BETWEEN October and December 2012, as part of her Museums Galleries Scotland and Creative Scotland funded “Iconic Artists in Iconic Places” residency at Caithness Horizons, the Fibre Artist created a “Portable Museum of Curiosity” inspired by the hand-made moss collection box, which belonged to Thurso baker and botanist Robert Dick (1811-1866) that is on display at the Museum.

Joanne B. Kaar's Portable Museum of Curiosity

The “Portable Museum of Curiosity” is available for schools, community groups and other heritage organisations to borrow in order to learn more about the life and work of Robert Dick. The “Portable Museum of Curiosity” is already going out on loan to the St. Fergus Gallery, Wick and Mull Museum. It has been featured in a paper entitled “The Herbarium as Muse: Plant Specimens as Inspiration” by Maura C. Flannery, Professor of Biology, St. Johns University, New York at an American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in Boston, which was attended by over 8,000 people.

If you would like to borrow the “Portable Museum of Curiosity” please contact Joanne Howdle, Museum Curator on 01847 896508 or e-mail: joannehowdle@caithnesshorizons.co.uk

The “Portable Museum of Curiosity” will be on display at Caithness Horizons from 21st February until 10th March. During this period the “Portable Museum” will be taken off display for a few hours each day for groups to use.

© Caithness Horizons, 2013

Links

• Caithness Horizons
• Joanne B. Kaar

AT A time when our civic authorities, both local and national, are embracing the possibility of change and attempting to plan for and to facilitate a new future then it is to events such as this exhibition that they should look for inspiration, writes George Gunn.

ON THE preview night around 100 people filled the gallery and there was a real sense that here was a project which united the community in common cause with the artists who produced the work.

Detail from work by Aimee Begg

On the walls of the Caithness Horizons gallery hang works of great imagination and colour, and the energy of youth – literally in the case of Aimee Begg’s Moulin Rouge/Madonna-esque theatre designs – leaps off the wall. Here is a fine example of the wit and confidence with materials, colour and form which runs through this exhibition.

There are other, perhaps less successfully realised, designs for restaurant fronts and CD covers, yet there is contained within them the indication of a talent for draughtsmanship most specifically in the conceptualisation of the Japanese pagoda-style designs by Jack Dunnett. It is these glimpses of what is to come from these artists which is the tantalising and exciting element of this exhibition.

Work by Jack Dunnett

The confidence in colour and form and the ability to express it is highlighted in the series of self portraits most notably in the strange feather headed self-vision of Terri McCallum which has an expressive flair and a sure use of colour – all blood splattered and rag doll cheeky confidence.

This is in marked contrast with the haunting work of Charlotte Gordon, where the artist stares wistfully out from a green canvas where the sky is filled with doomed atmospheric gliders. In mood and exposition these two pieces demonstrate that these young artists follow their own path.

Work by Charlotte Gordon

The still life work also displays an ease in the use of colour and technique. Often these are not mere representations and as in the case of the work of Georgia Clyne, where a steel cooking pot and couple of yellow peppers appear to melt before the eye. This is a different vision of reality from the beautifully drawn and mature set of compositions by Nicola Gray where the bottle and onion are most definitely what they appear. There is a certainty to the work which promises much for the future.

Work by Nicola Gray

One has to constantly remind oneself that these artists are, technically, children, and yet it was Picasso who said that all his life he tried to get back to painting as he did when he was a child. On the other hand there are artists here who seem to have skipped childhood. Chloe Marks painting of two boats on a Caithness shore is a vibrant and colourful study of time and place with ominous surging waves and a threatening florescent sky. This is an accomplished piece of work.

Similarly successfully realised but more gently coloured is Ian McPherson’s headland-focused rendering of a beach with an assemblage of stones, rope and blocks – all pale blues and fading yellows. Both these paintings show artists who are at the beginning of an artistic journey which anyone who is interested in the future of painting will follow with interest.

Hat design by Sarah Douglas

There are also fantastic hat creations by Sarah Douglas and Kerri Sim, and the theme of time and clocks is apparent in many of the works on show but most eye-catchingly in the two pieces of assemblage by Rochelle Peat of a fish and a boat, both exquisite, both clocks.

Work by Rochelle Peat

Much emanates, mostly in hot air and policy documents, from central government and the local authority about community art and education and community interface. The Scottish Government and Highland Council should study the work of these young artists and admire and learn from their creativity, flair, imagination and talent.

Their skills are learned. We are fortunate to have teachers who can pass it on. This young artistic energy is the real alternative to the reducing monetarism of the modern state. These young visionaries will, by necessity, design the future so we had better make sure they are properly resourced to do so in the present. They are the future.

Come to Caithness Horizons and see an exhibition which will illuminate for you what exactly alternative energy means.

© George Gunn, 2013

Links

• Caithness Horizons

A POEM writ large on a wall, on a corner so that the poem bends, might seem an unlikely starting point for a journey into representative democracy. But Angus Reid is no ordinary artist, and one whose fluid thought processes are stimulated by and in turn enrich the evolution of Scotland’s political progress, writes George Gunn.

THE poem at the core of this creative project is, in form, a classic 14th century Petrarchian sonnet: 14 lines of 10 syllables. What Reid does is to divide each line into 7 and 3 syllables so that the poem can physically “bend” around any corner where it is installed.

Angus Reid's Call for a Constitution at Caithness Horizons

The work reflects a central motif used by Catalan architect Enric Miralles in his design of the parliament building in Edinburgh – for Scotland, the physical embodiment of representative democracy. Angus Reid has picked up on Miralles’ use of an open hand, whereby the MSP’s in the debating chamber become the dexterous fingers, and the forearm and wrist represent the real power of the people. This power comes from the land itself as signified in Edinburgh by Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags. The main unfolding dialectic of Angus Reid’s ‘Call for a Constitution’ is the five fingers on the hand (for right-handed people the left hand, the “listening/thinking” hand) which relate to the “five principles”: “the sacred”, “freedom of conscience”, “the gift of every individual”, “communities” and “the land”.

Whether you agree with the poem, or disagree, or just want to participate, you are invited to leave a drawing of your left hand on the response wall beside the poem. Or respond by sending an image to Angus Reid’s website (see below) to be projected in the Scottish Parliament on the 25 September, coming along in person to Holyrood on the same day.

Reid also invites us, the viewer/participator, to create our own poem, to imagine our own constitution, to decide upon our own five principles. It is an intriguing and timely notion which has its origins in the “peace and reconciliation” architecture of the French visionary Le Corbusier and the “space and light” sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, as well as in the revelatory and inspirational constructions of Miralles himself. Angus Reid’s question to us is, I remind you, “What kind of country do you wish to live in?” This is an “open hand” question which cannot be answered by the simplistic dichotomy of “yes or no”.

What Angus Reid suggests, through his art, is that we undertake a journey into what it means to be a human animal in the modern world. Do not look for certainties on this journey for this is the territory of image, both abstract and clear, where meaning is fluid but where the image nonetheless insists upon meaning, political representation and consequence. For this is political art. The image is freedom and freedom is energy and energy is love and love is responsibility – as he writes in his poem: “to care for the land/ and wherever/ the land has been abused to/ restore it”.

Angus Reid

All of this is also education and education is a gift offered in an “open hand”. At Caithness Horizons, Angus Reid explained to his audience he wanted to “take the poem on a walk and see what happens”. It may be too early or indeed too grand to say that this is the journey to a revolution, but this fascinating arts project has the seed of revolution in its conception, and like revolution (and democracy) it depends upon people and their participation.

By way of Shetland to Orkney; from Sutherland to Uist; Dunbar to Dundee, until the end of September, you can participate: open your hand, make your mark, and think about what kind of country you wish to live in. Angus Reid will be at The Scottish Parliament on the 25 September at 6pm. For this event and full details of all the 13 other locations where you can see ‘Call For a Constitution, go to Angus Reid’s website (see link below).

See if you can turn the corner, along with the poem, into a new world.

© George Gunn, 2012

Links

• Angus Reid
• Caithness Horizons

THIS exhibition of collages, prints, watercolours and calligraphy by Mary Hamada Parker represents a unique artistic fusion of Japanese expressive tradition and European abstract and representative painting inspired, in part, by the Caithness landscape, writes George Gunn.

THE Caithness Horizons Gallery is a naturally well lit space and this sense of northern light highlights well the atmospheric yet controlled palate of ochre browny yellows, blacks, reds and off whites which colour this striking exhibition. There is a discipline to this artists work, and yet the series of watercolours of flowers spills out of the gallery and into the corridor and some of the paintings even escape from their opaque placings in energised green droplets as if the passion of the creation could not be contained by the limitation of a frame.

Mary Hamada Parker - Walking The Anointing

This energy is also apparent in the series of 18 collages of print and paint where landscapes – Japanese or Caithnessian – seem to reach out of the frame and the figures contained in them are either emerging into or out of a dream or revelation. These vary from the two flagstone-grey Caithness inspired pieces to the decidedly Japanese, calligraphic Tree of Life with its three (atomic?) mushroom-like layers. There are even shades of Klimt in the golden figure which dominates the foreground of Walking the Anointing. This is contrasted with the subjective violence of Tsunami, which for all its Japanese tragedy has a decidedly Caithness, Morven-like shape to it.

Mary Hamada Parker - Tsunami

This combination of violence, tragedy and minimalism finds its expressionistic fulcrum in the series of five watercolour prints entitled Christ’s Hands: each work consists of a series of black hand prints, open in supplication but with various waterfalls of blood red paint pouring from them that reminds this reviewer of Ralph Steadman at his iconoclastic best.

But the still centre of this exhibition is the ten abstract calligraphic works where the need for abstraction or representation is subsumed in a process in which, as Mary Hamada Parker describes it, “only the creative instinct is working”. The appropriately titled Perfection shows this “instinct” in action with its swatches of black ink on innocent paper.

Mary Hamada Parker - Perfection

This exhibition is a challenging journey into the world of a highly idiosyncratic artists yet one who takes the two aspects of her creativity – from both sides of the world – and fuses them into vibrantly charged work which will stay for a long time in the mind of those fortunate enough to see it.

© George Gunn, 2012

Links

• Caithness Horizons

CAITHNESS Horizons in Thurso is gradually becoming the cultural hub the North of Scotland requires, writes George Gunn.

HOT on the heels of the Gillie Mor Festival comes Scales, Sails and Surf, a week long musical performance project between Robert Aitken’s Piping Arts Limited and Caithness Horizons, involving 21 young musicians from all over Caithness who gave a spirited outing to their talents in the main gallery to a large audience last Saturday afternoon.

Projections from Robert Aitken's ‘Last Footsteps of Home’, a pre-recorded musical drama about emigration

The theme of the four strands of music performed was the Pentland Firth itself; its history, its environment and its sheer power and beauty. The first strand, “Pentland Firth FM”, took the form of a radio programme and featured all the young musicians contributing something. The effect was as if one was turning the dial across the long wave-band of musical experience: all snatches of tunes and hoots and toots from various instruments and players. A very democratic musical kaleidoscope.

Katrina Gordon, one of the tutors on Scales, Sails and Surf, and a highly regarded composer in her own right, performed on piano, along with her daughter Belinda on clarinet, a very moving new piece inspired by the runes carved on a stone, which is part of the Caithness Horizons museum collection, ‘…in memory of his father Ingulf’ by a nameless Caithness Viking from the early middle ages. This was followed by another accomplished piano piece which charted the journey of Dounreay into the “new energies” of the future. This was music making of the highest calibre.

Robert Aitken of Piping Arts Limited talking to the youngsters during the workshops.

“Last Footsteps of Home” was a short, haunting pipe piece composed by Robert Aitken, director of Piping Arts Limited, with an accompanying slide sequence of images projected against Caithness Horizons’ huge map of the North, portraying a girl’s emigration from the Highlands. As many of the clearance ships left from Scrabster this was an apposite and highly charged contribution.

The main current, however, was the creativity of the children themselves and in the title piece “Scales, Sails and Surf: a tribute to the Pentland Firth”, their well tutored talents came into their own. This was a four part musical tide-race of bodhran, accordion and fiddle which melded into a flowing piano melody with an accompaniment of rain-sticks and other percussion. This ebbed into a delicious rush of oboes, trumpet, flutes and the recorded voices of surfers describing the sensation of riding the waves at Thurso East, and all brought to an impressive musical conclusion by the gentle coaxing and ever generous Robert Aitken.

The workshop participants meet Thurso surfers Mark Boyd and Scott Main

Even with the presence in Caithness Horizons of the RNLI this was an event which was never in need of rescue and proves that with careful and sympathetic tutoring young musicians can, in a comparatively short time, produce music and levels of performances well beyond what is normally expected.

But there was nothing “normal” about Scales, Sails and Surf, and Robert Aitken and Piping Arts, with the assistance of the tutors Katrina Gordon and Susie Dingle, have to be commended in bringing forth the flood of talent which is within all of these 21 children, of all ages and sizes. Caithness Horizons, with projects such as these, is reaching out to all areas of its community, and as one initiative leads into another is becoming an indispensable centre for cultural expression.

© George Gunn, 2012

Links

• Caithness Horizons
• Piping Arts

]]> http://northings.com/2012/04/10/scales-sails-and-surf/feed/ 0 http://northings.com/2012/03/09/return-of-the-ghillie-mor/ http://northings.com/2012/03/09/return-of-the-ghillie-mor/#comments Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:25:01 +0000 http://northings.com/?p=23828 Christine Gunn sets the scene for a celebration of folk culture in Caithness

CAITHNESS Horizons in Thurso has added The Gillie Mor to the cultural calendar of the Highlands.

LAST March saw the emergence of a three-day festival of talks, books, film, story-telling, folklore, music and poetry which put the spotlight on the life and work of folk icon, Hamish Henderson.  While keeping Hamish Henderson as the festival figurehead, organisers this year are keen to stress that the weekend is not about one man.  The 2012 programme of events and song workshops, which includes Dick Gaughan, Margaret Bennett, Essie Stewart, George Gunn, Nancy Nicolson, Kevin Williamson and Dr Fred Freeman, is designed to take forward the grass-roots ambitions of the man who did so much to discover, record and promote a wealth of songs and stories that might otherwise have disappeared from Scotland forever.

Dick Gaughan

Folk phenomenon Dick Gaughan’s presence in this year’s programme may help audiences understand how the festival got its name.  The Gillie Mor [The Big Lad’] became Henderson’s nickname after he wrote a song of the same title as a message of friendship and solidarity at the height of the Cold War from the Blacksmith’s Trade Union in Leith to the Blacksmith’s Trade Union in Kiev in the Ukraine.  The song is perhaps most familiar to audiences all over the world through its recording by Dick Gaughan.

Hamish Henderson by Jean Mohr (courtesy Birlinn)

A professional musician and singer since 1970, Dick Gaughan – like Henderson – was brought up and immersed in the musical traditions of the Gaels.  Over four decades he has been at the cutting edge of Scottish music. Guitarist, singer, songwriter, actor, musical director, composer, arranger, producer and engineer, Gaughan’s expressive voice and distinctive guitar technique are unmistakeable, and his orchestral work has been commissioned more than once for Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival.

Explicitly in sympathy with the oppressed and the underdog, Gaughan’s songs, like the songs and poetry of Hamish Henderson, are Scottish in expression but internationalist in spirit, and share a burning passion for humanitarian egalitarianism.  As he has often sung in Henderson’s words, ‘You and me, the man, the brither – me an you, the Gillie Mor’.

Margaret Bennett

Margaret Bennett returns to Thurso this year with ‘Highland Exodus’, a talk and slide presentation about Highland emigrants to Canada during the Potato Famine of the 19th century. A writer and academic, Margaret is as well known as a singer and folklorist, and she worked with Hamish Henderson at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh University.

The issue of roadsigns in Gaelic has created heated debate recently in Caithness, which is proud of its Norse heritage.  Boldly, Caithness Horizons has invited Margaret to run two workshops during the festival, teaching one or more Gaelic songs, which partipants will sing at an end-of festival ceilidh.

We are not being provocative. Folk culture is global, and I can think of no-one better than Margaret Bennett to demonstrate how folk song pushes right through cultural barriers.  We want Gillie Mor to become a festival of the people by the people, and to achieve that takes confidence in our own identity – or identities.

Essie Stewart (photo Issie Macphail)

Essie Stewart knows well the bi-lingual nature of Highland folklore.  Known throughout the Highlands as a traditional storyteller from Sutherland – one of the last ‘Summer Walkers’ of the travelling families – Essie Stewart is proud to be guardian of the stories of her grandfather, Ailidh Dall Stewart (1882-1968), and tells his stories in both English and Gaelic.  Essie hopes her return to Thurso might turn up new contacts with local people who remember the family when they camped with their horses at Glengolly.

Sharing a song and story session with Essie Stewart, Nancy Nicolson is now Edinburgh-based.  Still proud of her Caithness croft background, and of being what she calls a ‘Cultural Crofter’, Nancy enjoys involving people in song, music and story. At a recent Festival Fringe she arrived at Edinburgh’s Royal Oak folk venue, melodeon slung over her shoulder, to the announcement, ‘Here she is … the Instant Ceilidh!’

Her songs range from ancient ballads to funny, cheeky, political pieces from her own pen. One reviewer said: “NN writes songs that are cunningly temperate. Her well-honed humour sees Nancy apply the iron fist in the velvet glove.”

Fellow Caithness countrymen George Gunn and Kevin Williamson could not be accused of using stealth to subdue audiences, although they share the ability to charm as well as shock.  Both writers are known for their forthright views; both are social and political commentators as well as creative writers of poetry, prose and drama, and it is as poets they are billed together as ‘The Radical Bardachd’.

Kevin Williamson

Kevin Williamson will deliver his one-man hit show from last year’s Edinburgh Festival, ‘Robert Burns: Not in My Name’, which uses film sequences by Alastair Cook to complement and sometimes counterpoint the less familiar poetry of the Ayrshire bard.  Highly praised for his delivery of Burns’ language, Williamson supports the vision behind the festival:

‘As someone brought up in Thurso,” he said, “after twenty years organising and participating in arts and literary events all over the world I’m excited about finally doing something in my hometown.  It’s appropriate, too – the show begins with a ferocious Burns poem about the people of the Highlands.  Caithness has long had a vibrant arts and folk scene and the Gillie Mor festival keeps this and the Hamish Henderson flag flying proudly.  I’m looking forward to it.’

George Gunn is the other ‘radical bard’ on the bill.  The festival was originally Gunn’s idea.

‘The Gillie Mor Festival in Thurso is now in its second year and is quickly establishing itself as one of the most important cultural events in the Highlands, if not Scotland,” he said. “Hamish Henderson had strong Caithness connections as his father’s people came from Braemore.  He always considered himself a proud member of the Clan Gunn. I am proud that in my home town we can add to the stock of the carrying stream of Caithness culture and bring it forward, and at the same time keep alive the work and memory of a vibrant world-spirit.”

George Gunn

Gunn credits his own development as an artist to his friendship with Henderson.

“I was greatly encouraged by Hamish Henderson and without his generosity of spirit and constant support I doubt I would have had the confidence to undertake what I have as a writer.”

Thurso High School Pupils and members of the public will have the opportunity to work with both Dick Gaughan and George Gunn in an innovative attempt to generate new songs, written in the spirit of what Henderson described as the ‘Carrying Stream’ of folk culture.  As with Margaret Bennett’s Gaelic songs, the idea is to perform this material at the end-of-festival ceilidh on Saturday 31^st March in Thurso’s Pentland Hotel.

Currently Fellow in English at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Fred Freeman has extensive experience of teaching literature, folk music and history.  Dr Freeman will deliver a key presentation during the festival, outlining the contribution Hamish Henderson made during his lifetime to Scottish Culture.  Shortly after Henderson’s death, Dr Freeman produced A’ the Bairns o’ Adam for Greentrax Records, a highly regarded CD of Hamish Henderson songs, recorded by many artists who were personal friends of Hamish, or greatly admired his work.

Nancy Nicolson with a famous friend

The Gillie Mor 2012 aims to set a marker for folk culture in the 21st century.  As organiser, I believes there is an appetite for entertainment that is rooted in community activity without being parochial or backward-looking.   Communities have always come together to sing, play music, speak poetry or tell stories about shared experience.  All we’re really doing is having a three-day ceilidh, and reminding ourselves of the value of that, as well as having fun in the process.

Funding support for the festival has been awarded by Museums Galleries Scotland, Highland Council & Bòrd na Gàidhlig.

Christine Gunn is Education & Community Officer at Caithness Horizons.

© Christine Gunn, 2012

Links

• Caithness Horizons
• Festival Programme

THE COLOUR and sheer vivacity of this exhibition betrays the young years of those who have made the various pieces of work on show, but the confidence in composition and execution reveals a high degree of skill and talent, and is testament to the work of William Wallace and Stuart Webb, the two principal art teachers at Thurso High School, writes George Gunn.

Ranging from portraiture, still life, collage, masks and what I would call, for want of a better definition, soft sculpture, this exhibition literally runs around the walls of the very fine gallery at Caithness Horizons.

Portrait by Charlotte Gordon, Masks by S1 pupils

As you walk in the stark, beautiful and haunting self portrait in ink by Charlotte Gordon grabs the eye. What is striking about this work is the sheer space the artist leaves in the composition, which lends each line a greater significance. But this work is an island of restraint in a sea of movement. This is epitomised, ironically, by the “still life” series of pastels, of which the study of various fruit and veg and a red teapot by Sammi-Lea Mackenzie displays a sure eye with colour and form.

All the compositions in this series, which occupy an entire wall, are mature compositions, and all display a solid sense of positioning and a strong instinct for aesthetics. In other words, these artists know what looks good. They may be portraits of still objects but they all move and satisfy the eye by their brave definition and their sure use of colour.

There is also a striking collage by various hands of 20 4” x 6” panels which capture various aspects in crayon and paint of the Kylesku, Kessock, Dornoch and Cromarty bridges, and proves that, no matter the age of the artist, the primary function of all art is in providing a new way of seeing. This also applies to how art is seen, and a series of impish masks by S1 and S2 pupils dance in a garish line of off-primary colours; all pinks, azures and yellows: so the viewer is viewed.

Chloe Marks' Dunnet Bay series

Next to this theatrical and cubist reinterpretation of reality is Chloe Marks various studies of Dunnet Bay. Some of these small paintings in acrylic are more successful than others but the most accomplished is probably the most simple, and most deceptive, which is a small painting of Dunnet Beach with a crashing wave in the foreground and Dunnet Head and Dwarick Head in the background, and above them all is a perfectly captured Atlantic sky.

The contrasts in this work are what make it significant. The headlands may be still, but the light, the sky and the ocean are all moving. It may appear very matter of fact to the casual observer but it is extremely difficult to pull off as a painter and certainly one has to admire the execution here, as the artist is still in the 5^th year.

But this is they joy of this exhibition: none of the artists display any fear whatsoever. Where study and talent leave off, sheer exuberance takes over. This is a very busy exhibition and a sheer delight. The strong tradition of visual art in Caithness, one of its many cultural jewels, is shining bright and has a secure future if the work of these Thurso High School pupils is anything to go by.

Mask by Christie-Lee McInnes

This exhibition is the second of its kind and is planned to be an annual event. Go and see it. Forget the artists are technically children – for all artists in a way are children – and let the artwork bring colour to your eye, your heart.

© George Gunn, 2012

Links

• Caithness Horizons

MENTION glass and most folk think first of window panes, drinking vessels, or dinky ornaments – things to be handled gingerly.

FOR many, the word ‘sculpture’ still brings to mind half-clad alabaster statues staring into infinity. Four artists currently engaged in a residency based jointly at North Lands Creative Glass [NLCG] and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop [SSW] give the lie to all preconceptions.

Sculptors Clare Flatley and Kate Hobby, and glass artists Katya Filmus and Lisa Anne Bate, gave presentations last week at Caithness Horizons in Thurso, showing slides from their back catalogues of work as well as introducing the local audience to work-in-progress for a Metal and Glass Casting residency offered this year by the two Caithness and Aberdeenshire arts organisations.

Katya Filmus mixing plaster

The eight week residency is an opportunity to create new work and to collaborate with other artists while also learning new techniques in casting.  It also poses a huge challenge for participants, not least travelling between the two venues while having to absorb entirely new skills and techniques for working in media they are unfamiliar with.

Undaunted by the sheer mountain of new information to be taken on board, all four artists have already produced experimental pieces, and are clearly buzzing with new ideas.

Clare Flatley & Kate Hobby learning about glass with NLCG technician Michael Bullen

Originally from Israel, Katya Filmus began her career with figurative sculpture, working under a Russian tutor, and has since experimented with a wide range of media, including Raku pottery, porcelain fixtures and latex.

For a time in Jerusalem she designed a range of glass products for manufacture, and has been commissioned by Glenfiddich distillery for a major glass casting project which will see a series of large cast stags’ heads installed in 21 airports around the world.

During her presentation she described her fascination with exploring the capacity of work in glass to reflect ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ facets of an object in three dimensions, as well as how autobiography often inspires ideas for pieces.

Clare Flatley is a new graduate.  As an undergraduate she had been intrigued by process and materials, and by the absorbant and reflective qualities of materials and surfaces.  The properties of the colour black along with the idea of anti-matter has provoked a series of works to develop textures and forms that are ‘chaotic’, while also very beautiful.

Doorways and portals provide a metaphor to explore the duality of surface.  Like Katya Filmus, the antithetical relationship between ‘front’ and ‘back’ provides for Clare a dimension to be explored in glass and metal.

Lisa Anne Bate constructing her mould

Lisa Anne Bate also wants to stretch form to experiment with scientific ideas.  Microscopic life and minerals have inspired the creation of sculptural shapes and connected elements – often based on everyday objects – to suggest a visualization of new ‘species’.

Often working on a small scale, the artist likes to create sculpture that isn’t static:  she has used magnets to provide connection between glass and metal, and to make elements move.  Resulting forms often seem sinister and unsettling, causing the viewer to look again.

A chance opportunity to pour iron provided the catalyst for a change in artistic direction for Sussex-based sculptor Kate Hobby.  Now used to working with metal on a large scale, Kate described how overwhelming it has been to engage with a whole new medium: glass.

The residency is providing her with the space and the peace to develop new ideas, and – building out from a woven basket-form piece cast recently in bronze, her intention is to develop a weaving ‘loom’ sculpture during her time in Lumsden and Caithness.

Over the years NLCG has brought many artists from around the globe to its Lybster studios, and its reputation as a centre of excellence for the spectrum of glass-working continues to grow.  Over the past three years, visitors to Caithness Horizons have been given privileged insight into the imaginative, technical and physical challenges of the medium, and treated to slideshows of images that merely hint at the multiplicity of colour, texture, form and thematic ambition of artefacts produced by extremely gifted residency artists.

The current residency continues the trend of excellence, with the added interest of asking artists to stretch themselves by combining glass and metal casting.  NLCG and SSW are to be congratulated on maintaining what has become a very rare thing in the arts:  a commitment to providing artists with the time, space and resources to develop new skills and produce truly original art.

Christine Gunn is the Education & Community Officer at Caithness Horizons.

© Christine Gunn, 2011

Links

• Caithness Horizons
• North Lands Creative Glass
• Scottish Sculpture Workshop

IT MAY be just 15 paintings, and it may be just the café as opposed to the gallery in Caithness Horizons, and it may just be on for the month of November, but there is something significant about this exhibition of recent work by David Morrison, the ubiquitous Caithness poet and painter.

One reason is that he is 70 this year. Another is that his painting is getting better and better. I cannot think of another Scottish artist – or any artist, for that matter – whose work arrests the viewer quite like Morrison’s.

Certainly there are shades of late Degas, influences of Matisse – there are dabs and splashes aplenty – but the main influence is Caithness itself, and in this capturing of the moods and open vistas of this fascinating, hypnotic landscape Morrison is unique.

David Morrison - landscape

The fifteen paintings on display in the café both lend themselves to and somehow frame the ever changing vastness of the sky, the parallel signature of the land and the peppery, all-revealing light of Caithness. If the county was a challenge, Morrison has met it.

In this exhibition there are abstract cloudscapes, controlled explosions of blue and green, gothic purple murmurings of dawn or dusk or a mythical representation of death, snow scapes with blood clots, images which form into ships or headlands and then seem to dissolve into something else, as if the artist is seeking some image and having found it, is disappointed and moves on for something better. David Morrison’s is a restless art. There maybe no human forms in this exhibition but there is great humanity.

“I am an abstract expressionist”, he told me when I met him in Wick, “and I believe that will never date. If it catches the eye it will last. I have always painted, self taught certainly, but I have looked and looked at paintings, how others have done it and what I can’t express in words I say visually.”

This business of saying is very important to Morrison and sheds light on his other talent – that of the poet. “When I was young I couldn’t speak – literally – I had such a terrible stutter. But in this regard, when I was in Edinburgh, I met such incredible poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Norman MacCaig, Tom Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid, Iain Crichton Smith, Sorley Maclean, and of course Alan Bold, whose “Rocket” pamphlet I modelled “Scotia Review” on. As a magazine it was extremely influential, and I was very proud when the National Gallery of Scotland held an exhibition on the magazine in 1986. All these writers helped me find my voice.”

I ask him about of influence of Caithness on his work, which, to me, is such a strong theme. He says: “Caithness is my spiritual home. Edna [his wife] and I came here in 1965, to Thurso, to be principal assistant to the county librarian Fred Robertson. Of course Caithness influences me. I paint what I see, as does every artist. It was John L. Broom who took me here, in fact to Orkney, but it was when we were in Caithness I said to Edna ‘This is where I want to be’. I was at the time a very unhappy librarian at the Edinburgh College of Art.”

Colour, obviously, for an artist, is an issue, and that is one thing the exhibition in Caithness Horizons does not lack. “There is a great deal of spirituality in what I paint and why I paint, and here I don’t want to sound pretentious, but colour, the colours I choose, depends on my mood, on the weather. So this is Caithness, it will never leave me.”

It’s the relationship Caithness has to Morrison which is the question. The fact that his paintings are in the cafe and not in the Caithness Horizons gallery speaks volumes. This is not meant in detriment to the magnificent Joanne Kaar, whose work currently occupies that space, but in general there is not, and never has been, the recognition abroad that this committed artists work merits and deserves.

What I mean is that the general contribution David Morrison has made to the development of the arts in Caithness, and the Highlands in general, has been, somehow, forgotten. But Morrison’s vision has always been universal. It was no accident that the subtitle of his magazine Scotia Review was “for the Scottish muse and nation”.

David Morrison - landscape

This facility to make the local national and the national local saw such writers as the above mentioned Sorley Maclean, MacCaig, Crichton Smith, and many others over the years, visit Wick to read their work. This encouraged an entire generation of Caithness writers including myself, Colin MacDonald, Iain Bain, John Mcleod, Drew Macleod and others, writers who if it had not been for David Morrison’s energy would not have been exposed to outside stimulation and would not have had the careers they have subsequently fashioned.

On the flip side Morrison has always struggled with isolation – both geographical and intellectual. “Wick is a long way from Edinburgh”, he says, “So it was always difficult to keep the Wick festival of Poetry, Folk and Jazz going. But let me say this – I have no regrets whatsoever. I didn’t flinch when my house was re-possessed and when debts were run up, when no-one would give me any funding. My wife, Edna, has always stood by me and now I have two children and four grandchildren and there are many poets and painters who have stood by me too. I am a very loyal person.

“You see, everything comes in waves. There was a great resurgence – a new Scottish renaissance if you like – in the 1960’s with folk music and poetry in general and I was involved in it, in Edinburgh, with groups like The Heretics and others, so there was an audience there. Which is why, when I met up with John Humphries, the printer in Thurso, we produced a series of hugely popular books such as a collection of essays on Neil Gunn and a series on modern Scottish poets.

“But that was then, and you have to learn to hand things on. I take great inspiration from poets such as Willie Neal and George Mackay Brown, they took me on board and inspired me,  but you have to hand on to the next generation. But I’m also a great believer in the local audience and if a poet speaks directly to them, the people, they will be listened to.”

David Morrison - landscape

Morrison, as he speaks, pauses. I look out of the window and a glorious autumn sun is shining over the North Sea. Everything is crisp and defined. Suddenly I remember that this is the 1^st of November and as well as being the opening of his Caithness Horizons exhibition, it is also the Celtic festival of Samhain, the beginning of Winter, the day of the dead when the previous rise up and mingle with the current.

“I don’t fear death” he tells me, as if he has been sensing what I’ve been thinking. “I just want to be fit enough to die gracefully. That’s no bad, is it?”

It certainly isn’t, and apart from a bit of pulmonary problem – walking a distance brings on severe peching – he seems fit enough. “I’ve been writing hundreds of haikus,” he tells me. “I love the miniature. Which is why, I think, I like the work of artists such as Bet Low. Everything is concise.”

We walk, slowly, over from his flat to his favourite pub, The Mountain Dew, an old fisherman’s watering hole overlooking Wick harbour. It fits in with his philosophy – scrubbed, functional, minimal, dripping history and in its own particular way, very beautiful. When we enter bagpipe music, for some reason, belts out of the jukebox. We retire to the frosty exposure of the “smokers lounge”. No roof, lots of concrete. “What I’m attempting in my painting,” he tells me over a glass of red wine, “is to take the painters who have influenced me and give it a whole new Caithness dimension.”

I think of all the collages and colours, the landscapes and seascapes I have just seen on the Caithness Horizons walls, the shape-shifting lyricism of it and of the fields and sky I saw on the way to Wick – just the scale of it – so I ask him about that.

“I’ve produced over 2000 paintings so far. I believe in experimentation. Without experimentation you die as an artist. That’s the core of it.”

What Caithness, what Scotland owes this mercurial polymath is a decent retrospective in a proper gallery. David Morrison has given so much and asked for so little. “I’ve given up all my community work now and I’ve become meditative. I’ve really begun to appreciate Neil Gunn’s The Atom of Delight and all its Caithness-Zen wisdom. One thing I have learned, now that I am 70, that all life is, is love.”

In Morrison, art lives in Wick.

David Morrison, recent work, Caithness Horizons café, Thurso, until 30 November 2011; David Morrison’s work will also be included in Katnes Folio, an exhibition of art from Caithness, at the Axolotl Gallery, Edinburgh, 5-30 November 2011.

© George Gunn, 2011

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DURING my recent visit to Caithness Horizons I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the opening of Paper Wrappers and Herbarium Sheets, an exhibition by Joanne B. Kaar to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Dick, Baker and Botanist of Thurso 1811-1866, writes Rebecca Davis.

JOANNE has continued to work as a volunteer with the Caithness Horizons Curator and Centre Manager since the grand re-opening of the Museum, and her initial 5-week residency in December 2008 was to re-interpret and preserve the Museum’s Robert Dick Herbarium.

This exhibition both celebrates the bicentenary of Robert Dick’s birth and the culmination of three years of Joanne’s own work.

Joanne B. Kaar's Paper Wrappers and Herbarium Sheets

Robert trained as a journeyman baker, locating to Thurso in 1830 where his father was living to set up his own bakery. Here he worked tirelessly until his death in 1866. He was somewhat of a recluse, who had few friends other than his beloved sister.

Throughout his time in Caithness he also developed an obsession with the plants, molluscs, fossils and insects of the area. Becoming a renowned self-taught botanist, geologist and naturalist within the field, on his death he had amassed an herbarium of about 200 folios of mosses, ferns and flowering plants “almost unique in its completeness,” which is now stored, with some of his fossils, in Caithness Horizons.

It is both the life and the character of the man, as well as the contents of the Herbarium which Joanne explores through this exhibition.

Displayed in a wonderfully bright gallery space, the work varied from digital botanical prints on handmade paper to authentic loafs of bread on a baker’s bench and line ink drawings.

As with Robert Dick, Joanne’s work is prolific. Her botanical prints reaching into the Cafe exhibition space. Many of them feature local plants, which friends at the private view were identifying from their favourite local walks or growing near their homes. Dunnet Head was in fact one of Robert’s own favourite places to walk and collect plants.

As well as pieces of art, these works serve a conservation purpose. Each of the prints is created from an original Herbarium artefact which Joanne has scanned and then ‘cleaned’ using Photoshop. She then prints the final images onto paper handmade by herself from waste from Scalpay Linen.

These final prints serve to preserve the Herbarium for future years as well as allowing Joanne to interpret and display the Collection for new audiences.

My favoured pieces were those whose surfaces had been more worked into, giving added depth and interest to the piece. Using overlaid imagery, stitching and a Japanese persimmon wash technique on the paper, gave the work added interest, especially with Joanne’s added explanation of the technique.

Joanne’s passion for her subject is evident in the scale and breath of work on display within this exhibition. With the added historical context Joanne has really succeeded in bringing the life and obsessions of a local man together in this exhibition, for visitors to absorb, explore, and ponder.

Dick was unrecognised by his local community until his death, despite his renown within the scientific arena. It seems just that his work should be celebrated in this way, and Joanne does real justice to the Herbarium as well as enabling new and future audiences to appreciate this wonderful Collection.

Rebecca Davis is the Audience Development Officer for Craft Scotland.

© Rebecca Davis, 2011.

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• Joanne B. Kaar
• Caithness Horizons
• Craft Scotland

CAITHNESS Horizons invited a group of Standard Grade Art pupils and their teacher, Mrs Rhona Hayley, to spend three days studying and replicating the symbols carved into the two Caithness Pictish stones now displayed in Caithness Horizons foyer.

With project funding from Museums Galleries Scotland, Caithness Horizons also had the support of Edinburgh-based John Borland from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland [RCAHMS], and local master stone craftsman, George Gunn, to provide historical information, technical advice and practical support to the young people.

Jennifer Hardman at work on a stone carving

By the end of three days, all of them had individually sketched and carved their own versions of Pictish symbols taken from the Caithness Horizons stones, working on Caithness Flagstone provided by A & D Sutherland, Spittal Quarry.

Then, working in groups, they carved symbols and samples of ogham lettering into bigger pieces of high quality sandstone, supplied by Moray Stone Cutters of Elgin.

John Borland has an expert knowledge of the Pictish Stones of Scotland, spending his professional life surveying and creating detailed drawings of them and other significant constructions from the distant and more recent past.

“By the end of the week I was very impressed by the pupils’ work,” he said. “I know from experience how hard it is to concentrate on drawing these symbols accurately, and the physical stamina needed to carve them into stone is considerable.  We had a bit of a smile as we watched them move from a standing to a sitting posture after a morning’s carving with the hefty chisels and mells.”

The project came into being during a casual conversation last winter between John Borland and myself. John was very quietly sitting drawing the carvings on our Skinnet and Ulbster stones for the Commission as I was working on a completely different project.

A brief conversation and a half-promise to develop this idea became a definite plan after discussion with Rhona Hayley from Thurso High School, who saw it as an ideal opportunity to give her pupils some experience of sculpture as well as design.

Maeva Donaldson and Kayla McPhee working on the mirror and comb symbol, which is found on many Pictish Stones

We’re very grateful to Museums Galleries Scotland, to RCAHMS and to Archaeology Scotland for funding, professional advice and for the loan of some tools.  We’re particularly grateful to A & D Sutherland who donated and delivered some beautiful Caithness flagstone, and to Moray Stone Cutters who really made a Herculean effort to deliver their stone despite huge difficulties.

The project team hope that the project will encourage local people as well as visitors to take a keen interest in the Pictish culture signified in the Skinnet and Ulbster stones.

The carvings on these two Caithness stones suggest that they date from the period of the Picts’ Christianisation.  Once broken into several pieces, the Skinnet Stone was restored especially for upright display within its current home at Caithness Horizons.  It now stands impressively beside the Ulbster stone in the museum’s foyer.

Caithness Horizons intends to display the new Thurso High School stones whenever they can find a way to secure them safely, allowing visitors to create rubbings from them – something that is not possible from the originals.

Meantime, art teacher Rhona Hayley used the Pictish symbol of the eagle as her chosen totem for carving, along with a symbol known as the three ovals, a fragment of which can be seen on the Skinnet Stone.

“We learned this week that the three ovals are particularly associated with Caithness Pictish carvings,” she said. “As Thurso High School emblem is the eagle, I thought it would be appropriate to carve the eagle and three ovals into the stone I’m taking back up to school.”

Caithness Horizons invested in buying some sets of carving tools to keep as a local resource, in the hope that school pupils and others, like stone craftsman George Gunn, will continue to use them, thus keeping in circulation the knowledge and skills demonstrated so impressively in the variety of stone carvings left by the Picts, a people whose story remains an interpretive challenge to modern historians.

Participating pupils from Thurso High School were Maeva Donaldson, Andrew McGregor, Kyle Easson, Scott Mackay, Carenza Sudd, Kayla McPhee, Jennifer Hardman, Kirstine Freidenfelde, and Craig Kennedy.

Christine Russell is education and community officer at Caithness Horizons.

© Christine Russell, 2011

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• Museums Galleries Scotland
• Caithness Horizons

CAITHNESS Horizons in Thurso joined museums all over Scotland this past weekend by getting into the spirit of Spring with four unique children’s art workshops to highlight its Robert Dick collection.

The Festival of Museums was created and supported by Museums Galleries Scotland to celebrate Scotland’s wealth of culture with day and night-time events scheduled to take place from 13 -15 May 2011. The festival offered locals and tourists a range of cultural experiences intended to ‘ignite imaginations’.

A hat to keep it under

‘Keep It Under You Hat’ was a colourful project devised by artist Joanne B. Kaar and Caithness Horizons, designed especially for the Festival Of Museums.  The aim was to introduce young people of Thurso to just one of the stories represented by Caithness Horizons’ museum collection, and to inspire them to be aware and proud of an aspect of their local heritage.

Robert Dick

Robert Dick, a 19th-century Thurso baker, lived parallel lives.  By night he wrought dough into bread and biscuits, ready for his housekeeper to sell next day. Once free of the bake-house, however, Dick’s passion in life was to tramp the extensive coast, shores and blanket bog of Caithness, looking for plants and fossils to add to his personal collections.

What distinguished Dick from contemporary natural history enthusiasts was his single-mindedness; his tenacity in attempting to make comprehensive collections of all British flora, including the discovery along Thurso River that Northern Holy Grass was not after all extinct; and his understanding of how his discoveries of geology and fossils contributed to the research being done at the time by men such as Cromarty’s Hugh Miller, and pioneering geologist Sir Roderick Murchison.

The idea for ‘Keep It Under Your Hat’ emerged from Joanne B. Kaar’s personal research on the life of Robert Dick.  Joanne formed an early professional relationship with Caithness Horizons when the Thurso museum, gallery and community venue opened its doors to the public in December 2008.

Fibre artist Joanne created a visual art display to complement the exhibition of plants, fossils and other artefacts which belonged to Robert Dick. Fascinated by his collection of plants, and by the personal story of the man himself, Joanne has been making a photographic record of Dick’s herbarium, part of Caithness Horizons’ collection.  ‘Keep It Under Your Hat’ allowed her to share her own enthusiasm with school-age young people, introducing them to his work in a fun way.

“I thought children could relate to a man who used to stick his plant specimens under his hat to keep his hands free on his long walks,” said Joanne.  “I showed the youngsters how to make a simple chimney pot hat, similar to the one Robert Dick himself would have worn, and then decorate it with insects, plants, letters – things we know he was intrigued by, or would have used.  We know he used to wrap plant specimens in old newspaper, old bills – whatever came to hand, and the children thought it was very funny that one wrapping he used was an old newspaper ad. that was offering payment to folk who’d bring in their old unwanted false teeth!”

Pupils from Primary 7 at Mount Pleasant Primary School in Thurso spent a day making hats, then delighted museum visitors and staff by wearing them as they later explored the Robert Dick display itself.  Locals would also have spotted the very dandily dressed pupils as they walked back over the Ellan Bridge to school.  Class teacher Mrs Firth reported that a gust of wind caught one hat on the way, but most survived, and one pupil was heard asking if they could wear their hats for school assembly that afternoon.  Two more workshops were held on Saturday.

Mount Pleasant pupils at work on the hats with Joanne

As Caithness Horizons Education & Community Officer, I thought the event was an ideal way to engage young people with history.  By all accounts Robert Dick was a very modest man uninterested in personal glory.  He’d probably have been astounded to learn his activities had inspired such events and activities, but I think he also kept something of a child’s curiosity and sense of wonder about the world and the things in it, so I think he’d have been chuffed to see children walking past his house in Wilson Street wearing these hats.  Joanne’s enthusiasm for the subject rubbed off on the youngsters, and I’m sure they’ll now remember their very own local hero.

Caithness Horizons will be hosting a free ‘Robert Dick Walk’ on Saturday 28 May as part of the Caithness & Sutherland Walking Festival, organized by Wick Paths Project.  Anyone interested in this, or in the Robert Dick Collection, can visit Caithness Horizons in Thurso seven days a week: Mon- Fri. 10am-6pm; Sun. 11am-4pm.  Tel.  01847 896508 or e-mail info@caithnesshorizons.co.uk .

© Christine Russell, 2011

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• Caithness Horizons
• Joanne B Kaar

THE “final” in the title of this exhibition does not refer to the year’s end work of the 10 full time or 37 part time students who have completed their National Certificate in Art and Creative Studies, or the creativity of the 14 “Learning For Life” who have participated in the Exploring Visual Images module: tragically, it refers to the final exhibition from this course, which began in 1995 and for purely for financial reasons is to cease in 2011, writes George Gunn.

Some aspects of the part time art course will be retained within other departments, but what has been a life changing experience for many who have completed the NC at Thurso and who have gone on to art colleges and to a career in the visual arts will now not be available for anyone – and the participants range from school leavers to the retired – is a sad reflection on the much vaunted aspiration of the newly titled University of the Highlands and Islands. What other centre for learning and opportunity comes into the world by deleting courses and closing buildings?

Work on display in the exhibition

On the bright side – literally – the light loving gallery in Caithness Horizons is jam packed full of colour and creativity. The work, as one might expect, varies in quality and range, but there is enough ambition on display to ensure that the great tradition of visual art in Caithness is continuing on and gaining in technique and confidence. For example the concentration on drawing by those who were part time students last year is seen to bear fruit by increased quality of the paintings the students have produced this year.

It is always unfair to pick out particular works from such a ceilidh of creativity, but the flavour of this exhibition can be enjoyed in the seemingly random but hugely effective woody quality of John A Farquhar’s ‘Scribbled Life Drawing #2’.

Donald Busby - Storm

Equally confident in composition and colour is the painting ‘Leaf’ by Donald Busby, an acrylic on canvas; an arresting concentration of yellows, blues and blacks. Another artist with a fine sense of form is Kathy Manson. ‘Highland Village’, an acrylic and oil, is a semi-abstract study of a human landscape, an assured assemblage of greens and browns which gently draws the viewer in.

Kathy Manson - Highland Village

Of a different hue altogether is Emily Morris Ashton’s untitled but striking ink and water colour drawing on paper of a figure caught in mid-action – perhaps in pain, maybe being hunted – but the sense of movement is skilfully caught by this young Caithness artist.

These four works were not singled out at random but to highlight the necessary scale of the exhibition, which means that the art work is almost bursting out of the gallery, and this represents exactly the talent which is bursting out, and has done so consistently over the years of this valuable arts course.

Painting and drawing are to the fore but there are impressive displays of jewellery in glass and clay from Annie Body and Sarah Barnetson, ideas for fashion design and in textiles, and I also recommend that the visitor pick up the many artists portfolios which are available and you will see the work-in-progress, the fascinating thought processes which may or may not end up in a finished work.

Visitors admire the work on show

The two tutors, Mary Parker and Jackie Newton, can be proud of their students and of what their course has achieved. In Caithness, as elsewhere, art education and training is a chain-link activity: from primary school to secondary school; from night class to full time course work. If the chain is broken, as it has been in the decision to end the National Certificate in Art and Creative Studies at North Highland College,  then all other arts activity and the future creativity of Caithness and the North is put in jeopardy.

This exhibition proudly celebrates that significant part of human nature which is creativity, for it is creativity which makes us human. If we are denied access to our creativity, and the training to better express it, then society limits its own possibilities.

We are not truly civilised if we condone this. Go to Caithness Horizons in Thurso and enjoy the enthusiasm and ambition of the arts students’ creations. Do not be satisfied that this is the last exhibition. North Highland College and the University of the Highlands and Islands must be made to think again. Denial is not education: it is just denial.

© George Gunn 2011

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• Caithness Horizons

Hamish Henderson (1919 – 2002) was one of Scotland’s foremost twentieth century poets as well as being a ground breaking folk song collector and co-founder of the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University, writes GEORGE GUNN.

Although born in Glenshee he claimed that his people came from Caithness and were of the Clan Gunn. Certainly his father Alexander, writing in 1903 in the Dundee Advertiser believed so:

“My family originates from Caithness. ‘Gunn’ is the name for Henderson. We are descended from the third son of the Princess of Norway, daughter of the King of Norway…”

Hamish Henderson, all his long, eventful and creative life kept that claim active. When I met him in Edinburgh in 1979 I was immediately addressed as “kin”. From that day on until the day he died we were always close, and from Hamish I learned a lot about my own people, their culture and my country.

End paper of Tim Neat's biography of Hamish Henderson

It is that sense of enjoyment and fun, of discovery, of delight in music and song, of reclamation, of cultural worth, which I hope The Gillie Mor Festival will inspire. Hamish was a big man, which is what “Gillie Mor” means in Gaelic, he was over six foot, but it also means “great man” and in cultural terms Hamish Henderson was exactly that.

When his book of poems, “Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica”, appeared in 1948 it was chronicle of the North African conflict of World War Two and gave eloquent voice to the ordinary Highland squaddie in the 51st Highland Division of Montgomery’s Eighth Army. The “Elegies” were cherished by many of those veterans because of the humanity it expressed for the casualties on both sides. Both Caithness and Sutherland produced a disproportionate amount of personnel for that struggle and that one book alone would be enough to cement Hamish Henderson’s claim to a special relationship with the Far North.

Hamish Henderson (© Birlinn)

It was in 1955 and 1957 when Hamish made direct connection, at first by accident, with the Stewart’s of Remarstaig, the last of the Sutherland travelling people – The “Summer Walkers” of Timothy Neat’s celebrated film. It was from Ailidh Dahl , blind Alec Stewart, that Hamish recorded “Am Bron Binn” (The Sweet Sorrow”), which turned out to be one of the oldest in Europe. As he told me many years later, “Seoras (he rarely called me George) I knew it was old but I didn’t expect it to come from the beginning of time!” As he told Timothy Neat, “To start at the beginning is always good! But to get started in 500AD was the stuff of dreams…” Ailidh Dall’s granddaughter, the story teller Essie Stewart, will also be appearing at The Gillie Mor Festival to provide evidence that this dynamic cultural thread has not come to an end.

Timothy Neat is the author of highly acclaimed two volume biography of Hamish Henderson and he will be showing his film of Hamish’s 1957 Summer of folklore collecting with the Stewarts of Remarstaig, “The Summer Walkers”. Timothy will also be talking to the pupils of Wick High School about Hamish Henderson, the poet. This educational aspect of The Gillie Mor Festival is a very important aspect of the event because if the children cannot enter into the “carrying stream”, as Hamish called culture and folk lore, then our heritage has no future. With Timothy I climbed Ben Gulabin in Glenshee in 2002 and scattered Hamish’s ashes on its summit.

Also appearing at The Gillie Mor Festival will be Dr Margaret Bennett, a colleague of Hamish Henderson at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh and an eminent folklorist and historian in her own right as well as being one of Scotland’s finest traditional Gaelic singers. Dr Bennett will be delivering a talk on “The Highland Exodus” which will have its theme the emigration of people from the North of Scotland to America and Canada in the 19th century. Margaret is the mother of Martyn Bennett, one of Scotland’s foremost young composers and musicians and so recently and tragically lost to us from cancer. Hamish Henderson used to daundle Martyn on his knee and much of Martyn Bennett’s innovatory style was inspired by Hamish’s influence for, as the singer Alison McMorland has said, “Hamish Henderson changed Scotland forever!”

To complete the individual line up will be the renowned Caithness singer Nancy Nicolson whose association with Hamish Henderson and his work goes back a long time. Nancy is a former teacher and she took Hamish’s concept of the “carrying stream” of cultural expression into the schools with her and also in her work as Educational Officer for Celtic Connections in Glasgow. I have known and worked with Nancy for many years and her presence at The Gillie Mor Festival is an important contribution of authentic Caithness artistry.

George Gunn

Completing the line up for the ceilidh in the Saturday night are three of Scotland’s top contemporary traditional musicians – Gordon Gunn, Charlie McKerron and Brian MacAlpine who usually combine as Session A9 but for The Gillie Mor Festival have branched out as a trio. Gordon Gunn is a native of Wick and is well known as having one of the most distinctive fiddle styles in Scotland. One of the aims of this festival, which I hope will be an annual event, is to bring Caithness artists back in contact with their local audience.

The fact that many in the Far North have not heard of Hamish Henderson or are aware of his work or his connection to Caithness and Sutherland is one of the reasons we have decided to mount The Gillie Mor Festival. Hamish Henderson, as a poet, a folklorist and collector, a translator and as a cultural and political agitator, is a national figure. As time goes on he will emerge, I am certain, as a world figure so it is appropriate that we in Caithness celebrate him as one of our own. Hamish Henderson, as he never tired of telling me, certainly thought of himself as such. I urge all of you to support The Gillie Mor Festival because, like Hamish’s lifework, it is your own.

More more information on the festival contact Christine Russell on  01847 896508 christinerussell@caithnesshorizons.co.uk

© George Gunn, 2011

CAITHNESS has always lent itself to the visual. The great swathes of open country, the huge sky, the receding horizon, the ever present sea; all of this informs any artist who comes from the far North – for good or bad, writes George Gunn.

So it is in this latest batch as represented by Thurso High School, assembled with no small love by Rona Hayley, head of Thurso High School art department. The pupils are of all ages, from first to sixth year, and, as you might expect, all their influences are on show, from Andy Warhol to the Iron Age and before.

The opening night crowd in the gallery

What is striking is the amount of skill that is in these children’s hands and eyes, and this must be a result of the teaching. There is, on the evidence of these 50 or so pictures, a democracy of expression at work. Whether it touches on the landscape, as I have mentioned, or whether it is one of the many intense and colourful portraits, energy pours out of this exhibition.

The colour is never half done – I don’t think these artists know the meaning of compromise – which is as it should be, for here we have youth, ambition and no small measure of success.

The technical ability in capturing a face is all around the walls, and in the midst of these moving eyes there is the still centre of some simple pottery, unpretentiously displayed in a glass case, and yet here is a time machine.

Ten thousand years old in concept – these are representations of the Beaker People, those folk who came to these flat lands after the ice retreated, who hung – literally – their dead out to dry, burned their bones and then put them in pots, and then put those pots in the things we now know as Camster Cairns.

That these young artists reference this in their work is a sure sign that art is being taught to them as a meaningful thing and not just how quickly you can become the next Andy Warhol.

Caithness Horizons is the perfect venue for this. Its gallery is proving to be one of the few places where this ever-evolving, ever-changing community can have a dialogue with itself. This exhibition is idiosyncratic, bold and simply presented. From handsome portraits of castles or beaches to pop iconography – yes, including werewolves, vampires and zombies – it’s all on the walls.

This exhibition, like a many headed snake, is what the Thurso High School pupils are saying. Some may find it a bit challenging. This is as it should be. My advice is to go and see it – and admission is free.

Lizzy Ross and her painting What's The Time, Mr Wolf

Michaela Cameron and her painting The Real Me

Louise Calder's Costume for Titania

Natalie Grant's The Lion King

Michaela Sibley's Personality, Past, Future

© George Gunn, 2011

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Westland Exhibition - Caithness Horizons

ARTISTS working together always is inspiring. Sometimes it can be fraught with danger but the results of the collaboration of Joanne B. Kaar, a Caithness artist, and Lynn Taylor, an artist from New Zealand, is truly uplifting.

They have a common theme, and on the face of it, it is Mary Anne’s Cottage in the Westside of Dunnet, but in fact it is the sea. It is the sea that connects Otago in New Zealand with the far north coast of Caithness. But it is imagination, pure and simple, which makes sense of this jumble of history. Yet this is a very precise jumble.

From the beautiful drawings of chairs which greet you as you enter, the viewer encounters three aprons, a row of bottles, a row of twine of various texture and shape, and strange but familiar objects like a painted oar and other things too numerous to mention.

The central image is the seaman’s chest, his kist, which, like Pandora’s box, has liberated the visual flair and humour of these artists. For Joanne this is obviously home territory, and hers is the dominant personality of this exhibition – her tone, her colour sense, and above all her love of paper as a material and boats as a subject, is prevalent. This is no bad thing as she is an artist of the highest calibre and knows how to lay stuff out, because the jumble is an intriguing and structured jumble.

The sea is one of the few elements that, like humans, can dream. This exhibition has a dream-like quality to it; it is extremely sensuous, tactile and full of memories. Not content with painting, or with making paper objects, the artists insist that viewer becomes a listener as Mary Anne’s voice comes from beneath an almost religious assembly of chairs.

This is an important point, as we, however poor we are, are drawn together, to talk, to remember, to dream, to thank God we are still alive no matter the distances between each other, be that New Zealand or Scotland, each country the other side of the planet.

But in many ways this represents the two halves of the North Highlander, which is a tragedy of emigration, survival and hanging onto life even if you have to dig it out of the earth with your bare hands or build the boats which carry you across the planet yourself.

This exhibition is an eloquent testament to that survival. I urge all of you who care about this county, its people and their history to go and see it. This is art with a purpose and it is rare.

Caithness Horizons are to be congratulated in hosting this timely and important exhibition and I sincerely wish that they continue to mix the international with the local as talent is talent in any continent.

Exhibition opening hours are 10am – 6pm.

© George Gunn, 2009

Links

• Caithness Horizons

• Paperboats

• Mary-Ann’s Cottage

• Joanne B. Kaar

• George Gunn