water environment.

I particularly enjoyed the layer upon layer of history and response in Joanne and Lynn’s work. A story from the ship unravels through a string horse and five bottles of whisky. Three aprons (one to protect a dress, the next to protect the first apron, and a third, made out of sacking, to protect the other two) emerge from Lynn’s log book and are given physical form by Joanne. Seeing such an integrated body of work it is incredible to discover that the two artists have never actually met.

Etching by Jason Hicklin

The third exhibition, a series of etchings and oil paintings of coastal waters and islands in Ireland and the Hebrides, is the first that you encounter on walking into the gallery. With its brooding, haunting atmosphere, Jason Hicklin’s work balances the vivacity of Westland and the colourful diversity of Fleet. Almost monochrome, these pictures all depict land blurring into water. Jason Hicklin evokes tumultuous seas and waves crashing on cliffs and captures perfectly the way clouds merge into sea, watery sun reflects in weedy shallows and evening light calls from the western horizon. These are pictures to gaze into, reflecting how the worst of weather can still be beautiful.

Whatever the weather for the rest of July, this is one boat that should definitely not be missed.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Joanne B Kaar Blog
• Mandy Haggith’s Blog
• Mandy Haggith

AS I drove south to see the opening of the latest exhibition at an talla solais, I witnessed a spectacular double rainbow arching between Quinag and Loch Assynt.

On the way back, the sunset was a blaze of molten bronze over Ben Mor Coigach, casting spotlights on Elphin and transforming the sheet of rain over Cam Loch into a pink phosphorescent haze.

Frances Pelly – Grass Noust

Competing with the full force of Assynt and Coigach’s sky-painters were two mere artists, Frances Pelly and John Cumming, displaying in the tiny Ullapool gallery. It seems unfair to review their work without acknowledging these unmatchable pre- and post-exhibition displays.

When the warm-up act is Aphrodite and the encore is given by Neptune, any artist is going to seem, to put it bluntly, human. Satiated with colour on a huge scale, I found a contemplative quietness in the three-room display of sculptures by the two Orkney-based artists.

Much of the work is muted in colour – natural geological tones ranging from alabaster white to the dark cloud-shades of Caithness flagstone. Wood, copper and bronze bring some other tones into the spectrum, but the overall effect is softly-spoken.

Frances Pelly makes sticks into spell-casting sceptres. She binds them together with birch bark, grass stalks and copper picked up on a beach and hangs them from the ceiling to swing and twist. Like musical instruments or monsters, the shadows they cast seem to be as much part of their presence as their material forms.

There is much else in her work that is delicate: the Hoy sketches are strange suggestions of birds, air movements and clouds cast in what looks like papier-maché.

So, coming across a piece of stone sculpture, I found myself assuming that this must be by the other artist, and indeed many of John Cumming’s pieces are weighty stones, including several smooth, tactile skimming stones, some of which would need a huge hand with a giant’s power behind it to make them skim.

Yet some of the substantial stone pieces are also by Frances Pelly, who makes much of her living cutting memorial stones. She seems as at home carving sandstone as making pieces out of driftwood or grass.

Likewise, my presumption that a set of fuschia sticks with ceramic lumps like wasp galls, were another feminine work, was contradicted by the artist’s name. This time it was John Cummings conjuring the mysterious forms of ‘Dhans’.

His works play with appearances: making boulders out of wood (Cairn), pebbles out of clay (The Vaddel) and strange creatures out of turf (Poans). As the names suggest, John has his roots in Shetland.

In fact, both artists make rich use of the dialects of the Northern Isles, collaborating with poets and other writers in the works in this exhibition and more widely through the Hansel Cooperative Press, which promotes the culture, art and writing of the islands.

John Cumming - Tilfer

Short poems, haiku, fragments of text and groups of words are carved and rendered into wood and stone. Some of these pieces are playful and thought-provoking: John Cumming’s ‘Tilfer’ has ‘first there was an island, then there was a boat’ engraved on a boat-shaped arrangement of planks.

Works like this celebrate both text and texture: Frances Pelly’s ‘Seawords’ presents five words that traditionally should never be spoken on board a boat, together with their allowable euphemisms, mixing paint and engraving to blend the spoken words with their hidden meanings.

The haiku carved by Frances Pelly are a less successful blend of poetry with sculpture: although beautifully worked, I wonder whether the words, already compressed in meaning, are given the space they need on their dense, black slabs.

Both artists clearly take pleasure in making the link to Scotland’s ancient stone-carving tradition. Two of John Cummings works, ‘Wall Knot’ and ‘Man Knot’, are modern-day Celtic stones. (The latter, tragically, fell and broke the night before the opening and has been hurriedly mended.) Frances Pelly continues the Pictish tradition of carving nature’s transience onto rock, with works like ‘Leaf Stone’.

My favourite piece of all, Frances Pelly’s ‘Fall’, is a drift of ceramic leaves, ranging from white to charcoal, all individually crumpled. As if falling from an invisible tree, they are scattered down a wall and into a cluster at floor level – a gust of breeze made tangible.

This exhibition proved a peaceful place to contemplate – ‘da still point I da world’s roost’, in the words of poet Yvonne Grey – while outside the sky went psychedelic.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Mandy Haggith’s website
• Mandy Haggith’s blog

We offer gallery space for the display of contemporary arts and crafts, workshop rooms and studio space for local artists. We run a series of exhibitions, workshops and classes throughout the year with the aim of enabling the local community and visitors to engage with the visual arts in new and stimulating ways.

THE West Coast Open exhibition at An Talla Solais shows the Ullapool gallery at its most community-minded. Submission to the show is open to anyone, and for this year all those who put work in have at least one piece displayed (although that is not policy – all work is individually selected). Around half of the artists are from the Ullapool area, with the rest coming from far and wide around the UK.

It is a testament to the success of the gallery as a community organisation that this exhibition has impressive submissions from well-known local professional artists who are willing for their work to sit alongside pieces from amateurs and hobbyists.

Work by Shiela Robertson

Walking into the room where one wall is dominated by James Hawking’s wildly colourful ‘Falls Glen Doucharry’, it is hard to look at anything else. Likewise Peter White’s paintings create a huge presence with their thought-provoking emptiness – a blank book, hats without heads. Paintings of this quality are immediately striking and more rewarding the more time you give them.

The gallery, which used to be a dark and uninviting space, has been refurbished and is now bright and welcoming, with lighting that draws attention to the work on walls and plinths. It is small, but the circular arrangement of rooms and use of the corridors creates a sense of space and encourages you to revisit what you have already seen from a different direction.

There is such a profusion and variety of work on display that it repays a second or third look, and often I found myself returning to a room and coming upon pieces that I had completely overlooked at first glance. One such was the West Coast Odyssey, a collage by Rosemary Bassett that appeared at first abstract, rather like the inside of an oyster shell, and only on second examination revealed itself as an exquisitely literal portrayal of the mountain landscape of this area.

Susanna Robson’s landscapes had a similar effect, the intense quality of the light in her paintings of Waternish and Lewis becoming more and more beguiling with each encounter. Other work that grew on me included Susan Brown’s two black and white drawings: ‘Tunnel into Darkness’ and ‘Tunnel into Light’, the intensely coloured work of Sandra Murray and the exquisite detailing of Richard Lindsay’s pen and ink evocation of the Snowy Kintail Sisters.

Untitled piece by Dan Murray

The exhibition has been curated with skill and each room has a balance of paintings, sculptures, craft pieces and photography, although paintings and drawings dominate. There is much to enjoy, too much to be able to name-check everything worth seeing. The sculptures (especially Barbara Peffer’s) and photographs are a particularly enthralling aspect of the exhibition, and it is perhaps surprising not to see more work in these media.

In one room, Alison Weightman has a pair of ceramic seeds and a single seed. Next door there is another ceramic pair and singleton, this time by Patricia Shone. This pattern of singles and pairs is repeated over and over, creating a pleasing rhythm and helping the exhibition cohere, with many instances of two similar pieces by one artist together in one place, and third different piece on its own, sometimes nearby (such as Rhiannon van Muysens’s absorbing abstract paintings) and sometimes (like Martin Howard’s startling fish and bird photographs) in another room.

Hare made from driftwood by Paul Szeiler

The best joke is Jan Breckenridge and Viv Halcrow’s bike with wicker paniers, called ‘Whither Donkey’, and I enjoyed the pair of hares, both Paul Szeiler’s salvaged boatwood sculpture and Sara Garnett’s miniature. And there are dark moments, like Lynn Bennett-Mackenzie’s charcoal drawing called ‘Journey’, which depicts a hand holding a feather, or perhaps about to drop it, suggesting a need for letting go.

Although much of the work is recognisably west coast Scottish, there are glimpses of other parts of the world. For example, Joanna Wright brings a sense of Uganda; her ‘Elders under the Mango Tree’ evokes the light and shade of a place far hotter than Ullapool’s hottest days.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the town that has a fish festival should have so many fish on show. There are many, and they are various. Philip D James’ mackerel caught my eye, as did Anne Roberts Nicoll’s mermaid, but my favourites were Florence Jamieson’s fish in moonlight, although it did take me a while to notice them lurking in the shadows underneath James Hawkins’ radiant falls.

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

• An Talla Solais

FIVE young artists have retraced their steps to Ullapool to create a vital and varied exhibition of painting, collage, animated film, environmental installation and illustrations, at An Talla Solais.

The artists studied together with Eleanor White at Bridge House Art during 2006, producing portfolios which won them art school places. They went their separate ways, two to Edinburgh College of Art, two to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee and one to Glasgow School of Art.

They have all since graduated, and this show brings together their work, in both individual and collaborative pieces, revealing five very different directions of artistic development.

Rhiannon van Muysen - Titans Moon

The most arresting pieces of the show are the paintings of Rhiannon Van Muysen, originally from Durness. She has filled a room with pieces that are abstract yet bring together textures and patterns that seem completely naturalistic, as if they are lichens that have grown, rather than  having been created.

One, a huge round ‘Titan’s Moon’, fills a wall with complex and mesmerising light. Another combines a sense of rusty decay with the expansiveness of deep space. Many of these pieces are circular and reminiscent of chemistry experiments that have generated unexpectedly beautiful, colourful results.

There are even actual petri-dishes, and magnifying glasses to allow us to peer into their textured contents. We are told their ingredients: clay, iron, sulfur and resin, or verdigris and agar-agar; familiar names with something strange and alchemical about them.

They make you wonder if they will appear the same on another day. I longed for microscopes, the ability to look even more closely. Rhiannon says she is inspired by ‘study of landscapes both vast and microscopic’. Her resulting paintings have an organic feeling that is both serene and intriguing.

Christine Morrison is also influenced by the environment and by the particularity of place. She presents two visualisations of data about the natural world: a demonstration of the high tide marks over a week – ‘7 days:13 tides’, the levels of which are represented by pieces of driftwood (in glass wax – why?) suspended at appropriate heights; and a wall-graphic showing varying day length over the 52 Sundays of a year.

Christine Morrison - 7 days 13 tides

Both are specific to Ullapool and are novel ways of seeing the rhythms of nature. My favourite piece of the show was displayed only at the launch, down at Ullapool harbour, where, after dark, a rowing dinghy floated in a water-filled boat that will never go to sea again. At its prow, a video played of a journey out into open sea. The little boat bobbed in reality and on film, to a soundtrack of spray and creaking timbers, as if remembering an earlier voyage.

Tiffany Bottomley is interested in feminism, and creates collages of fabrics, lace, fabrics, mirrors, silk flowers and plastic wreaths. A hair piece is hung with pink flowers. On the beach is a pile of stones, each decorated with pretty patterns: dots, stripes and glitter.

Tiffany Bottomley - Mutton dressed as lamb dressed as lamb dressed as mutton

There is a lot of pink frilly stuff but it is shredded and stuck back together again in odd ways, as if Tiffany has taken apart the very idea of girliness and pieced together something different, something rather unsettling and impersonal, something that asks questions about what femininity is all about.

Mary Somerville’s stop motion animations are strangely delightful. ‘Sirius the Dog Star and Dog’ features a two-headed plasticene dog, who inhabits a monochrome world of everyday objects that do not behave normally. A chair shuffles about, as does a box on legs. A sad plasticene character sits at the bottom of a ladder but does not climb up it. We ask why not?

Mary Somerville - Pylons and the Stilts Hut

A door closes and we want to know who is behind it. It opens and we wonder where it goes to. The world is pared down to a few simple shapes and as narratives are suggested, we are drawn into making stories.

Matt Stockl’s illustrations take stories and songs as starting points and move on from there. They are dark and stark, black pen drawings of odd part-people part-animal characters. He has brought a little known Grimms fairy tale, The Three Army Surgeons, back from oblivion, and created a series of suitably disturbing pictures to go with it. I’ve not seen anything like it since David Hockney’s illustrations of Rapunzel and Rumpelstilzchen.

Matt Stockl - Throw it all away

© Mandy Haggith, 2011

Links

An Talla Solais

FOLLOWING his highly successful collaboration and exhibition with poet Jon Miller at an talla solais, Ullapool, last August 2010, Peter White’s current solo show at Kilmorack Gallery presents the viewer with a typically beguiling combination of presence and absence within the same frame. Distilled into a series of iconographic objects, the art of Peter White evokes meditative stillness, the seeming emptiness of vessels such as bowls, books, hats or garments transformed by the artist’s rendering into objects of spiritual contemplation.

Peter White's Garment 2

White’s palette is characteristically subtle and coolly ethereal which makes light and warmth all the more luminescent when it does appear. Garment 1 (Mixed media) is a particularly beautiful example, the arms of the empty shirt outstretched like a prophet, tonally lit from within. The visual draw of this composition is to the centre of the image where the human heart should be, a space glowing like embers, the whole form suspended on a ground of the deepest ultramarine. The two dimensional painted surface itself is also illuminated at the edges, the panel rendered as symbolic as the treatment of the subject.

Absence of physical human form also creates a powerful presence in Hat 4, the skull cap hovering delicately, defining the space where a human head should be. The intimate, childlike scale of this work is poignant for it suggests mindfulness rooted in age rather than infancy, an object evocative of time and therefore of mortality in relation to the human condition.

White’s treatment of the human head throughout the exhibition is cerebral rather than personal; on an intimate or monumental scale the artist’s heads feel less like portraiture and more like Everyman. Heads 1-9 in graphite all look directly at the viewer as if through a veil of chiaroscuro, framed in isolation on dark grounds. Although they display individuality in variations of features, they feel very much like a chorus proclaiming the artist’s vision. These heads, like the objects depicted throughout the exhibition, are removed from their earthly context and hover like visions out of darkness or dreams.

Peter White's Garment Triptych

There is something inherently spiritual, yet completely non-denominational, about White’s imagery. In Garment Triptych (Mixed media 250cm x 130cm) his use of three panels and the empty garment, arms outstretched, immediately suggests the crucifixion, albeit with an absence of flesh and blood. A series of strips of cloth, each arranged emblematically on a variety of dark grounds feel as if they are details plucked from the art of medieval Germany or Flanders, with their religious motto or heraldry removed, blank, fluttering and suspended, each contained within their own dark space. The build up of the painted surface in mixed media feels like the accumulation of ages, particularly in the tar like background of Strip 10, the white illumination of an inanimate object recalling portraiture and figurative work of the Northern Renaissance.

Peter White's Bowl 2

There is a sense in which all of White’s objects become humanised, presented on panels in isolation and held aloft for contemplation; layers of wax and pigment are painstakingly crafted, contours of form and surface patina almost sculptural in their rendering. Garment 2 feels as though it is a panel wrought in bronze, steeped in aqua, blues, greens and russet, a diffuse palette, evocative of the effect of weather and the elements on metal, yet visually suspended as if seen underwater. The surface of the painting is alive with texture, and this attention to detail, the crafting of the image, is what makes White’s work so distinct.

Peter White’s latest solo show displays with insistence the artist’s unique vision but there is also variety in terms of subject matter and scale, creating a fluid dialogue between figurative, still life and landscape genres. White’s enigmatic work is beautifully crafted throughout, a perfect synthesis of technique and ideas.

© Georgina Coburn, 2011

Links

• Kilmorack Gallery

NORMAN MACCAIG was born 100 years ago this month, on 14 November 2010. He spent his summers in Assynt for forty years, from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, and he left a poetic legacy of more than 100 poems about Assynt, despite his claim to be leaving ‘nothing but / cigarette packets and footprints’ in the place he called ‘this most beautiful corner of the land’.

To honour MacCaig’s poetry, the community of Assynt ran a week-long celebration involving readings of new poetry and old, walks, talks, ceilidhs and not just one but two art exhibitions.

Helen Denerley's sculpture Goat from the An Talla Solais exhibition

Art and poetry rub up against each other in ways that can transform the way we see each other and our places. Auden said ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, but in Scotland that nothing has been enormously significant, as Alan Riach and Alexander Moffat explained to a packed room in Lochinver (8 November), as they talked about how MacCaig’s poems sit among the rest of 20th century Scottish poetry, and how poetry influences Scottish culture more broadly.

They showed how poets like MacDiarmid helped to build the confidence in Scotland as a nation that has led to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, and argued that poets like Norman MacCaig, Sorley Maclean and George Mackay Brown set trends and expressed ideas that were responded to by Scottish artists, changing the way the north of Scotland is seen and heard in Scottish culture.

We can’t prove it, of course, but it is hard in Assynt not to believe that MacCaig’s words played a key role in the historic land buyouts that have helped to stem the decline of this fragile corner.

‘Who owns this landscape?

The millionaire who bought it or

the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning

with a deer on his back?’

‘Who possesses this landscape? –

The man who bought it or

I who am possessed by it?’

‘Does owning have anything to do with love?’

These words, from MacCaig’s longest poem, ‘A Man in Assynt’, opened up a possibility back in the revolutionary year of 1968. They turned a fact (ownership by the rich and powerful) into a questionable state, they turned a felt injustice into a political imperative and they undermined the status quo.

MacCaig was a visitor from Edinburgh, a schoolmaster and a member of the literary intelligentsia. His questioning of the legitimacy of the landowning elite signals a shift from a Scotland where unruly teuchters might grumble in highland glens, but could be ignored in the central belt. Powerful voices from the capital were on their side. Issues of landownership and the troubles of crofting communities were debated in Edinburgh pubs.

Eventually (it took a generation for change to become material) in 2005, MacCaig’s words were read out in the Scottish Parliament by Assynt people seeking the community right to buy the land put up for sale by the Vestey family, land that included the ‘litany’ of iconic mountains: Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beg.

Politicians and civil servants were faced with the opportunity to give new answers to MacCaig’s questions, and did so. Who owns this landscape now? We do. It is held in trust by the community of Assynt on behalf of the people of Scotland. The marvellous mountain of Suilven, Scotland’s Fuji, is no longer private property.

Like Fuji, Suilven is much painted. Hokusai produced the famous 36 Views of Mount Fuji and almost as many views of Suilven came together in one of the two exhibitions in response to Norman MacCaig’s centenary. The leisure centre in Lochinver, usually the domain of badminton players, silver surfers learning internet skills and kids playing table football, became a place for art.

Suilven, Assynt's iconic mountain (photo by Kenny Mathieson)

The walls filled with paintings and photographs, not just of Suilven – Stac Pollaidh and Quinag featured too, as did many of the more intimate corners of Assynt – and in the room used usually for board meetings, first aid classes and business start-up training sessions, a cornucopia appeared of ceramics, glass, basketry and textiles, with a huge, glassy eyed metal frog, ‘Leap frog with raindrops’, by Gordon Nairn, as the centrepiece.

This joyful and diverse tribute to a brilliant poet is also a demonstration of the wealth of artistic talent in the north west highlands and proof that the landscape continues to inspire the best of Scottish art. Other pieces deserving mention are Helen Steven’s litany of mountains, and a splendidly robust Aunt Julia complete with big boots, full skirt and almost audibly loud Gaelic.

Euan Callus added thoughtful photographic responses to a dozen poems, while Robin Noble’s ‘Quinag’ is a harmonious rallentando in the haze (and Liz Lochhead’s favourite piece in the exhibition). A basket made from thorn stems and rosehips by Claire Belshaw, responding to ‘Praise of a Thorn Bush’, was in turn responded to by Pippa Little, the winner of the Norman MacCaig Poetry Competition.

‘they were supple and pliant, those old words

and they answered under her fingers; a slow

to-and-fro of inland water oars and

knock of a spade edge down-slanted

into peat; of rocks inching their way

through thousands of years…’

Down in Ullapool, a parallel exhibition runs at An Talla Solais. It centres around a marvellous set of sculptures by Helen Denerley including a goat, a crow, a heron, an earwig, starlings and sparrows, and most splendidly a gleaming toad in a rusty box, ‘a tiny radiance in a dark place’. Trevor Lockie also graces the space with a mesmerising painting of a ptarmigan and some glorious and uplifting quills, re-asking another MacCaig question: ‘Birds of which feather?’

Feathers by Trevor Lockie from the An Talla Solais exhibition

The openings of both exhibitions were graced by a performance of a new, specially written, setting of ‘Moment Musical in Assynt’, by harpist Wendy Stewart, which starts with Nordic chords and opens into a melody as full of character as the landscape and the words of the poem deserve. The piece has featured on the soundtrack of a video of some of the poetic highlights of the MacCaig centenary (see below).

Liz Lochhead, Rody Gorman, Alan Taylor, Alan Riach, Sandy Moffat, Colin Will and Norman’s son Ewen all helped to make it a special week. Assynt’s children also joined in the celebration. Poems by 46 pupils from Stoer, Lochinver and Ullapool schools, many illustrated with lavish exuberance, are displayed around the parish in shops, notice-boards and windows and gathered into a collection called ‘Assynt’s Casket’.

One can only feel sorry for Norman for not being around to enjoy it all.

© Mandy Haggith, 2010

Links

• Norman MacCaig Poetry Competition
• An Talla Solais

HI-Arts talks to Ceramicist Allison Weightman just prior to the opening of the exhibition and also finds out about her concerns regarding the future of the teaching of ceramics in Scotland.

Scottish based ceramic artist Allison Weightman, and Committee members of an talla solais, have prompted the exhibition which is entitled ‘Keep the Burners Lit’ to highlight the quality and skill in the tradition of ceramics in Scotland and the demise of the subject in regard to education in the subject throughout the curriculum in both lower and higher education.

Allison had been a self-taught ceramicist in the years prior to being accepted and subsequently graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in the last year of the Ceramics Department. Allison says about her time at ECA: “This was a strange time to be at the end of something, (which seemed as a subject and material to be as important and valid as it had always had been)”.

an talla solais understands that Glasgow School of Art will close its department next year when the current students graduate, it will retain the facilities but there will not be a department focused on the subject regarding specialiation in the subject .

Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen still offers Ceramics as part of a design course, but again it is not a course that specialises in the subject. Across the rest of the country the departments are closed, and although there may be kilns in the colleges, the subject in its own right, has gone.

There are, however, studios in the Central belt, with enterprises like the Glasgow Ceramic Studios, based in the WASP studios. Edinburgh also has similar communal run studios, These spaces are occupied by those who have generally been through art school and are trying to make a living from being a maker. Some of these makers offer short courses but it is difficult for these studios to be utilised as a permanent learning environment, (as space is always an issue), and if they are big enough, there is not funding for the teaching.

Work by Patricia Shone

an talla solais is looking at the moment to secure future funding to build ceramics provision on to the existing building, they hope that this will be a purpose built space, which will allow them to run courses and offer a working environment to students, and facilities for schools and visiting Ceramic Artists to use.

an talla solais also intends to dedicate an exhibition per year to the subject, as part of their already busy programme. It is hoped that gatherings such as the ‘Keeping the Burners Lit’ exhibition and its related events will maintain and develop a profile for the subject.

Work by Veronica Newman

Teapot by Fergus Stewart

“Maybe the subject needed to die the death that it has been sentenced to, so that new shoots will emerge that will be sustainable?”

Ceramics is a subject that takes a lifetime to master, and the experimental years offered to students attending art college are invaluable. Without these years of foundation, it is difficult to imagine how a young person with a passion for clay will be able to find a facility that can compare to that offered by a degree course. We have to accept that Ceramic provision in Scotland as we knew it, has gone.

But what we don’t have to accept that the subject is lost. As long as there is a passion, it will survive.”– Excerpt from Article Printed in The Ceramics Review Magazine issue 244 July/August 2010 written by Alison Weightman

Allison Weightman, June 2010

The exhibitors who are participating in this exhibition were: Daniel Kavanagh, Lotte Glob, Nickolai Glob, Allison Weightman, Gavin Burnett, Illona Morrice, Morag MaGee, Fergus Stewart, Tom Butcher, Veronica Newman, Jym Brammah, Steven Paterson and Patricia Shone.

Find out more about an talla solais by visiting their website on www.antallasolais.org

Croft house by Charlotte Waters

MAYBE places other than Ullapool, Achiltibuie and Lochinver have produced a role call of artistic talent capable of filling concert halls and several arts venues simultaneously – but these are likely to have much larger populations than the two thousand or so who populate the hills and glens in this area of the northwest Highlands.

The current homecoming project in Ullapool takes its name from the Runrig song ‘Tillidh Mi Dhachaidh’ by Calum MacDonald. It translates as ‘I will return home’, and succeeds in showcasing the music and art of pupils – past and present – from Ullapool High School.

It also marks the tenth anniversary of the new community school on Mill Street It was realised by music teacher Val Bryan, who has nurtured generations of musicians in her 25 years in Ullapool. She commissioned former pupil Martin Minton to curate a series of art exhibitions sited around the village.

Thus, a wait for the ferry in Ullapool is currently enriched by the work of artist Charlotte Waters at the Ferry Terminal. Three dimensional geometric shapes painted in various hues of blue sit along the windowsill on the seaward side of the ferry terminal.

Reminiscent of ships or maybe certain wave formations, the pieces break up our view of the sea and relate it to the landscape beyond. These wooden sculptures – one of which has a many-faceted mirror placed alongside it – act as touchstones which challenge us not to take our visual surroundings for granted.

Alongside these fairly large pieces are a couple of models of abandoned croft houses, a spooky reminder of aspects of our history. The houses give the other pieces a sense of scale.

Exquisite jewellery which eschews the clean lines and minimalism of other modern work can be seen in the reception area at The Ceilidh Place in West Argyle Street. Recent graduate Barbara MacLeod merges the contemporary and vintage. Her pieces are delicately etched with lots of detail. Her sources of inspiration include antique wallpaper, fashion and architectural features but a fresh perspective has been brought to bear on the floral themes she references.

The green room next to the coffee shop has an entire wall featuring the work of Frances Fogg. This represents some of the most accessible work on show. It is playful and quirky with a sense of naivety. Using a range of media the artist has depicted a cosy and sometimes comical view of the northwest Highlands. A drawing in sepia illustrates sheep in the middle of the road whilst a colour work of a man and a dog in a boat edges towards caricature.

Undergraduate Alice Nairn, who is currently studying costume design, hints at great work to come with her bold textile contributions.

Prepare to be challenged when you visit the spirited community-run gallery run An Talla Solais, which has taken over a former medical centre. This venue is filled with the work of six former pupils of Ullapool High who have progressed in their artistic careers and whose conceptual approach demands deliberation.

Holly Lockie has chosen ‘the size of our consciousness’ as her theme. Working with acrylic on board or canvas, she presents semi-abstract images ranging from spectacles to an insect on a plant. There is a nod towards pop art in her corner of the gallery.

In the same section animator Alasdair Brotherston and sculptor Jock Mooney have liaised to produce three accomplished animations. Surprisingly an environmental piece entitled ‘Bottom of the River’ is the most lyrical – probably because of the catchy sound track.

PhD student Ian Harrison, whose first degree is in architecture, has produced some cleverly conceived photographs. He took landscape shots and then sited them in context and took photos of the photos in situ. Playing on the wilderness maxim that one should take nothing but photographs and leave nothing but foot prints, Harrison has also created plaster casts of footprints.

Suzy Lee has taken a car journey as her overarching theme. Using slides, road signs and handcrafted books containing writing, she invites us to reflect on our experience of travelling through the landscape and how journeys impact on the way we interact with our fellow passengers.

Finally, a visit to the exhibition sited in the Macphail Centre at the High School reassures that the area’s future artists are set to carry the torch of creative flair. Undergraduates display their work in illustration, fine art and textiles.
Matt Stockl takes us on a leap of imagination with his illustrations whilst fellow illustration artist Kim Richards is more representational in her approach.

Fine art student, Rosie McGregor integrates text into her finely wrought pieces and sites her close family as a source of security and inspiration. Meanwhile, Janet Kelly has produced some photographs of her product design work.

Tiril Planterose sums up the challenges of adapting to city life. She describes her journey from living with her family in their forest home surrounded by nature to the urban environment of Dundee. Tiril displays a mixed media piece of collective figures along side inspired paintings centred on a rowan tree which grows outside her bedroom window at home. Perhaps it is this mix of influence which nurtures highland talent.

© Jenny McBain, 2009

Links

• An Talla Solais
• Macphail Centre
• The Ceilidh Place
  

THIS EXHIBITION at an talla solais presents a superb opportunity to view a substantial selection of over 60 works by acclaimed Scottish artists Will Maclean, RSA RGA RSW, and Marian Leven, RSA RSW. This is a perfectly balanced show with a room devoted to each artist and a third bringing their work together on loan from private collections.

Marian Leven - Interaction

Maclean and Leven’s work compliment each other beautifully, and it is wonderful to be able to view this exhibition in the context of the local West Coast landscape. Both artists’ level of engagement with this environment, together with their exploration of visual language creates an inspiring and thought provoking exhibition. A powerful expression of the mindscape of land and sea, Coastal Connections reinterprets this landscape in human terms, each artist’s methodology revealing a wider cultural process of reevaluation and recognition.

Maclean’s Signs and Symbols/ BadenTarbet (Mixed media and found objects 1999) with its whitewashed low relief and emergent imagery feels like the unearthing of an ancient tablet. Reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the stone carving of the West Highland School of Sculpture, Maclean’s signs and symbols read as an enduring reminder of a sea-going culture. There is something quietly introspective and monumental about the piece itself as a signifier, raising important questions about personal and collective identity. For me the whitewash is very much about the visual culture of the Highlands and Islands, with Signs and Symbols/ Baden Tarbet powerful evidence of its continuing existence.

Displayed on three elevated plinths, Maclean’s Fish With Boat Roove, Big Fish Eat Little Fish and Fish With Double Hook (Bronze 2006) are superbly angular and elegant in their articulation. Like a series of visual lures, line and form, together with the high finish of gilt-edged bronze and green patina, immediately draw the eye.

Exquisitely crafted, they allude to the meaning and value of traditional craftsmanship found in boatbuilding or weaving, of art inseparable from life. Like much of Maclean’s sculptural work they feel like acts of aesthetic engineering, the artist’s long association with the sea consistent throughout his working life in the fisheries and in the studio.

Sulidae Torpedo (Mixed media and found objects 2005) demonstrates methods of construction integral to the artist’s creative process, acts of assemblage shared by artist and audience in the reception of the work. What is so compelling in Maclean’s work is the complexity of its layers, meaning like the technique of collage is creatively fluid and open to interpretation.

In Sulidae Torpedo the box construction presents the viewer with a series of delicately overlaid surfaces. The glider-like model made partially of bone combines stark sculptural lines hovering poetically above its hand-drawn outline. A series of beautifully mysterious surfaces and collaged elements emerge out of the ground of the image.

Crowlin Head (Mixed media on board 2000) is another example, presenting intriguing layers of internal mapping. Striated contours of navigational charts combine with a physical mapping of the muscular structure of the human head. This yellow and aged engraving anchored to a fish and a cross section of vertebrae pull the image out of the frame and into the viewer’s consciousness.

Hand written text and fragments of typeface – “to Canada” – provide points of reference. Maclean’s box constructions are vessels of assembled meaning, found objects gathered and composed in a personal and collective process of recognition. At the heart of this process is a sense cultural loss and endurance.

It is a great pleasure to see works from private collections included in the exhibition, among them Maclean’s “Portrait of Morag Mackenzie, Polbain” (Pen and Ink on Paper, 2007) which has not been previously shown. This unexpected portrait interior, for it is not representative of its genre in an orthodox sense, is an absolute gem. The depth of the interior space draws us in psychologically, a sepia-tinged elusive world of light and shadow fragmentary as memory or a dream, but equally as potent.

The portrait figure itself, features drawn distinctly upon a pale body, hovers in the incandescent light from a rear window. Present throughout the image is a profound sense of reminiscence and human presence, a distillation of portraiture itself. Shadowy dogs like sentinels and the outline of stag’s antler’s frame the image with objects of a childhood past brought vividly to life.

Maclean’s The Drowning – Isle Martin (Acrylic on Paper, 1999) is another fine example of work on private loan. This poignant image of human absence is made visible in the opaque ghost-like silhouette in the boat and sensitivity of paint handling, layered and waterlogged in a drowning haze of blue. The solemn veiled landmass of burnt umber in the background, white line of the horizon and outline of a seagull’s head to the right of the image like a spectre of death add to the ethereal quality of the work.

To the very edges of the distressed frame the painting is infused with strength and feeling. Maclean’s Rudder Shaman (Mixed Media Construction, 2000) is another dominant work in this room, its blackened totemic presence like a talisman for journeying.

Marian Leven’s Summer Isles (Acrylic On Paper, 1996) is beautifully rendered and composed, flecks of sand and striated brushwork give the image vigor and intensity, drawing us into a silent vortex of circular movement in the foreground. Light seems to come from within the landscape and beneath the high horizon line, creating a liberating feeling of space and depth.

A similar dynamic is created in Pool of Light (Acrylic On Paper, 1996) where dark edges give way to luminous expanse and energized brushwork. In Summer Isles the dominant steely blue and grey of the composition is accented with white light and a flash of ochre; whilst Leven’s palette is characteristically subdued it is no less rich, conveying an understanding of pictorial elements explored more radically in the rest of the exhibition.

Leven’s reduction of visual language to bare tone, form, line and colour takes its cues from nature and the coastal environment. There is a strong sense of the momentary definitive mark in her work, a response to shifting patterns of weather and light revealed to the viewer in fragments and traces.

Trace Line (Watercolour On Gesso) is a good example, a sequential statement made in washes of pigment and drawn line. Light From the West (Watercolour on Gesso) is a tremendously subtle piece of work, the smoke-like tonality created in finely speckled marks of paint overlaid both vertically and horizontally. The formal geometric elements of the work are tempered by a gentle layering of textured watercolor on paper giving the whole sequence a minimal, calligraphic quality.

Each work feels very much like a meditation, deceptively simple yet multilayered in its construction. The sense of harmony and balance achieved in these abstract works is compelling. Enclosed Space (Watercolour on Gesso) is a fine example with washes of grey delicate splatter, enclosed in a thinly drawn line, a shard of light in the central form. The whole piece is framed so it hovers adding another layer of enclosed perception to the work.

It is ironic that in a year of Homecoming the most potent exploration of this theme can again be found outside the official programme and that a public exhibition of this stature has been facilitated by a local arts organisation of charitable status. an talla solais are to be congratulated on their vision and commitment to visual arts access, an exhibition of this kind places the work of Highland artists in a national context, bringing that context resoundingly home.

© Georgina Coburn, 2009

Links

• an talla solais

Associated Page

• Creative Connections Gallery

Daniel Reeves: The Future. An Installation

THE NAIRN Book and Arts Festival has been offering some very rich pickings, but the literary event of the week for me-perhaps of the year-was actually a much quieter affair on the other side of the country, in Ullapool, where Les Murray was the guest of the team behind the developing visual arts centre, an talla solais.

Les Murray has been for many years now Australia’s most celebrated and renowned poet. But he also has strong links with the UK – as a younger man he lived here for over a year, even including six months in Culloden- and so he does undertake regular reading tours here. Given his fame, however, these are surprisingly low key affairs, often responding, as in the case of his Ullapool visit, to personal invitations, and driving himself the length and breadth of the country-no publishers’ entourage!

His reading in the MacPhail Centre was a similarly modest affair, with an audience of about 50. Asked if he found audiences different in different parts of the world, he said no, poetry people were much the same everywhere, and we were clearly ‘poetry people’.

After the high profile, carefully staged events in Nairn, Les Murray’s reading could have seemed almost offhand. Even with this small audience closely seated, it might have been better if he’d been miked, as he has a soft voice and can tend to swallow some words.

But then, that may be a ploy to encourage close listening. And his poems certainly repay that close attention. It’s perhaps not surprising that his work should attract a warm response in the Highlands, as it has a lot in common with writers like the late Norman MacCaig or Iain Crichton Smith: a wonderful eye for detail and fleeting moments, a generous humanity, a feel for the underlying sadness of life, a marvellous sense of place, and considerable, sometimes barbed, humour. And his exuberant love of words recalls another giant of that generation, happily still with us, Edwin Morgan.

Despite the informal manner, therefore, each poem he read was received by the audience like a precious gift. He has a particular talent for killer final lines-as he said, someone once complained that his poems don’t end, they just stop, and he confided that those magical final lines ‘have to be earned’ through the labour on the rest of the poem. Not surprisingly, there was a brisk trade in copies of his Collected Poems after the reading.

That evening also saw the launch of an exhibition ‘In Response’ at an talla solais. For some years now the group behind an talla solais have been mounting exhibitions in the building that used to house Ullapool’s library. They have now moved into the former medical centre next door, and this was the first exhibition to be presented in this new space.

All the artists featured had been invited to make work which responded to one of Les Murray’s poems. The result was particularly well suited to the kind of spaces this new an talla solais offers-a sequence of small rooms which allowed a concentration on the work of just one or two artists at a time.

Video artist Daniel Reeves complemented the poem ‘The Future’ with an installation that had at its heart a crystal ball that showed a sequence of strange and beautiful prophetic visions. Dalziel + Scullion presented three mesmerising sections of tree bark digitally photographed in the highest of High Definition.

Ullapool-based Eleanor White, who’d first issued the invitation to Les Murray, interpreted a poem about beans with a series of lush paintings that perfectly matched the wit and baroque language of the poem. Jacqueline Watt’s richly-overlaid abstract paintings related more to the texture of Murray’s poetry than to its content.

There seems to be an explosion of interest in literature in the Highlands these days, with book and writing festivals popping up all over the place. If this means that we can continue to attract writers of the calibre and standing of Les Murray, and those programmed in Nairn, then long may this trend continue!

© Robert Livingston, 2008

Links

• Les Murray
• an talla solais

Work by Sheila Robertson.

ULLAPOOL Visual Arts’ latest open exhibition is clear evidence of a vibrant and diverse West Coast art scene. With work by well-known artists such as Barbara Peffers, Peter White, James Hawkins and Allison Weightman alongside both emerging professional and recreational practice, the show bodes well for the establishment of a local facility for visual arts including studio, workshop and exhibition space.

West Coast Open 3 represents a great range of work from painting and drawing to sculpture, ceramics, textiles, jewellery and mixed media with many innovative and inspirational pieces on display. The fluid relationship between Fine Art and Craft practices is displayed in the work of several artists and this is a unique strength throughout the region.

Innovative and unexpected use of materials can be seen in Merlin Planterose’s series of three “Wax Tiles” constructed from wax and paper and strong design is exhibited by two other works by the artist on show, “Large Bag” (fabric, card and found wood) and “Gravestone Necklace” (copper).

The robust open-chained necklace with a solid ingot naturally hollowed in the centre appears to be part construction, part assemblage of found elements.

This quality can also be seen in Natalie Ryde’s wonderful “A835 aka the Road Kill Brooch” in mixed media including wire and felt and material. It is a humorous, elegant piece of design and adornment transforming the found objects into something unexpected and extraordinary.

Another example is Tonya McMullan’s hanging work “LevelMadamLevel” reading like a curtain or screen and ingeniously constructed from the paper cut out words of the title in a continuous sequence.

Avril Moyes has contributed two textile works to the show, the first a dark piece of woven Polypropeline with a delicate tracery of diagonal lines of bare weave that allows the light to shine delicately through, and “Song of Ananke”, a bold geometric pattern of red hessian bands contrasted beautifully with painted sections of turquoise.

Barbara Peffers’ work “In Memory” constructed from soap stone, found wood and earth pigments displays a combination of refinement in the fine stone carving, the beauty of raw natural materials and the resonance of ancient Pictish symbols. The interplay of natural textures and the delicacy of fragmented human faces etched into stone are accomplished and distinctive.

There are some excellent examples of drawing in the show including the simplicity in pen and ink of Evelyn Peffers “Molly and her Puppies”, Rachel Wylie’s “Untitled II”, a beautiful abstract mixed media work in turquoise, ultramarine, purple and cream, and Lynn Bennett-Mackenzie’s naïve illustrative pen and ink “Someone to Watch Over Me”.

Other highlights in the show include Susan Brown’s “Two Doors” (oil bar) a vibrant, semi abstract composition with energetic cross-hatched layers of colour and the visual anchor of mountain ranges in the distance.

Eleanor White’s two intriguing mixed media triptychs in jewel like colour and Francis Fogg’s “Shore Street” (Ink on card) containing a softness of light and colour that is still, contemplative and glowing contrasted with white drawn lines scratched into the surface.

Two distinctive emerging painters in the exhibition this year (and also memorable in the previous show) are Adam Pellant and Cecilia Garbutt. Pellant’s “Harbour and Village” (acrylic & mixed media) is a fascinating combination of raw energy through use of colour; ochre, sienna, black and ultramarine, loose handling of paint and characteristic under-drawing or mark making allowed to shine through.

There is great spontaneity in this work which is both exciting and refreshing. Garbutt’s “The Angel” and “The Beacon” (both acrylic) are beautifully balanced and composed with complimentary abstract geometric and organic forms coupled with figurative elements. Her style is a fine combination of drawn, scraped and painted textures well balanced by colour and form.

With the current an talla solais building (formerly Ullapool Library) to be demolished, a proposal for the long term lease of the nearby former medical centre as a much needed arts centre for the area is to be considered by Highland Council.

Exhibitions such as this one reveal that the region can be justifiably proud of the visible presence of visual artists within the community who contribute so much to how residents and visitors view Highland life and our unique environment.

The subject matter, media and techniques are extremely diverse and an overwhelmingly positive sign of a healthy, proactive and creative community.

(Open 2pm to 5pm until 23 September).

© Georgina Coburn, 2007