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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ditty Box by John Cumming and Cecil Tait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Cape Farewell

DEREK Williams was a chartered surveyor from Cardiff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a great show.

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

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

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

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

ANNIE Cattrell’s current exhibition at Timespan presents a fascinating collaboration between disciplines of Art and Science.

INSPIRED by natural elements and interior mindscapes, this series of dynamic works in glass and paper are perfectly sited in the gallery and within a local landmark, referencing a history of human interaction with land and seascape.

Annie Cattrell - Conditions

The installation of Currents in the old Helmsdale Ice House, just across the Telford Bridge from Timespan, provides a historical setting in which to contemplate Cattrell’s hand-modelled three-dimensional surface of the sea. The site distils the sculpture by association, playing with the dynamic of “mutatis mutandis” so prevalent in the artist’s work. The richly textured stone wall interior of the ice house as a man made structure and the visual representation of the ocean, responsive to elemental forces of nature above the surface through wind and weather and below in the movement of the undercurrent and tides, present surfaces of tension held beautifully in balance in the mind’s eye. The solid form of the sculpture (L 2,800mm x W. 800mm x H 200mm), tantalisingly similar to ice in its opaque, layered translucence, embodies human aspiration for permanence through Art coupled with the inevitability of ceaseless change in nature.

Annie Cattrell - Conditions

Similarly in Cattrell’s Conditions, a series of twelve sculptures in sub-surface etched optical glass displayed on a wooden plinth, the idea of permanence meets the ephemeral nature of cloud. “Informed by dialogues with meteorologist Stan Cornford”, the artist has created a fluid, multi-layered work where finely etched marks contained within the solidity of glass refract and reduce their confinement. The monumentality of cloud formations and their placement 40,000ft above the earth’s crust echoed in the 400mm height of each sculpture could also be read as minute particles of dust caught in a heavy transparency of human construction.The documentation of different types of cloud is transformed into a poetic and supremely elegant work which heightens our sense of a human mind perceiving nature.

Annie Cattrell - Pleasure-Pain

Similarly the artist’s use of scientific technology to map interior surfaces, including Lydar laser scanning and FMRI brain scanning techniques, reimagines this data, presenting a highly ambiguous model of physicality in the gallery space. Pleasure/Pain is a fascinating example; an S.L.S rapid prototype, displayed on a mirror and plinth which charts in three dimensions the physical parts of the brain linked to these dual sensations. Made in collaboration with neuroscientist Professor Morten Kringelbach from Oxford University, Pleasure/Pain is a curious hybrid of Scientific and Artistic enquiry; a strange new species resembling a piece of fossilised coral or bone from an alien subterranean world, something outside ourselves rather than within.

The placement of this object on the mirror, a surface of truth and deceit in relation to the Self and upon a culturally elevated plinth encourages narrative association, not with the emotional centre of Pleasure and Pain but the physical locus of it in the brain and as an idea. The contours and textures of the sculpture/ prototype are unexpectedly beautiful in their striated delicacy, a natural by-product of the mystery of our own creation.

Annie Cattrell - Capacity

Capacity, a fragile construction of Borosilicate glass made by human breath to form the delicate structure of human lungs, is another example of the way that Cattrell explores connections between Art , Science and knowledge. The way that light and shadow inform our reading of this work, displayed at an elevated height, brings traditional elements of visual language into play in a way that defies purely observational interpretation of the object or surface. The artist’s use of a material usually used to make test tubes by glass blowing is utilised in a poetic way that reminds us of our own vulnerability. The illuminated clear glass with no hint of corruption or disease also suggests an ideal or aspirational state, a sense of human evolution or progression through Science and Art/ Culture.

An expansive definition of drawing in three dimensions is ever present throughout the exhibition. This human mark skilfully incised on 300 gram Bockingford paper has created an exquisite series of works, Brink, Pour, Lift and Pressure, that extend beyond the confines of the frame. Cattrell’s papercut drawings contain an extraordinary sense of movement and precision, physically altering the integrity of the pictorial ground in a way that captures elemental, natural forces.

Brink is both microcosm and macrocosm, suggesting an aerial view, the edge of a shifting continent in the ebb and flow of incisions across the surface. Lift is one of the most breathtaking works in the exhibition, a strip of ground contrasted with the sculptural manipulation of the surface; a series of minute movements of the hand and eye to create a living work of Art. The surface is cut and the imaginative space drawn in a way that feels organic, a quality also richly in evidence in Pour, a visualisation of gravity itself. The craftsmanship and persistence of Cantrell’s papercut drawings is impressive and this physicality is equal to the conceptual element of her practice represented in this latest body of work.

Following Annie Cattrell’s RSA/Creative Scotland residency hosted by the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness during 2010, this first exhibition by the artist in the Highlands will also be shown at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery from August to October 2012.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Timespan
• Annie Cattrell

THE PIER is hoaching with folk asking where the toilets are and why there isn’t a café.

UPSTAIRS there’s a chap looking after a visiting celeb. He waves his hand at the walls. ‘This is a local photographer,’ he says. ‘He’s not bad.’

It’s festival time, of course, and it hits me how lucky I am to be able to view work here all year round, in all sorts of light, in lots of space. It’s different, seeing a video installation amidst a press of people. The two artists on display have both been energised by Orkney; both have ‘local’ connections and international reputations; both are women.

Work for Christine Borland's The Grey Room

The sex is important, I think, because I think there are things women know more about than men, things which engage them creatively in different ways. Christine Borland is moved by Barbara Hepworth’s womb-like sculptures – all those warm womanly buttocky curves. Typically, though, Borland investigates deeper – right into the interior, scanning the work, turning it inside out, making shape out of negative space.

She has talked about ‘working figuratively, but not in life drawing’ and that’s what this is about. Her interest in medical science, dissection and anatomy isn’t clinical, but warmly engaged with the need to connect experiment to consequences – the Orcadian installation piece Hoxa Sound (2001), which is sited in two identical WW2 searchlight posts facing each other, is a good example of this.

It’s two prosthetic legs – a child’s – cast in steel which, it’s said, was recovered from the rusting sunken warships in the Flow and recast for medical equipment. The legs themselves, a rich rust brown, look tough and vulnerable at the same time; a celebration, maybe, of civilisation wresting a bit of good out of bad.

A Madras Loom leads us into the big sweep of cotton lace that’s the Grey Room installation. This beautiful instrument is from Borland’s home town, Darval. You can feel the maker’s love for it, the precision of the man-made joints and frets and mechanics. Your history brain starts humming – industrialisation, lace towns, rural craft, urban despair… but it’s only a tiny bit of the story – this was the room where women hunted the material for flaws, to darn them, where they repaired the machine’s mistakes.

Your eye is drawn to the big red dots in the big cotton weave, and sure enough, there are runs and snags – it’s like a magnified spider’s web, wrecked by bluebottles struggling. In the corner there are two wee seats, their cushions (nicely ironic this) patched with parcel tape – and two message bags hung over the chair backs. The play on scale is subtle and engaging – how tiny the tears that machine made were, how minute the repair – how enormous this cotton bale is, gushing all over the Pier’s ‘high’ room, flowing into corners – women’s work, from the tiny corner, fussy, never ending, crucial, unremarked. It’s a fine piece.

Christine Borland - Cast From Nature (film still)

I pass over the video work – one isn’t moving much and I like the physicality of the lace too much to spoil it by looking at a flat screen – and the wee room’s too crowded. It’s into Orkney Clay Body (male and female) – another celebration of layers and discoveries. There’s a series of potters’ tables, nicely used, coffee-cup circled and battered – and on them, rough cast pots.

They’re lovely, because they’re barely a step away from the making hand – unwieldy and lumpy and busy holding themselves together. This is, really, the human body and what it’s for – making, gathering, feeding – all in one. We’re just stuff, beautiful stuff mixed with mystery. To enlarge the point – developing the streak of irony which I’m finding most engaging in this artist – we meet Venus of the Whins.

There’s been hoo-ha amongst archaeological circles about a couple of finds from local digs which look human – the Westray Wifie, and the Brodgar Beuy. Potter Andrew Appleby produced his own find, which is here captured in a glass case beside the official report which dismisses it as ‘entirely geological in origin…shows no modification to its overall shape or surface.’ It looks as anthropomorphic as the Brodgar beuy; but that was found in very different, high profile circumstances.

Well! Something geological which is unmodified – I’d say that was a first. Of course it’s modified, by time, history, Orkney, Appleby, Borland, the glass case. Archaeology isn’t just mud; it’s Divine Imperfections, mediated by – in this case – woman’s work. I’ll go back to this show.

Christine Borland - Detail from Orkney Clay Body

But it’s upstairs, to Gunnie Moberg’s portraits of festival folk. This is a fascinating little journey – perhaps more evocative (as the chap who heads my review seems to suggest) for ‘local’ people. The much missed photographer is in her element here – catching people unawares – charming them – for she was very charming – into unguarded relaxation, and then capturing their essence for us.

It’s also a history of the growing awareness, confidence, and knowingness of the St Magnus International Festival, as we now call it, and of Gunnie’s own sense of her role as photographer to the great and good. The early work, in black and white, is fresh and exuberant. There’s Seamus Heaney caught in mid-crack, whisky half-cock, in ’82, the year they all danced at Brodgar on Midsummer Night; there’s Crichton Smith, never quite losing the teachery gesture – there’s Robert Alan Jamieson looking like a young Viking.

Gunnie Moberg - Maya Angelou,1991

Naomi Mitchison and G M B mirror each other, hands and knees crossed. Maxwell Davies hunches over Isaac Stern in that eagle-concentration posture that’s so familiar, Edwin Morgan is all tooth gaggle, a smile on legs; Jessie Kesson is defiantly dressed in an assortment of the wrong things, because clearly it’s not important. Perhaps the most evocative portrait, because there’s a lot of Gunnie in it, is of the Faroese writer William Heinesins at 90 – the knitted chair back, the beautiful hands, the busy eyes …

Later portrait,s in colour, seem no less searching and informative, but more formal and solemn. Perhaps as the Festival grew up, it put away childish things and daft behaviour as the weight of history grew, and Gunnie, a faithful recorder, reflected it too.

A fine pair, then, uncovering layers, investigating history and legacy and presenting us with the results. Digging the garden will never be quite the same.

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• St Magnus Festival

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

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

arah Maclean - Untitled (relief print)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anne Marie Nicol - Goldenlight (woodblock)

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

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

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

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

Sue Daniel - Know Thyself (after Domenichino)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

THIS IS an intriguing pairing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Rik Hammond

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

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

Rik Hammond drawings at Orkney Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rik Hammond drawing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Rik Hammond

BEFORE the evening’s entertainment commenced I was stopped in the street by several people during the day who wanted to know what a foy is.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is “A parting entertainment, present, cup of liquor, etc., given by or to one setting out on a journey. In different parts of Scotland applied variously to a party given in honour of a woman on the eve of her marriage; to a feast at the end of the harvest or fishing season; and the like.” It may be derived from the Dutch version of the French foie, meaning way or journey.

Cynthia Chaddock, John McGill, Morag MacInnes and Emma Grieve

It could also be the Johnsmas Foy which is performed during the St Magnus Festival in June. Certainly in Orkney, and Shetland, a foy has come to mean a celebration in words and music.

This is what we got at the Pier Arts Centre when master wordsmiths Morag MacInnes and John McGill performed their own work, Cynthia Chaddock read, and Emma Grieve told stories and sang.

McGill’s short story of life in the slums of a Glasgow tenement came with a warning of content of hideous depravity. His anti-religious fervour abounds, somewhat sweetly, as his Catholic protagonist is plagued with fearful imaginings of being damned. His only solution is to murder and mutilate his angelic niece who is a symbol of loveliness. There will be no wrangling over his soul and total forgiveness could only be met by total depravity. Spellbound by the realism and magic in the writing and telling, we were left standing on the edge of a cliff during the interval.

MacInnes brought dazzling poetry and prose; playing with the words of her native dialect. Her finesse is to stand outside to observe her island community and tell it from within; perhaps being a once-exiled Orcadian has added this gift.

A Christmas story about how granny made a tree when weather prevented the boat from delivering one could have been twee, but as granny gathers presents for the cat, the dog and the postie and assembles her Orkney tree we recognise island life with all its trials and blessings through our brief glimpses of her characters, and twee it is not. Her poem urging the Old Man of Hoy to escape and outwit the camera snapping tourists is a funny bid for independence.

Cynthia Chaddock’s melodious voice was rich and beautiful, but would have benefitted from slowing slightly to allow us to fully appreciate the nuances of her recitations of Gerald Manley Hopkins, her husband Clive’s poems, Bruce Chatwin, and a timely extract from Edward Gibbon’s the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire referring to the independence of the native Caledonians.

Emma Grieve gave a lively performance of stories including George Mackay Brown’s children’s story The Two Fiddlers and schoolgirl Alanna Swannay’s Battle o the Mackerel. Her solo singing included Partans in his Creel.

Traditional tunes were played by Stephen Flett on piano, Aidan White on fiddle and Isla Wallace on accordion, under the musical direction of Jean Leonard.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2012

I’M A newcomer to the world of the Swirry – that’s the Scottish Womens’ Rural Institute to the uninitiated amongst you.

I WAS  prepared for competition, for high standards, for quality – but not quite prepared for the fierce gaze of neighbouring Swirry ladies as you unload your produce, the eager point-counting, the close scrutiny of judges (wha’s he related to? Did he cut the sponge doon the middle afore he tried it?)

It’s a bit like war with no blood, just jam. I’m reminded of this at the annual Open Exhibition at the Pier – a very popular event, this, where people come to buy stuff and look for friends’ pictures. Over a hundred entries, full-on work for those hanging the stuff.

Christmas Open in the Pier

This year it’s clearly themed – flowers here, animals there, text heavy stuff in a wee room, abstract and off the wall in a big space. Because it’s so popular, there have to be guidelines. You must be resident. It must be current work (as in the Swirry, you mustn’t put the cross stitch you did for Amy’s wedding in year after year till she’s bringing her baby to see it…)

Some folk slipped through the net – annoying to see work from 1982 on the wall, nice as it is – but for the most part this is a large, messy, bitty, fairly joyous show, democratic and determinedly non-pretentious. There are exceptions, of course; but in general, the more pretension a work has – to philosophical or spiritual depth, to knowingness, to boundary breaking and shock jocking – the less successful it is. Look in the quiet corners and you’ll find jewels.

Flower studies haven’t recovered from the great Victorian cataloguers, unrivalled for patient accurate draughtsmanship. I associate rosa rugosa with sturdy Orkney hedgerows: here it’s domestic and tamed. To keep a flower alive as you’re painting is hard – look at Chardin. Or the Glasgow boys, for freedom and discipline in harmony.

It’s a good discipline, drawing from life, and one Sunday painters shy away from, precisely because it takes practice. The figurative work here  is tentative to say the least, and often tricksy – whatever is lettraset promarker? I’m caught by Shona Firth’s fine pantomine dame – wittily titled Isnae Disney, this is a tribute to local Orkney dramatic tradition, beautifully captured – an exotic costume, a homely familiar face topping it.

Next to it, the Papay makers Ivanov and Chan display another exotic, which reminds me of shrunken head totems in a marine museum – a canvas death man, roughly daubed with black. A warm, live evocation of life and entertainment juxtaposed with a ritual mask. Well done the Pier.

Window display

In another corner, Morag Tweedie’s evocative gentle meditation in mixed media, The Servant, tells its own little story – a glove, roses, net curtain.  Next to it – another good juxtaposition – Ingrid Garrioch has an intelligent  photographic study of masculinity, in sepia. It needs to be looked at more than once. I like Emma Ainley’s Loo Roll Memorial, a ribbon of colour while we’re on life and death and what’s in between. It’s witty without trying too hard.

Impossible to pass Diana Leslie’s work, simply because her palette is subtle, chalky and earthy, and her brushwork makes you feel good.  She works outdoors, and it’s a brave thing to do – if only because an overworked studio piece soon loses freshness. There are good landscapes on show, and there are landscapes which have sat too long on an easel whilst the artist fussed over them.

Each medium has its pluses and minuses, and you  can really see this here – acrylic paint needs a swift hand, or it dries dull and flat. Oil needs to be translucent and rough at the same time, and as for watercolour – it separates the bairns from the grown ups and no mistake. A wash too far, a jarring note, and you’ve had it. Look at Berte Zawadski’s Shapinsay Winter Scene for a masterclass in simplicity. Steph Spence’s Reflection captures something brooding and strange, a life beyond the image….

There’s photography here; there’s fine jewellery, textile work (Alec Webster’s Wave Studies are a finely judged balance of acrylic and threads). The domestic is on show – Sigrid Appleby’s tiny Stromness Window is loving, precise and utterly satisfying.

Christmas Open

There’s what I’d call the slightly weird and wacky – text based pieces, apocalyptic visions (Lynn Ralston’s Northside Birsay, sporting a very red sea, looks like a sci-fi film dating from when colour first turned everybody’s head a bit. It’s a bit Matisse, a brave shock.) Lyndsay Hall has made a shattered mirror with a red nose in the middle, called Vision of You. Marshall Luck is reinventing Bosch in three D, with his ship of fools, The Twelve Apostates – rowing boats filled with fishing men, Neptune in the corner, deep meaning all over the place.  The best of the thought provoking, experimental work for me is Hilary Seatter’s take on the movement of the sea – two silk prints, hung on top of one another, called Waves Micro. They  shift and shimmer, and the delicacy of the artist’s observation is clear.

I love the unexpected, and commend these folk for pushing boundaries – but it’s fine to catch Kirsty Grieve’s Weathered – orange and blue, almost peacock feather colours, but very gentle and restful. The same’s true of a window piece (windows always dress well, in the Pier), Sarah Smith’s Boat No 16 – it’s delicate and sad, perfectly put together.

Upstairs there’s a big pig and a big sheep. I’m reminded of 18^th century studies I saw in the Usher Gallery in Lincoln, of very big Tamworths. Animals by weight, or by fleece, have their place in rural celebration. However, the gem here, tucked away in a corner, is Colin Kirkpatrick’s elegant rumination about our relationship to the sea and the catch.

With its Inuit iconography and clean paleolithic line, it  is a small intelligent tonic. The title – West Shore Dream Time/Wakey Wakey Marine Baby, perhaps catches eloquently the modern dilemma facing agriculture and fisheries.  The same sense of history and direction is present in two monoprints by Sarah Kea  – Study for Traverse Board has a nicely nautical feel, and an elegiac touch that makes you return to it.

Maybe artists have to do more than simply depict the natural world. They have to say what it’s hard to express any other way. There are Orcadians doing this, and they’re to be commended.

There’s far more than I’ve mentioned, and you’ll find your own pleasures and dismays  – that’s the fun of it. Don’t whatever you do miss seeing it; and remember that the painting you are scrutinising may be the work of the lady on your left. Just like when you are hovering over the Black bun table in the Swirry Baking Show.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

I THINK we should let artists out more often.

They’re a solitary bunch, squirreling away in the studio or contemplating a cliff: but when they get together you can’t shut them up and the results can be very thought-provoking. The Pier was host to this animated – very animated  – discussion between three practitioners.

They’d come together to discuss the results of an imaginative project developed by Orkney Arts Society and funded by Scotland’s Islands (whatever will we do when that particular cash cow disappears into the void?) The quote – All things seem possible – comes from American environmentalist Edwin May Teale. The brief was to produce 40 drawings in the 31 days of May, in A5 landscape. The results were to be printed in a limited edition.

Drawing by Diana Leslie

The artists  – Diana Leslie, Colin Johnstone and Robin Bownass – knew each other’s work, but had no contact with each other during the month, beyond, as Johnstone says, ‘meeting Diana in the street and thinking, God, I havenae started thinking yet.’

They’re very different people, and therein lies the fascination. Leslie began the event by describing how alien it seemed  – and how wonderful – to be offered financial rewards for drawing. ‘Draw for a month and get paid? Hmm. That’s hard…’

But immediately, she said, the project began to articulate her practice. She’s not accustomed to A 5. ‘It takes more welly, somehow. I go through paper in a big way; with this I was persisting with small, almost forgotten causes, the rules of engagement were different.’

She chose to sketch from a stance on Brinkies Brae, the  hill above Stromness famous as the home  (as they say at Halloween) of the witch Bessie Millie, who sold winds to sailors. Her sketchbook is a visual record, from North to South, of the view, 360 degrees of it.

She incorporates writing, large generous cursive; she uses a very soft pencil, and works and works at detail. What you get is almost a peek at the learning curve. Some of the sketches just take off – the space and air and reflections balance. Some are too fussy. Some, clearly, will find themselves re-invented as paintings.

That’s the point, really – it’s a record of the business of success and failure. You’ll all have your own favourites from this book, but it’s most fun to ponder the ones you don’t find successful – and delightful that they’re all there, the good and the problematic ones. It’s honest work.

I love sketches – my favourite is the German artist Menzel, but any glimpse of an artist practising technique intrigues – Leonardo on muscles, Durer on rabbits, Breughel on children, all wadded up to escape the winter chill. I like domestic detail, rather than Constable’s careful colour notations – it’s the randomness of a moment that’s so human about sketching – you can almost hear the artist saying, I just have to get that down on paper, that dog scratching, that woman plucking a hen.

This project somehow doesn’t have that spontaneity, because none of the artists are engaged particularly by the human body, perhaps; or perhaps because, when you’re told your sketches will become a book, it’s a bit inhibiting.

Drawing by Robin Bownass

Robin Bownass’ approach is a traditional one. The oldest of the artists, he explained that drawing for him is central to the understanding of structure. In the past, artists drew from what they looked at, and learnt from it. Now in Art Colleges, he says, this isn’t happening. His drawings are based on the many crumbling W W 11 builings scattered around Orkney. ‘A record needs to be made’ he said.

He’s involved in a big Ship of Fools project, and brought a painting in to illustrate how the sketches inform larger work. He mentioned Durer’s Knight Death and the Devil, and Daumier’s Don Quihote, as influences – but his work is blunter than theirs. He uses brush and wash, not pencil. There’s a sense  again here that the A5 format is constraining – the sketches seem to burst out, full of vigour, as if they want to be allowed more space.

‘It’s not as simple as copying,’ he said. ‘People can be taught how to see. Preparatory studies are vital. I find these strange collapsing structures in such dramatic coastal settings exciting, and the sketches are preparatory and necessary. My sketchbook’s essential to me – and I enjoy it, I take delight in the medium, responding to the feel of the paint.’

Drawing by Colin Johnstone

Colin Johnstone’s approach is radically different. He hadn’t used a sketchbook since 1978, and ‘I’ll be chucking this one – it’s over to the viewer now.’ He described himself as ‘not a stand-and-look person; I’m more introspective, I look internally. This is full of personal things. I’m interested in veneers, in surfaces, layering. I used a 1970 Formica Architect’s Book as my inspiration, that and a facsimile of a 17 century artist’s notebook – just his business book, with blank pages, notes of sales, ink blots – I found it in a charity shop.’

This original approach yields an enigmatic and fascinating meditation. There’s a colour chart at the beginning so the viewer can imagine the formica  colours. (The actual book, with its samples, and 70s lettering and style, takes you right back to the time when imitation wood on sticky back plastic adorned every kitchen).

There’s a page which tells ‘the book, cover to cover’ – a summing up, perhaps, of the month as it unfolded,   – volcanic ash, a family tragedy, a riff on Icarus and windfarms, which he hates. The pages themselves are concrete poems, full of meaning for him – but capable of utterly different – and perfectly valid – interpretations by the viewer.

It’s a finished product, in a way that the other books are not; carefully meditated and organised. A couple of the images will become bigger pictures, he thinks; but  I don’t see why; I think the works fit perfectly into the sketchbook space and there’s a progression there which feels right.

‘I don’t draw academically’ he said – and that did it! We were treated to a really feisty discussion about the nature and purpose of drawing; what’s mechanical and dead and what’s real. Johnstone used to draw from observation but no longer does;. ‘I don’t think I’m missing anything!’ he said.

‘I do’ said Bownass.

From there to a discussion about ego – Leslie said, ‘Durer’s image of Jesus was himself! He was saying, I am God!  Ego’s a bad thing! If I make arrogant drawings, they’re bad!

‘Ego’s a drive,’ said Johnstone. Then – what’s conceptual art? What’s modern? What’s truth?

It was fascinating. They could have gone on all day. I loved it.  I had to go home and look at lots of sketchbooks, and wonder why Durer was so conceited about his hair.

As I say – we should let our artists out more. We should give them money to publish more sketchbooks as well.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Scotland’s Islands
• Orkney Arts Society
• Pier Arts Centre

NOVELIST Lesley Glaister spotted several published and many unpublished writers in the audience for her reading from her novel Chosen – her psychological thriller about religious cults and what happens when a family member joins a sect.

This set the theme for her presentation, organised by Orkney Arts Society, which focussed on her author’s journey while writing the novel. The creation of the novel is a typical example of how writers are often blind to their own experiences. Glaister had the idea that the subject of a person becoming a member of a cult, and particularly the effect of this on the family left behind, would make a great subject for a thriller. She set about finding out more about the psychology of a person who is drawn into a cult.

Lesley Glaister (photo by Catherine Turnbull)

She knew her protagonist would be a woman aged about 30 and a male member of the family would join the religious sect – maybe a father or a brother. It is funny how writers make these decisions, she said, especially as she later remembered that one of her own brothers was involved in The Divine Light Mission when she was a young teenager.

She visited him in his Ashram and she used memories of this and later conversations about how it had affected him to research the novel. One of her most vivid is that all the people who were members of the cult were “glazey-eyed and blissed out”.

She never stayed around to find out why this happened after people were initiated. It was thrilling to be among people who all had one purpose and was almost tempted to go through with the ceremony. Somehow she had forgotten all about this episode in her life.

Through these memories she invented the Soul-Life church in the USA for Chosen. The novel begins when Dodie’s younger brother, Seth, only 16, has gone to New York, supposedly to stay with relatives. But Dodie is alerted that something else is going on when a letter from Seth is addressed from the Soul-Life commune in New York State.

Glaister’s reading described Dodie’s visit to the commune and first meeting with cult members with its sinister undertones.

The author felt the story was flimsy, with too many stereotypes, so she shifted to tell the back story of how her imagined cult began. She drew on her early experiences on the fringes of her brother’s hippy kingdom.

In this central section we meet the hippy Bogart, who looked like “Jesus or Cat Stevens”. The reading took us back to a party in a squat in 1974 which was so convincing that one audience member who was born well after the 1970s felt she had travelled back in time to that place.

As someone who was around then I wondered if Glaister and I had been to the same party. Once the back story had been told the rest of the book flowed to its dramatic and tragic conclusion.

Glaister teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews. The following day she led a writing workshop in Kirkwall Library, taking participants with eyes closed to observe and describe objects and atmosphere using all the senses. Her visit to Orkney, where she and husband Andrew Greig have a house, was of great value to the islands’ writing community.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

SYLVIA WISHART (1936-2008) began life in a house on Clouston’s Pier, in the centre of Stromness, a couple of doors away from where, fifteen years earlier, George Mackay Brown was born.

Their lives were intertwined a bit: but Sylvia was her own woman, and cut her own solitary track through Orkney’s history and landscape. This exhibition brings together for the first time work garnished  from a 50 year long life in painting; canvas after canvas fills the Pier. There are really useful information boards, and the place is buzzing with locals – many of whom provided the works on show.

Sylvia Wishart - Cottage Interior c. 1968-72, oil on board, private collection © The Estate of Sylvia Wishart

You feel her presence particularly if you are an older Orcadian, and remember when the warehouse which became part of the Pier was once her own studio; upstairs you can see her 1973 ‘Harbour View’, thoughtfully hung exactly where she would have stood when painting from her tiny window.

Margaret Gardiner was her friend; they schemed together about a perfect site to house Gardiner’s St Ives Collection. Margaret bought Sylvia’s place, Sylvia became an adviser and then a Trustee; the rest is Pier history.

So she’s coming home, in a sense, though in a way she never left. She did teach elsewhere; but Rackwick and the West Short were her painting places. Like Mackay Brown, she didn’t feel the need to move far to get inspiration.

I declare a family interest here; early in my father Ian MacInnes’ career as a marine artist, post war, he took his light easel around the Stromness streets in all weathers. Clouston’s pier was a favourite – it commands a fine view both ways, is made of good ochre stone, well dressed, and there were boats, buoys, washing lines and dappled shadows a-plenty.

The young Sylvia used to dog his footsteps, saying, ‘what are you doing noo? What bit are you puttan in?’ To stop her asking questions he would get her to hold down his easel for him until she got fed up. (There was a gentle etiquette preserved, when he painted the street; folk knew him, came up and said, ‘Aye Ian, no bad day’, and then went on with their walk; but Sylvia was a bit young to know the rules.)

She first exhibited a picture at twelve, in amongst some MacInneses , Farmiloes and Scotts, and was considered gifted; but it’s a sign of her character that, though she studied under dad at school and he tried hard to get her to apply to Art College, she was adamant that she didn’t want to ‘stay on’  – she went to the Post Office instead. A living had to be made. However, he persevered, and they got together a portfolio, and off she went to Grays in Aberdeen.

Sylvia Wishart - Watchful 1964, oil on wood, on loan from Ingrid M Morrison

It’s a treat to see her development. I looked, of course in the early work, for traces of my father’s influence – a fluid splashy line, a rich ultramarine, raw sienna, burnt ochre palette. Not a trace of it.  Her early 1964 study of the local boat the Watchful is already informed by her continuing interest in geometrical shapes – funnels, masts, gangplanks, netting – and the sage green and cream chalkiness has a pastel, conti crayon feel to it which never really leaves her work for long, even in old age.

Her portraits from this period show great empathy. She catches the subtlety of personality and domestic atmosphere in a way which is very attractive. I wonder why figures don’t feature much in the later work – it’s a shame. Perhaps – though she could be gregarious and welcoming and warm, of course – the creative act which engaged her was to do with the elements themselves, the essence of things – not people.

Her mature work begins in Rackwick. She visited, with friends Mackay Brown and Susie Gilbertson. There she fell in love with a broken down croft which sits in the bowl of a hill commanding a view of the crescent sweep of shoreline, a ruckle of abandoned houses, and the astonishing red sandstone  Hoy cliffs. The trio walked, talked and drank by peat fires and the light of Tilley lamps and cruisies; they flirted with Catholicism.  (Sylvia changed her mind).

She did the croft up.  George wrote, and Sylvia painted. They fought sometimes – real fisticuffs. They shared the urge to make something, inspired by the scenery around them.

He produced An Orkney Tapestry (a seminal work, outlining many of the themes which would recur in his later work). She did the illustrations – beautiful precise pieces of draughtsmanship. Around the same time she produced a series of Orkney views for a local business calendar, and these are in the long corridor at the Pier.

Sylvia Wishart Hoy Sound 1987,oil and mixed media on paper, Pier Arts Centre Collection (c) The Estate of Sylvia Wishart

Tranquil visions, they are – no high winds, no undue Romanticism, they’re utterly Classical and immensely satisfying. It is as if she is looking through a glass, and the distance that gives  empties her, and the view, of feeling and allows her simply to record. I’m reminded of Orwell saying that good prose should be like a window pane – and perhaps this image isn’t a bad one at all, specially for the later work, which I’ll get to in a minute.

She returns to favourite views again and again, in the 60s and 70s, and we begin to see the inclusion of important, totemic objects – a capped fence post; a ship in a bottle; a bird; a lamp; a Biblical text. The oil is thick and crusty, and she uses the paintbrush flat and square, then turns it and scrapes and scratches with the sharp end, so that corn stalks, wood grain, furrowed fields, roof flags or dyke tops stand proud. Winter suits her tonal sense – greys, a fugitive wispy turquoise, browns, and then tiny streaks of something unexpected – an orange streak in the sky, or on a stray clump of monbretia; a red streak of rust.

It’s impossible to look at this period in her development without connecting it to Brown’s images of Rackwick, the deserted valley:

At Burnmouth the door hangs from a broken hinge

And the fire is out.

The windows of Shore empty sockets

And the hearth coldness

Stars shine through the roofbeams of Scar

No flame is needed

To warm ghosts and nettles and rats

(Orkney Tapestry)

A triptych, in the sea-room of the Pier is perhaps the only really derivative thing in the exhibition – it’s pure GMB, down to the Madonna in the blackened hearth; and it sits uneasily, the imagery mawkish, the heavy symbolism dragging the thing down.

There is a great loneliness, I think, in these  Rackwick pictures – the frames (beautifully chosen and painted to compliment what’s in them, a study on their own) frame an empty window or the hasps of a door. We are in the darkness of the croft, often, looking out at light – and what a variety of light – hot harvest, yellow spring rain, snow.

Nature has taken over, and is implacable – beautiful sometimes, but untouchable, a little scary. An element, not to be domesticated. Influences? Well, there’s a touch of the Joan Eardley, perhaps; more than a nod to the Glasgow Boys and Peploe; a drop  of Max Ernst – those moons, discs hanging over fields  – as we move on to the next period, when she moves to Heatherybraes.

Sylvia Wishart - Hoy Sound with reflection c. 1996, oil and mixed media on paper, on loan from Tom Muir

It’s a long low Orkney croft house with a panoramic view of the Pentland Firth, where the tides run in a ‘roost’. She could see Hoy, and, on a clear day, the coast of Scotland; and fields tumble down towards the water under her house, worked by local farmers, changing colour and texture as the year turns. It provides her with another window; ( ‘it’s ‘smashing!’)  – and a new discovery. A friend visits, and she’s out. She leaves a drawing of a bird on the window. She looks at it.

‘This made me look…at the window as well as through it.’

It’s a pivotal moment. Subsequently there’s hardly a painting which doesn’t play with reflection, what’s inside and what’s not, what’s natural and what’s made. The barrier between the inner and the outer breaks down; the view from the window becomes a view in a window, in the glass. The objects and ornaments dance about amongst doves, owls, hanging plants and sometimes, the reflection of the artist herself. Outside things – jaunty Alfred Wallis boats, the ferry, the moon – nestle in beside the pattern of curtains. Rusty balers bowl along beside texts: Thou God seest me is there.

The canvases are bigger, and swimmier, loose and dreamlike – Chagall’s in there somewhere now, and the insistence on returning again and again to the same theme is worthy of Cezanne and Monet. A couple of really delightful lithographs have a crisp elegance, revisiting the same objects, adding a woman’s lined face – is it her? Or a relation? I do wish she had done more people. And illustrated childrens’ books – the little recurring details will delight young visitors.

There are other themes. She engages, for a while in the 70s with boxes and creels, piled outside her Stromness Pier ; she’s caught by a locally famous Norskie wreck on the West Shore, which has been slowly decaying since 1966 – you can still see the remains, though new artists have been taking chunks away to add to their own installations, not maybe knowing the old history of old things in their places on old shores.

In the end though, it’s the observer at the window, who confronts us. She gazes for so long that space and shape blur and melt. What’s more real – that ship out there? This window pole? The net curtain? The pot plant? The seaswell? The reflection of the reflection? She’s a philosopher-painter, investigating, in John Berger’s phrase, ‘ways of seeing.’

It takes me right back to her beginnings, tugging on an easel, asking and asking ‘what bit are you puttan in noo?’ She describes her own process like this – ‘I let the picture grow in all directions until a decision is made where to stop the image … I choose to start with much more than I think I will need … it gives a freer form of expression.’

There’s a book coming; an important addition to this very important and impressive show. Put your order in now.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

THERE was an evocative photographic exhibition by John Bulmer at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness recently. Taken in the 1960s and 1970s for the Sunday Times Magazine, the photographs document Orkney on the cusp of change – still rooted in its historic way of life but with hints of what might be coming.

John Bulmer's memorable image of a woman milking from the recent show at the Pier Arts Centre

Seen today, from a globalised, networked consumer society undergoing its own stress tests, the images of sheep in Kirkwall’s streets and milking by hand in the wind suggest how far we have travelled. And not much has changed more than Orkney’s cultural life in that time, both in itself and as a result of wider economic and social transformation.

Orkney’s culture is as ancient as any: thousands come each year to see Maeshowe and Skara Brae, the Ring of Brodgar and the Dwarfie Stane. More recent monuments, from the Viking period to the Second World War, have endowed the county with a truly exceptional cultural heritage.

But it’s the way that cultural life has flourished in the 40 years since John Bulmer took his photographs that seems remarkable now. The Pier Arts Centre and the St Magnus Festival have become internationally recognised since their creation in the late 1970s.

Yet they are only parts of a cultural life that includes folk and science festivals, amateur drama and pipe bands, galleries, museums and craft shops, literature, jewellery and visual arts.

Each element, small or great, well known or not, has a distinctive place in Orkney’s cultural ecology. Together they make the islands today artistically vital and widely admired.

So what happened? Why has Orkney experienced such a strong growth in its cultural development since John Bulmer took his photographs?

Is this story different to what has happened in the other islands – Shetland, the Hebrides, or the isles closer to the mainland? Is it different from artistic growth across the Highlands, itself a remarkable aspect of Scotland’s recent past?

Stromness Pipe Band at the Orkney Folk Festival

I’ve been commissioned by Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) to look at how Orkney’s culture has developed over the past generation and to what extent that experience may be replicable elsewhere. To that end, I’m looking back at records and data, such as they are, but more importantly listening to the people involved, whether as artists, activists, audience members or supporters.

The study is exploring questions such as:

§       What factors have made the arts and heritage of Orkney so rich?

§       How have things changed there over the past 30 years?

§       What has been gained – and perhaps lost as well?

§       What might people in other places learn from Orkney’s experience?

I’d also like to hear the views of people outside Orkney, and especially the users of this site, where so many different aspects of art and culture in the region are presented. How does Orkney and its cultural development look from where you are?

If you’d like to comment on these questions or you have other views about the arts in Orkney, please add a comment in the box below, or email me directly at matarasso@mac.com; I’ll be glad to hear from you.

Article by François Matarasso, 2011

Links

• François Matarasso

I OFTEN think that the art world – despite all its protestations and its open days and its community workshops – is a very closed shop indeed.

It reminds me of the Magic Circle – you only get in if you know the secret of the trick and swear never to tell; but you reserve the right to exchange a knowing wink with another Circle member.

Folk who have read my reviews know I love the Pier; but, though they did a brill job inside, the architects fell into the Magic Circle trap when they designed the door to the outside world. It’s scary smoked glass, so you kind of look into an aquarium, in which Sandra and Isla swim diligently.

Stands bearing expensive books and toys send warning signs; this is a Gallery. There won’t be cheeseburgers. It’s a wee bit forbidding; you’re entering a different zone.

Alfred Wallis- Headland with two three-masters (1934-8)

This was very evident during the Tall Ships weekend, and the Stromness gala week which followed. Streets full of cheeseburgers. The Pier’s pavements a riot of chalk drawing, as ever, and events inside for energetic school-free kids; but you are in a rarified element, beyond the doors.

Jim Lambie’s amazing op-art floor, which he had such fun installing, hits you the minute you walk in; it must be fun, being Sandra and Isla, and watching the punters’ reactions to such a cheeky, dizzymaking, challenging statement under their feet.

The point to all this rumination is the exhibition upstairs, past all the rock stars and pop references. This, planned to coincide with the Tall Ships,  is a must see for all sorts of reasons.

It showcases two artists who are described by those who know as ‘naïve’ painters.

It seems to me there’s always a note of condescension in that term. Experts, critics and curators on these TV art programmes wax lyrical – “never had any training!”, “semi-literate little old man!”, “used sheets of wrapping paper and laundry markers!”, “untrammeled by the pernicious effects of training in perspective!”, and so on.

I venture to suggest that Beryl Cook wasn’t a bit naïve – neither business-wise nor with regard to her artistic oeuvre. It’s sometimes just inverse snobbery, all this lauding of a kind of art that’s really closer to crafts, a kind of art which has always existed in its own domestic, working class/rural world.

A very few of these Grandma Moses’ have been ‘taken up’ – by dealers, or by – as in Alfred Wallis’ case – artists who were looking for a new direction in their own work. Wallis, of course, is part of the St Ives group, a big influence on Kit Woods and Ben Nicholson. He had been a seaman from the age of nine till thirty five, and began painting ‘for company’ on the death of his wife.

He was lionised, exhibited with the group – but spent his last days in the poorhouse. They made a beautiful gravestone for him, the St Ives painters; but seemed unable to solve the poorhouse problem; perhaps there was nowhere else to put an old man with Alzheimers. It seems a sad end, though, for such an inspirational figure.

He used old cardboard boxes as canvases, tearing them or cutting the tops and bottoms out; the colour and shape of the board informed the way the painting turned out. Bits were left bare to ‘be’ sand or rock. He used pencil, ships’ enamels, oil, charcoal. He painted on both sides of his paper, and arranged the village houses to his own personal perspective – his brother’s house was small, because they didn’t speak; the church was omnipresent.

The works in the Pier are rough, energetic, and sensual. He loves the geometry of boat hulls and rigging; the skies scud along, and the orangey-brown base colour imparts a richness to the seascapes. Combined with a vigorous, liberal use of chalky white and a sketchy shaggy black, this produces a lovely energy.

He seems impatient – his sailors are stick men, with no beards or caps; there’s nothing painstaking here. It’s a record, he said, of how things used to be; he didn’t need to refer to the ‘real’ landscape – it was all imprinted in his head. Perhaps that’s why these paintings seem so free – they’re only tethered to his imagination, and the emotion in them comes direct, without stopping by any reality checks on the way.

‘Naïve’ then, yes, in the sense that a child is naïve, innocent of restraint.

Thomson - Three-master passing Dennis Head Lighthouse and the Old Beacon, North Ronaldsay (1973)

An inspired combination then, to show William G Thomson’s North Ronaldsay work alongside Wallis. Crofter Wullie o’ Neven, a historian and folklorist, did most of his painting in later life, using photos and magazine illustrations for reference. He painted herring drifters, mail boats, and tall ships, using Humbrol model paint, a ruler, and black biro.

The titles, inscribed under the pictures in an ancient, elegant hand which brings to mind inkwells, blotters and nibs in a tiny local schoolroom, are long and detailed: ‘North Ronaldsay Mailboat making for Black Rock, Sanday’, for example. The detail is crucial – he knew every stick and stone of that coast. Geography, naming, precision, mattered.

This work is perhaps more familiar ‘naïve’ territory; the waves are like seagulls, the seagulls like seals, the clouds like candy floss; tractor, sheep and cows sit placidly on enamel grass, background to a painstaking boat with a red sail. The herring fleet sails into the deep in wobbly perspective, a forest of sails, all carefully numbered – LK110, K101. They veer off a flat plane, and the innocence of true perspective creates a surreal sense of dislocation.

A curiosity itself now, a glass float, is adorned with a fine rigger – the fanciful title, ‘In the Trade Winds’, made me think of the Onedin Line romance the tourists wanted to buy into during the Tall Ships weekend; some were put out to discover that rough weather makes folk sick on boats, its wet up aloft, there’s no tour guide telling you which grey lump is Copinsay, and the Captain’s word is law; he says you don’t sail, you don’t, no matter how many champagne dinners you’ve booked.

But there’s nothing fanciful about Thomson’s ships; he has done his homework; they are named, and their rigging is rulered in to perfection. You could make a model, using these pictures as a guide. He enjoys the patterns sun and shadow make on sails; his pencil can be subtle. A visitor said ‘these are just a record of the boats, what they looked like.’ Perhaps. But they’re a loving, careful record; like scrimshaw in the hands of a seaman, they’ve been worked on by someone who knew the world of ships in bottles, lighthouses manned by men, not machines.

Perhaps, I thought, as I looked at the inscription ‘To Beatrice from Daddy’, that’s the essence of ‘naïve’. It’s not really for sale; it’s for giving to folk; it doesn’t pretend to be what it’s not. The most troubled member of the St Ives group, Kit Woods, friend of Picasso, Diaghelev, Stravinsky, declared that he determined to be ‘the greatest painter in the world’.

Wallis and Thomson would no more have said that than they would have graced a wine and nibbles opening, read a review like this, or put a price on the back of their painting. It was just a thing they did ‘for company’.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

SEE, this is what happens when you get old – young turks take your history and re-invent it better. Constant Reader, I was there in the 60s, and unlike many, remember it.

I remember  my Biba trouser suit, my long white socks, the day I asked the Stromness hairdresser to do me a Mary Quant, and the day I went to Margaret Dowie’s fish shop to buy the tea, in a hippie skirt, headband, and no shoes. She said, “are your feet no kinda cowld? That’ll be three and seven…” She was a materialist, who had a point. My feet were freezing.

Jim Lambie Beach Boy installation at the Pier

Walk into this exhibition and you’re immediately in a haircut Quant world – the floor is Op Art – and it’s stunning. Move closer and you get, really, an investigation of masculinity and freedom. Lambie uses the 60s zeitgeist – that innocence and energy – to investigate his own, new century concerns.

The knight’s helmet, buckler, lance, appear, battered and broken. The  brash colours escape from the floor and re-emerge high up (‘that een’s escaped’ said my old school pal, pointing to a fleur de lys-like emblem high on the wall. The exhibition – not least the titles – bubbles with warm wit and you almost want to hear the sound track.

Poignantly, in the wee room, a video track of a bottle, randomly rolling around the back of a van, perfectly sums up, I think, both my generations’ frustration with the failure of the dream, and Lambie’s own sadness that he can’t, somehow, find a way back into that daft gaiety, find a way to emerge past the vileness that was Thatcher and then – even worse – Blair.

Upstairs – Orkney in photographs. You have to hand it to the Pier; they do contrast really well. You can meander about amongst rural vistas, and then go back downstairs for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Don’t miss this exhibition – if you are young, it’ll give you stuff to consider; if you are old, it’ll make you wonder where we all went wrong (was it the bare feet?) and get some comfort from the fact that the Jim Lambies are paying attention to those great 60s lyrics.

With apologies for the amendation – ‘he’s got everything he needs, he’s an artist, he don’t look back.’

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

PHOTOJOURNALIST John Bulmer had made a name for himself in the Sunday Times as a pioneer of colour photography, transforming the gritty monochrome of cities in the north of England into pastel tones, when he came to Orkney in 1964 to work on a story, Britain’s Lonely Islands, with travel writer Eric Newby.

Wanting to capture Orkney’s long evening light, he discovered most people were abed by the time the light was right, so he returned in the autumn during the gales and mists in 1976 for Geo magazine.

Bulmer’s practice was to drive round until he saw something, nothing was prearranged. This reactive method saw him capture moments in Orkney’s social history, on the brink of change. This photography is journalism, pictures of record, but they have a poetic atmosphere through his eye for a good image.

Woman milking a cow

This may be stills photography, rather than the moving image of film which he later worked with, but the images are far from still. There is fluidity and movement, drama and action in what amounts to a photo-documentary. Washing blows at a 90 degree angle outside a croft and at another washing line a woman’s own clothes billow against her form.

Washing is a favourite subject for Bulmer. Sheep on the shore in North Ronaldsay offer a timeless scene against the shifting backdrop of the sea while a family scene on the island has a boy teasing a dog by holding a rabbit by its hind legs while the father fixes barbed wire.

Blurred figures feature ephemerally passing permanent buildings, treated as subjects in the Stromness street and in the isles a sturdy two-room dwelling, the water pump and buckets in the foreground.

He took pictures of daily life; a woman with a headscarf milking a cow in the field; a lone figure on the road passing hay stooks after harvest; cattle being transported by boat and sheep being herded to market through Kirkwall, illustrating the relationship between rural life and town and sea.

His portraits reveal he got on well with his subjects as real warmth crinkles the eyes of even the serious close-up studies. . Women outside Walls Kirk on Hoy are dressed in their Sunday best, prayer books clasped, but are laughing out loud at their photographer. Compositions include a husband and wife in their kitchen, the working man eating from a bowl in Wyre, while another amused couple are outside their manse with their onions hanging in strings across the wall.

Ladies outside Walls Kirk on Hoy

The 33 photographs were taken in Mainland Orkney, Hoy, North Ronaldsay, Fara and Wyre. Some of the subjects are unnamed and the Pier Arts Centre is hoping visitors who can identify people will make a note in an exhibition book.

Bulmer, who was from Herefordshire from the famous cider-making family, was part of a group of British photographers which included Terence Donovan, David Bailey and Don McCullin, and were known as the ‘Young Meteors’. Bulmer went on to photograph all over the world, including taking famous images of John Lennon and Yoko Ono before moving into documentary films.

He is now cataloguing his vast collection of images for exhibitions, such as this in Orkney. We are fortunate indeed that Bulmer came here and his work adds to the rich record of photographs by Gunnie Moberg, Rebecca Marr and others, and we can see some of them for the first time.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

Links

• John Bulmer
• Pier Arts Centre

IT’S sort of nice to know that Orkney has had an Islands Councillor who spent whatever time he squeezed from the bloodless stone that is local government printmaking, indeed helping to found Soulisquoy Printmakers, producers of many beautiful tranquil things. What better, after a long hard day at Economic Development, than to get out the lino cutter and have a good gouge.

This new exhibition bears interesting fruit – a visit to Japan and an apprenticeship in stone letter cutting from the master, Frances Pelly. Interesting because the tension in engraving is generated by the dynamic between the material  and the subject.

Wilderness, 2010, Caithness Flagstone by Jeremy Baster

You may say this is true of all art – but engravers have it tough. The materials are obdurate. The tools – chisels, knives, blades, tungsten tips – can take the finger off you. More, they decline to make flourishes like a watercolour brush might. Engraving challenges the 3-D world. The bluntness of its blocks could flatten any image, but the key to its subtlety lies in clever layering, overprinting, and the deft use of colour.

Baster has been investigating extreme movement and its antithesis – the fixed frozen moment which catches the feeling of speed. We are lazy about this these days – we have wonderful photographers who freeze frames for us. Good to see another tack.

The theme of this exhibition is ‘spectator sports’, in particular cycling. It’s a great choice – the raked circle of the velodrome, the Mercury-like riders in their helmets, winging it along in skin hugging suits, the geometry of wheels and lanes and stands. The colours are a fine balance of warms – ochres, reds –  and a cooler blue edge.

Having just seen Diana Leslie’s extraordinarily acute sense of street geometry, in a previous show here, I was reminded that the important thing about the artist’s eye is that it brings our layman’s attention to something we never noticed, which, once revealed, becomes obvious. In Leslie’s case , I discovered beauty in what I thought was the ugliest Stromness corner. Here, I find myself thinking, I must keep an eye out for Chris Hoy, to see the dynamic burst of action Baster catches so well.

There’s a retro feel about the prints, in the nicest sort of way. I’m a fifties child, itchy granma-knit socks, liberty bodice, bottled orange juice. I get a whiff of Shell calendars, Three Nuns tobacco ads, Watneys Beer , Spangles; I see curtain prints, wallpapers, and linoleum patterns– a sort of simple, enthusiastic, New Look post war feel – bright, insistent energy and an innocence that’s very appealing.

Of course I’m pulled too by the Arts and Crafts movement’s honourable history, their elegant calligraphy (Edward Johnstone’s 1912 alphabet designed for the London Underground is still used today), their Fabian, communitarian ideals, their respect for philosophy, poetry and love of natural forms and cycles – plants, seasons, toil.

They were formidable book illustrators, the engravers. You only have to look at Joan Hassall’s fantastic engravings for Eric Linklater’s  book of short stories, Sealskin Trousers. She was trained by an associate of Eric Gill’s, Ralph John Beedham, a member of Gill’s Catholic co operative Ditchling Community.

It’s fascinating to look at the dynamic way technique developed. You end up wondering why woodcut, for example, lends itself so well to Aesop’s Fables, or Greek myth. You then think back to Blake and see that, of course, he could only present his visions in engravings. It’s about lack of sentimentality, I think. That lends credibility to the depiction of the heroic.

Baster’s best work  here is a series of illustrations for another project by the excellent Hansel Cooperative Press, a translation of Francoise Villon’s poetry done by Shetland poet Billy Tait. The Villon Suite is gutsy, full of dramatic action caught in the moment, and will be a fine complement to the poetry, while also observing the best traditions of cooperative endeavour in the arts – small presses, shared gain and local voices.

Of the new venture – stone etching, with haiku and homily – I’ve less to say. Here Baster is a willing and able student, but not an innovator. The streets of Scotland are becoming littered with lettering engraved on stone, as folk take Ian Hamilton Finlay and the renga tradition too much to heart, too literally. There are fine moments in this rush of stone poetry, which will endure. But a lot won’t, and will someday look as quaintly dated as 60s film.

Far and away the best, most heart-felt piece in Baster’s stone experiment, is, interestingly, one he wasn’t going to exhibit at all – it’s a sandstone block in which an eagle is folded. The inscription is from Tennyson’s great poem, which fifties children in Stromness learned by heart, as should all children everywhere – ‘ringed with the azure world he stands..’

There’s a real sense of presence about this carving, of flight about to burst out. Lao Tzu said, ‘study the uncarved block’ – so you could see the potential for movement in stillness, I suppose – and this eagle reminds me of that Zen dictum. Lovely.

Visit this exhibition – it has a tranquillity and simplicity that’s very engaging. And you may like the busyness of the Caithness slate sunburst, inscribed, ‘after the daffodil and the primrose comes the dandelion.’

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Hansel Press

AMONG celebrated American painter Alex Katz’s series of small painted studies there are several beautiful beings, including his friends and family who also appear among a sequence of portrait heads perched atop a green table. A crowd of bodiless people vying for attention.

Souvenir de L’lle des Saintes, 1979, watercolour and gouache on paper © 2011 Cy Twombly ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Acquired jointly through The d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008

Part of the three-year Artist Rooms project, from the collection amassed by art collector and curator Anthony d’Offray and donated to the nation, this exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre is a rare opportunity to see work by this influential artist.

Katz, born in 1927, is best known for his large scale figurative works, and these small studies in paint were made as preparation for larger studio-based pieces. Influenced by expressionism and Japanese art, decorative human subjects are placed on decentred landscapes, painted in situ, as are his small landscape studies.

My eye was particularly caught by the sparkling summer beach scene, ‘Penobscot’, in oil on board, depicting a moment of a perfect day on the Maine coast in 1999. Equally, ‘Young Trees 1989’, with its heightened green foreground and black sky, is direct and unsettling, the visible brushstrokes conveying mood and intimacy.

In ‘City Night’ winter branches form a grid across the modernist architecture of a New York apartment block. Together these small works are distinct and consistent, characterised by controlled brush marks and planes of flat colour.

Fellow American Cy Twombley’s works show ways of working very differently with paint. His suite of watercolours entitled ‘Souvenir de l’Ille des Saintes’ (Memory of the Island of Les Saintes), represents his first experiments with watercolour, made while staying in the French Caribbean in 1979.

Twombley, born a year later in 1928, has spent 50 years exploring references from nature, literature, classical history and mythology, using graffiti art and illusion. The island suite is mark-making using spontaneous saturated colour with watercolour and gouache.

On the first sheet is scrawled the title of the series followed by blotted dabs of ephemeral riots of colour, perhaps representing the riot of growth and sensuous fug of a semi-tropical island. It’s creative; certainly, unconscious daubing; perhaps, self indulgent; almost certainly.

His monoprint triptych ‘Lepanto I II and III’ references his interest in heritage with ships caught up in a 16^th century sea battle; his scribblings akin to that of a schoolboy learning history.

Upstairs on another level at the Pier is local artist Diana Leslie’s show of work, Hill & Voe, New Work by Diana Leslie (until 26 April, 2011), focusing on Stromness buildings and harbour, coastline and environs.

Diana Leslie, From Brinkie’s Brae, 2011, oil on wood. Photograph Rebecca Marr

This hardy soul also works out of doors in most weathers, chronicling the town’s landmarks, almost recording a social history. There is the Co-op with the petrol forecourt across the road and Stromness Post Office, with a spot of artistic licence via an imaginary ‘No Loitering’ sign and the Dive Cellar shop.

Boats in the harbour in ‘Boats in the Wind’ and the distinctive gable ends of Stromness houses in ‘The Waterfront’ capture the scenes expressively in oil or by pencil in sketchbook studies.

Diana Leslie - The Waterfront, 2011, oil on wood (photo Rebecca Marr)

Orcadian by birth, after studying at Glasgow School of Art, Leslie returned to Orkney in 2005 and joins a long line of accomplished Orkney artists. This work is important for the islands’ art heritage and a delight to see.

Down the street at Northlight Studio, it is worth popping in this week to view A Right Good Yarn (until 2 April, 2011), tapestries from winter weaving classes. Broadly diverse work from twenty students of the weaving studio show just how great a teacher Ros Bryant is by teaching them the tools they need without inhibiting their creativity.

From corn-coloured crop circles woven with raffia to handcrafted silver standing stones placed on a backdrop of heather and sky-blue wool, Orkney’s land sea and skyscapes are depicted imaginatively. Some are finished while others are works in progress still on the loom, revealing how the craft is created.

On the door is a sign saying classes include a yarn, tea and cake. There is always laughter here too, spilling out onto the street while the serious matter of this visual art form is painlessly explored and learned.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Artist Rooms

A collection of paintings which includes works by Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Alfred Wallis, is on permanent display. The centre reopened in 2007 after major development.

OKAY, what do we want from new graduates? We, being old and hair- and tooth-less, want reinvention.

So what do we have? The Pier, as always, creates the ambience.  I’m looking for a new voice, a new sound. And you know what I think? I think that what they have is a really horrible thing to cope with. They are gifted with a whole clanjamferie o’ technocological stuff – and then you come and look at it and you’re banjaxed.

Work by Matthew Lynch

They all have to do videos and digital imaging, and hard stuff involving dark rooms and orifices. And the Pier, nice and kind as they are, sets it up for them, so we all walk in a bewildered way through a lot of darkened rooms with flashing images.

Well – just don’t!! What I think we want is a sense of personality.

So what you find in this Pier exhibition is a remarkable reinvention of what’s good. I’m always bursting to hear or see what’s good. So what do we have? We have a lot of kind of pedestrian stuff (sounds horrible but it’s true), which hasna quite emerged from the tyranny of technology, and we have the stuff that’ll carry on. And the energy of these young people – it’s amazing!! But that’s the beauty of a new show.

They’re all very strange and odd. Clearly, Leila Dearness has a remarkable world view; you couldna make up her fur things, they’re her own imagining. What I think is that they are all, these new graduates, in their different ways, fighting with a very complex technology. We have become sophisticated viewers.

Ingrid Garrioch's Tweed skirt and jacket, and embellished silk shirt

So when we as the viewers look at a bit of video, we make horrid judgements, like the sound’s a bit crap. And because we are all very aware folk, we say – oh no!! I can’t hear that. I don’t think that’s made well. So I’m sorry. Gareth, it was a nice animation, but I want to be made to think further, I thought the sound was a bit poor   I couldna hear the voices. And that’s not fair on you, because I’ve watched a lot of films.

And Angus; well, you know, I think art’s about physicality. It’s about touching. So maybe travelling in Vietnam will give you that. And Helen – well, the Hubble did those images. Think beyond. There’s a coldness about these pictures which makes it hard to engage.

But then you think – they clearly want, these young people, to explore the digital, the non–physical, the thing that makes art something precious. They care.

I was in the gallery with Sophie (nearly nine) who loved Ian Rtchie’s pop-up pink book. And I think his work actually encapsulated the problem these wonderful, engaged, caring artists have. He plays with the idea of cardboard, physical pop-up books – plonking them into the lastminute.com world. It’s pink and witty, and what he’s doing is reminding us that cardboard is what folk like; we don’t really like computers.

So, in the end, what I think about this show is that I want something I can touch. I want to feel a person. And the only person who makes me think I can touch her understanding of our world is Alex Ashman. I think art’s really about sex. I think it’s about, when you look at it, it gives you a thrill.

So here we have a wee animation, and a character development, full of vigour and craziness, and – oh, excellent, A Coo’s Tale.  A joke! That’s the only moment (and it’s a fine drawing) when you are aware these are actually Orcadians, in the show. And she has the bravery to say  – I’m no going to be sucked into the digital thing, I’m going to draw people.

So – give me drawings. Give me engagement with the real messy world. Be brave with your art. And remember – like Lee Garson does – that photography is a vital art; it can tell you miles of Orkney stuff.  A photo of two shoes gives you far more miles than a whole big video about orifices.

© Morag MacInnes, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

HUDDLED together in the foyer of an old storehouse, on the street and on the pier, the harbour lapping the stone wharves, occasional cars surfing down the flagstoned road meandering through Stromness, we waited for the geopoet to begin reading.

We were told the room wasn’t quite ready but as our chatter rose and fell, the sound of two slates tapping emerged through our waves of talk and not quite silence fell.

On site at Ness of Brodgar

Street Sounds; I long for silence but no silence comes, day and night – an anguished plea from the city dweller which Norman Bissell once was. He turned down the corridor, taking us on his journey from urban noise to island sounds; sometimes it’s hard to tell the sound of the wind from the sound of the waves.

Sound artist Bill Thompson’s recordings and the plaintive notes of Gemma McGregor’s wooden flute and the abrupt gasps of an accordion’s bellows, carried us on as Norman asked: “Can you hear it?”

More slate percussion brought us into Norman’s ‘island on the rim of the world’, the Isle of Luing in Argyll. He sat among cup-marked Neolithic stones to recite Na H’In Ban, an ancient name for the Garvellach Isles where a solitary monk contemplates life and death as the wind howls around him.

We had hung back at the beginning of this journey through the Pier Arts Centre, slightly nervous of our participation and of what was expected of us. Now we were in full flow as the poet took us with him to Lichen Circles, as artist Brian Hartley drew two perfect circles on the wall and choreographer Claire Pencak mirrored his movement.

Sitting down to listen to the last lyrical readings we had collaborated in the experience of Slate, Sea and Sky, as artists and archaeologists had during the week, creating the installations which had added so much to the journey and poetry.

Art should not be a spectator sport, said Norman during the following discussion; we want to discuss how to engage the audience more.

“Art, archaeology, choreography and poetry. This must be a first for collaboration between these forms of expression,” Norman added.

His appearances were part of a week-long collaboration at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, called Test Trenches. This was a collaborative residency; the culmination of a choreographic fellowship awarded to Claire Pencak of the Tabula Rasa Dance Company.

The artists and archaeologists worked together on installations using sound, projection and objects. Most of the work focused on the Ness of Brodgar site in Orkney, where Neolithic painted stones were discovered last summer in a monumental building.

The artists made sound recordings and drawings and Glenda Rome shot videos of the archaeologists at work on site. The installations included methods used by archaeologists to record and draw at digs and films which depicted their work like a performance, shown among the modern spoil buckets, trowels, planning frames and strings.

The mud and muck of an archaeological dig was brought into the gallery, while the ancient stones became exhibits under the spotlights, not as art but bringing them down to earth in a dig context.

Norman Bissell at the Pier Arts Centre

Collaboration was the buzzword the next day at Norman Bissell’s lecture when he set out his case that the key to renewing the economy of Scotland’s fragile island communities is through embracing the natural and cultural heritage. Collaboration between artists, thinkers and scientists can form the basis of a radical cultural renewal, involving artists and archaeologists too.

The title of his talk, Atlantic Poetics: Of the Islands I Speak, is a nod to George Mackay Brown’s For The Islands I Sing, the title of his posthumously published autobiography, which was taken from his poem ‘Prologue’, in The Storm and Other Poems, 1954. The title of the forthcoming anthology of Scottish islands poetry edited by Kevin MacNeil is likely to be These Islands We Sing.

He spoke of the connections between Atlantic islands through culture, wildlife, weather and history, and that all the North Atlantic islands face common challenges of declining population, the disappearance of traditional languages, expensive travel links and maintaining viable island communities.

On Luing the population has declined from 207 three years ago to 178 now, which is why the Luing Community Trust plans to build the Atlantic Islands Centre with a café, restaurant, art gallery, museums, workspaces, a gift shop and exhibition space.

The Trust visited other community trusts and saw good examples of renewal at Lismore Gaelic Heritage Centre. Projects like North Uist’s Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre combines arts and heritage, and on Gigha, where the community bought the island, there has been renewal, job creation, population growth and revenue for the community. We can learn much from these positive examples and how different islands tackle these challenges.

The Year of Scotland’s Islands is an opportunity to learn from each other.

Norman suggested that a deep appreciation of our rich natural environment and the value of our cultural heritage are crucial to the future of the islands and should underpin everything we do as individuals and communities.

This, he said, is where geopoetics comes in, as it is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.

Norman outlined some of the collaborations he has done with artist and designer Steve Pardue and composer and musician Mark Sheridan. And he feels Claire Pencak has broken new ground in her Test Trenches residency by working as a choreographer with archaeologists, music makers, visual artists and writers in a way that, as far as he was aware, has never been done before.

How archaeologists use some approaches used in the arts, like creative imagining, can be crucial to the science of archaeology.

As the discussion was opened up for a further hour, there was positive reaction about further collaboration and much interest in the plans for the Atlantic islands Centre and the challenges faced within the island’s community where dissenting views had been voiced. Further explanation was requested and supplied to explain the philosophy of geopoetics.

Overall, the feeling at the Pier Arts Centre was that pioneering work had been achieved during the week and there is more to follow.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Norman Bissell

CREATIVE ENERGY output must reach its peak in October in Orkney in the countdown to the Christmas art shows, which have a staggering number of arts and crafts people submitting pieces in Stromness this season. The Pier Arts Centre has one or two works each from more than 100 people on its pristine walls and floors; four artists are exhibiting at Northlight Studio, and the work of more than 40 painters, textile workers, wood and metal workers are skilfully displayed in a tiny space in the back room of the Waterfront Gallery.

These frugal times may be reflected in art this year at the Pier Arts Centre where small pieces have replaced last year’s big, bold exhibits. Consequently this year’s open show is confined to the ground floor in loosely themed rooms and corridors. As one might expect the focus of inspiration is Orkney’s landscape, heritage and natural history; there are more representations of Neolithic standing stones than you can shake a paintbrush or camera at. This is not to denigrate the originality and competency of many of the pieces, with a close study of the texture of the stones in mono photographs by Rebecca Marr particularly grabbing my attention.

Too Hot To Handle by potter Elaine Henderson

There’s so much to see that after three turns round the exhibits I needed a week to take it all in. Taking a rest I sat down and watched a short video by Victoria Rhodes filmed at Skara Brae and the potter’s studio of Elaine Henderson. Too Hot to Handle starts as a documentary of how to throw a tea set, on the potter’s wheel that is, then balances the delicate floral cups on the beach for the tide to take them. Pot shots with an air rifle in Skara Brae spill red goo from the tea pot. The fancy-glazed shards mixed with ancient-style terracotta are displayed in a glass cabinet, perhaps suggesting the continuity of ancient and modern in Orkney.

Beach Stones sculpture by Sam Green

Seascapes have a tidal surge in the catalogue of work this year. Alayne Dickey’s textural painting, simply titled Beach, marries stone, resin and wire to create an almost 3-D image. Photography shifts from the dramatic moment of a storm to the eerie calmness of Nonnie Dingwall’s Dragon’s Teeth, Dingieshowe, where jagged rocks barely break the surface. Fiona Smith’s textural textiles range from the lumpy Rough Seas II to the delicate embroidery of Sea Spray. The eye is drawn outside to the pier on which the arts centre sits to Sam Green’s Balancing Beach Stones, floodlit with a dusting of snow which temporarily enhances their smooth forms. Inside, framed by a window overlooking the harbour, Sarah Smith’s Boat Number 10 from discarded wood is funny, simple and delightful.

An accomplished piece of whimsy by Mark Scadding is the oil, Springtime in Orkney; Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers are morphed into daffodils in a vase while the background is replaced with an Elysian scene of two women picking daffs among the hen coops, sheep and birds. Other beasts that grab are Colin Kirkpatrick’s cattle skull motif branded onto wood and John Vincent’s hefty scrap metal Big Bird and surprisingly dainty bird bath.

There’s so much more from ceramics to wood, stained glass to weaving, figurative to freestyle. Set aside a week to dip in and out of this feast of the visual arts.

Along the road in Graham Place, Northlight Studio’s Book Stone Voe takes George Mackay Brown’s notion that Stromness houses are stone books with stories to tell while the harbour or voe of Hamnavoe is the sea. Four artists interpret the spirit of Ros Bryant’s weaved study, Oh Little Town of Hamnavoe. Weaver and stone carver Ros Bryant has hewn relief carvings from Quoyloo flagstone, the crazily angled gables and roofs a tactile joy. Tapestries are set in frames of stone and the light ricocheting through buildings across the street is captured in photographs printed on linen.

A lobster creel by Rebecca Marr

Rebecca Marr has applied museum photography techniques to produce striking mono images of old creels, devoid of shadow, by setting up lights and black backcloths in the jumble of Willick Sinclair’s working shed by the Stromness shore. Each creel is isolated from its neighbours and has its own identity, shaped by its working life and encounters with the sea. The creels are familiar as working objects but somehow romanticised by the process. Objects become artefacts in museums but many were workaday in a previous life.

For Jackie Ward, Stromness houses are benign old men who watch out for us and protect us. Her large felt wall hangings are friendly with elongated height to tower up in Gothic fashion on one and with colour splashed chimney pots on a roof details in another.

Painter Diana Leslie took her easel outside in the street to capture the light on the busy waterfront, fishing boats, the hillside of Brinkie’s Brae against the light and the open scene of Cairston Road. Fighting with the elements has paid off in these dynamic studies.

The Waterfront Gallery’s show is all new work and is truly multi media with paintings in oil, acrylic and watercolour, etchings, glass, metalwork, woodwork, woven baskets, glass bowls, felt, bags and cushions.

The reacquaintance with the work of Louise Scott, a long time Orkney resident now in Glasgow who has sent up bird etchings will be welcomed. Orkney’s sea and landscapes and wildlife inspires much of the work including Ingrid Grieves’ huge mixed media Gerwin Field with the reds and ochre of an Orkney sky illuminate the land while Elfreda Scott’s Sunset at Scapa is golden and more discreet.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2010

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Waterfront Gallery

PAY ATTENTION at the back there! My abiding memory of the maths class is of the teacher – a clever, good, nice teacher – running his hands through his hair in despair and saying ‘for goodness’ sakes girl, it’s obvious!!! ’

Not to me. The beauty, symmetry and delight of all things mathematical passed me by, though I was very fond of the gadgets, the set square and that thingummy you drew the circles with. I loved making patterned paper doilies, cutting shapes out of folded paper and then opening out a lovely symmetrical design, different every time yet the same in its differences. I spent ages with my kaleidoscope. I liked looking at crystals under the magnifying glass. I just didn’t like the maths bit.

Game Space (oil on canvas, 150cm x 120cm) - Steven MacIver

Imagine my alarm, then, when I hear that MacIver, a young Orcadian artist out of Grays, the Slade and the Sainsbury Scholarship at the British School in Rome, is interested in ‘game space’. The picture in the paper looks like an awful lot of architectural, ruler-ed lines and squares. The drawn line is ‘an end in itself…re – evaluating the environments I encounter,’ he’s quoted as saying.

Aberdeen University and Arts Trust Scotland funded the year he took travelling an imaginary line – N 41 – drawn round the globe, hence the exhibition’s title. He visited, for example, the brilliantly named Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. He began by being interested in ‘the role of the home ground within the community’ and ended with, well, something completely different.

As soon as I’m in the Corridor looking at two pencil and paper works, ‘Ladders’ and ‘Domes’ (the more I visit the Pier, the more I realise how vital and interestingly diverse each exhibition space is, and so will you, as you move around –the tight little Corridor invites you in, and gets you up close to the art quickly) I think two things.

One – this man uses a pencil the way we did on the edges of homework notebooks and rough drafts, building up shapes, using soft shading and hard edges. (OK, some of those kids’ doodles might have been of cowboys, lions or unclothed ladies – but I mean the spirals and squares and triangles and flowers that grew round the edges of the history notes).

Two – it’s like M C Escher, the Dutchman whose work you may know from infuriating jigsaws made from his late meditations on the Mobius strip – a two dimensional strip with only one side which plays about with our ideas of what’s possible (told you to pay attention…).

Some of the titles echo Escher as well – Recreation 1, 11, 111. Game Space 1, 11 ( Metamorphosis 1 and 11 are important milestones for Escher).

‘Ladder’ is decorative, almost feminine in its careful, controlled expert gradation of shading and texture – an inhabited space, with curtains, chenille, fishing net, buoys, wood, steel, busy yet beautifully contained. ‘Domes’ alerts us to the artist’s love affair with geometry.

Opposite these, we’re plunged into ‘Game Space 11’ It’s like diving into a net ( or the Matrix – I’m half expecting Keanu Reeves…). The colour’s warm and persuasive – wine, red and violet with sudden sparks of bright green.

I have a daughter who is obsessed by the Japanese strategy game Go. She and her partner travel the world to spend weekends doing incomprehensible things with small stones on a board which looks very like this large oil painting. It’s a metaphor for life, the Go game, I suppose – all about strategy and capture – and very three dimensional, on a two dimensional plane.

The precision of the brushwork is remarkable. To the Long Gallery – another two Game Spaces, opposite each other on the two end walls – one blue and grey, all lines and squares, so the odd curve comes as a real pleasure – the other like, for want of any other description, a fakir’s rusty red bed of nails, except that there are little rectangles of pure colour here and there, like lights in a skyscraper at night.

Escher used sketches as a geometric grid, from which to design his own characters, filling that plane. He is close to my heart because he never understood the maths he was doing, except through his art – his notebook, Regular Division of the Plane with Asymetric Congruent Polygons, developed purely from his own desire to make graphic design – he never graduated, never was a success at school.

In the same way that phycisists use simple words – like string, or big bang, or butterfly effect – to investigate complex ideas, Escher used art. I think MacIver does too.

Recreation 1 and 111, and Gold Rush. Big canvases, sitting well in the space. They’re elegant, a bit like public art at first glance – you could imagine them in a bank or a shopping centre. But look closer – there’s real subtlety in the texture under the celebration of line that’s going on. Recreation 111 is cool – it’s a bit like what I’d imagine looking out of a new York hotel window twenty floors up in rain might be like. I’m betting scaffolding really rocks MacIver’s boat…

Gold Rush is dynamic, with the same underlying sneaky texture, a very natural one this time, brown shadowy natural hints like tree branches, overlaid again by jaggy blues and golds.

The Room off the Long Gallery is another tight little room, fairly dark and intimate. There are more small pencil works here – rather like notes from the artist to himself about the possibilities of texture. Crumpled paper; flawed cubes, graph paper, but empty of people, in a de Chirico kind of way, as if everything in the space is waiting for somebody to come along and sort it all out.

I expect the artist is that person.

Just as I’m getting a bit mathed-out (Escher, as a child, ‘with care, selected the shape, quantity and size of his slices of cheese, so that, fitted one against the other, they would cover as exactly as possible the entire slice of bread’, and I’m starting to want to throw a lot of Smarties around crazily ) – we reach the Seaward Gable End, my favourite room.

Beyond two young herring gulls on the pier outside, at the school’s Maritime Studies Department, the wooden fire escape and the gang planks round the boat slip echo the severe verticals inside this space – heating ducts, for example.

And bang! The wonderful Form1 – an older work from 2004 – seems to birl away in ever decreasing circles (a circle, at last!) like the Star Ship Enterprise. It’s a football stadium seen from above, a millennium dome in black white and grey, a gas ring. Go closer and it’s full of cogs and wheels and a spider-webby network of spaces enclosed by lines.

The background, again, is subtly smudged and distressed. The techniques here are remarkable – such precision, yet a kind of freedom inside the confines of the geometry. Refreshed, I head for the Double Height Gallery – which is exactly what it says it is.

There’s a series of wonderful surprises here and I hope when you visit you leave it until last. The titles are a clue – East is East. Blossom. Akasaka. Candlestick. Worship. There’s an expansion happening. The palette suddenly changes – to a stunning, subtle grey and mauve and pink, muted, not jazzy like all those Games and Recreations, not twitchy, but gentle and thoughtful.

Gloss paint contrasts with matt, isolating shapes and glinting in the lights. Extraordinarily, the room is an emotional experience – still shape-based, investigating what Escher called the division of the plane, still a meditation on inner space and containment – but charged with feeling.

Like MacIver, Escher travelled a great deal, and also like MacIver, became interested in decorative tiling, particularly in the Alhambra Palace in Grenada.

I don’t go to artist’s talks on their work on purpose, because I prefer just to see – and the Pier staff are great and always helpful, but I tend not to ask them much either, unless it’s about something very practical, for the same reason.

But Carol Dunbar tells me that Worship – a stunning architectural observation of a church, Byzantine-like, representational, precise, tenderly coloured, began the series. From there MacIver moved to work which is, I think, growing in confidence, daring, even playful. Akasaka is like a city, laid out yet isolated.

Candlestick is gentle, all curves, as pale as if it’s seen through a layer of volcanic ash – the football stadium shape again, but seen in a new, much kinder way. Blossom invests geometry with depth – maybe a flower the way a bee sees it? Little ticks of light seem to disturb the grey and black petals, and there’s a Mobius strip infinity feel about it – we want to invest it with movement.

It’s fascinating to see an artist build in strength. He has engaged patiently and carefully with the cold hard shape that I thought was maths and is making it move and change in ever more complex ways.

Escher said ‘in mathematical quarters, the regular division of the plane has been considered theoretically… mathematicians have opened the gate leading to an extensive domain, but they have not entered the domain themselves. By their very nature, they are more interested in the way in which the gate is opened than in the garden lying behind it.’

Steven MacIver is learning to have real fun in the garden.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Steven MacIver

• Pier Arts Centre

George Mackay Brown

THE GEORGE Mackay Brown Fellowship instituted a Memorial Lecture on the poet in 2007, to be held on or as near St Magnus Day (16 April), as possible. Aficionados will know how important to the author the saint was – the subject of many of his poems, and a full length novel.

With uncanny synchronicity, he died in the month he loved best, when the daffodils were out, and his funeral was held at St Magnus Cathedral on the saint’s day. As Maggie Fergusson remarks in her excellent biography of the poet, “before, in the language of the sagas, he ‘passed out of the story’… he said ‘I see hundreds and hundreds of ships sailing out of the harbour.'”

These last words – and the mention of sagas – set the scene neatly for this year’s lecture, by Dr Donna Heddle, programme leader in Cultural Studies at Orkney College, UHI, and Director of the Centre of Nordic Studies. She is a saga specialist, and took as her theme the myriad voices the poet exhibits and the rhetoric of the sagas, which inspired his work.

Other Orcadian writers, such as Eric Linklater, have experimented with ‘saga language’. But Linklater experimented with many voices. For GMB the economy of the old stories – and the communities and personalities and events they were about – underpinned his creative life.

Dr Heddle pointed out that the preconceived idea of GMB the hermit was too simple – he is not parochial, but looked for a room with a view. His language is concrete, spare and direct. Like the saga writers, he was not an explorer for himself, and his poems are saturated with life. Like them too, he’s a mood setter, not a commentator.

He rarely uses direct speech, and it is formulaic when he does – again a saga trait. His emphasis is also character-led. His women, like those in the sagas, are strong but often thwarted. His perception of time, too, is ‘an ocean of narratives’, rather like the orality of saga tales, which often define action through character.

If you want to see a Nordic treatment of the way a man acts, she suggested, look at the story ‘The Wireless Set’ ¬ a deceptively simple tale about stoicism and simplicity in the face of family tragedy.

There is also, however, a Celtic strain running through his work. He called himself Mackay Brown, recognising his mother’s roots, and his deep rooted belief that what has once happened always exists, his timeless evocation of landscape, the circularity of it, the paradox that the end is always in the beginning – that is reminiscent perhaps of the Book of Kells.

Then there’s the spiritual voice, as a reflection of the creative power of God, his fondness for liturgy and its language. For him human lives are always rooted in ceremony – he is the poet as spiritual significator.

Dr Heddle described the importance of Thomas Mann’s influence, and speculated about the similarities between G M B and Icelandic writer Haldor Laxness (Iceland being much in the mind, as some of the participants were unable to make the weekend because of flight disruption).

She summed up by suggesting that the most Nordic part of Mackay Brown was a residue of the sense of value, oldness and permanency of community. In the course of the lecture she discussed in passing the relationship between Muir and Mackay Brown, and said she would love to do that lecture. The audience will look forward to it. This was a fine beginning to a weekend celebrating literary endeavour.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• George Mackay Brown

THE CONTEMPORARY Art Society celebrates its centenary this year. Over the years it has gifted over 8000 works to British collections. The Pier has not only received four works, but also benefited from the CAS’s partnership with the Scottish Arts Council, which has yielded a further ten works.

Work by Lesley Foxcroft, Mark Francis and Sean Scully

Space for Colour – the title is important – encourages the viewer to make comparisons between the original Margaret Gardiner collection – the Hepworths and Nicolsons in particular – and the new work on show. It was said that she ‘collected for colour’, and it’s true that the permanent collection is full of intense jewels. But it could equally well be said that she collected for shape – or perhaps that shape was continually perplexing and provoking the St Ives group, and this exhibition is, I think, more about shape than colour.

I say this despite the fact that the major installation, Colour Play, by Adam Barker-Mills, “experiment(s) with colour… explore(s)relationships between colours, their brightness, saturation, tone, and density”, and the suite of 12 etchings by Turner prizewinner Amish Kapoor is “using colour and space to explore ideas of presence and absence.”

My feeling is that both allow their love of intense colour and the theory of its power to overwhelm their artistic judgment. Like the other artists on show, however, they do in their different ways make compelling arguments with shape and structure. But more of that later.

Terry Frost (1915-2003) introduces the theme – the first picture you encounter is vital, and the Pier know this. It’s a beauty, painted in 1959 and just called Red and Blue, tactile, lumpy, scratchy, rich. It’s far more than red and blue – there’s purple so deep you could dive into it. The shapes are linear, evoking book spines on a shelf, boats in a harbour, a scarf or a rug.

Just along a bit Barbara Hepworth’s lithograph Squares and Circles appears to be just that – a bit like a 1940s map of aerial bombardment, but, unlike Frost, Hepworth is strict with her colours, and the drift of yellow could be missed until you realise that’s what holds the whole print together. In the Frost, it’s the colour that pulls you in – then you see the shape. Hepworth does things the other way round. This contrast, and how you feel about it, is what will take you back and back to the show.

I head right, into the intimate quiet space which hosts some loans, and some new acquisitions. Lines are everywhere, echoing the tiled floor – lines which don’t always look like lines. In Mark K. Francis’ untitled monotype on paper (1992) they merge together till they look like linen.

The subtle tones – cream, yellow, charcoal – suggest dried flowers strewn on a kitchen tablecloth – but it doesn’t have to be that. The interesting thing is what happens to our expectation. Lines don’t have to be mathematical and scratchy. For Sean Scully, (Colourland 2004, oil on linen) they are brash and bouncy, a brick wall of them with the light bouncing off the brushstrokes. It’s Mondrian with guts. And because the form is simple, you really notice the colour – the juxtapositions – ochre, red – excite. What would this man do with a dyke, I wonder.

Right next door – back to the tranquil exploration of line, rectangle, square, in Alan Reynolds lovely earth-and-blue untitled piece. Nothing is quite horizontal here, and no line is without a layer of colour to define it – but you could live with it for years. Even the bold big canvas that’s Callum Innes’ Exposed Painting, Deep Violet, Charcoal Black (2004, oil on canvas) plays with our idea of lines and squares.

It reminded me of A A Milne’s aptly titled poem Lines and Squares: “whenever I walk on a London street/I’m ever so careful to watch my feet…”. Here the stark white black and purple expanses are softened at the edges by a lacy effect, oil pretending to be knitting wool, or the end of a wave. There’s no such thing, he seems to say, as a true edge.

The Roger Ackling acquisition, Wayland (1996 sunlight on wood) sits well here – lines burnt and etched, in natural tones – complimented on the other side of the space by Lesley Foxcroft’s witty Stackwork – a tower of corrugated cardboard – an Old Man of Hoy with a difference, full of pattern and nuanced colour. There’s lots to enjoy.

Move through to the long gallery and Anish Kapoor hits you – I was going to say like a brick, but it’s more like, well, a sort of spongey jelly, really. Like being assaulted by a sea anemonae. The colour certainly is deep – very orange, very red. The blue and brown etchings I much prefer – a big Quink blot, very Rorschach, and a beige polyp-like thing (though the hospital-ish look – like a slide of your innards – puts me off a bit).

He has made choices, of course – the etchings aren’t random. The organic shapes, being so amorphous, evoke lots of things – vulvas, plant life, amoebas, cells. Here there are no lines, nothing rectangular – it’s all flux. I find the colours unsubtle, sometimes unpleasant.

My relationship with orange has never been cordial, and I applaud an artist who can make me see all the wonderful variations it inhabits, and all the contrasts it points up. But Kapoor’s orange has no variation. Depth, probably. But I find it a bit sick-making.

Sensibly, these works have been hung in a big space. I’m awed a bit by the vigour of them, but they don’t move me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many images of space from the Hubble telescope. I like to feel people’s hands on work – a bit of sweat, a bit of rough. Here I find myself looking at the mounting paper, which has nice ragged edges, and wondering why it’s lifting, as if it’s got damp. I’m hoping it’s on purpose, because that adds volumes to the meaning of the etchings.

On to the light installation, Colour Play, by Adam Barker-Mill. He was a lighting camera man and photography director (he worked with the Sex Pistols! There’s a pic of him standing beside Johnny Rotten on the web!).

The leaflet tells me that this is a sequence of four works – Interchange, What is White, Pulse and Journey, originated by Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen in 2009. I presume that means that Peacock Arts made the installation for the artist, but I don’t know. Already we are a step away from the bit of sweat and bit of rough I incline towards. The works, I’m told, “through the offsetting of time sequences between background and aperture affects (sic) our perception of colour to create a compelling sensory experience.”

Okay. Interestingly, Health and Safety have just popped by the Gallery and are asking about the effect it might have on folk. There are “short coloured flashes.” It’s all safe, so that’s good.

It’s a big screen with a sort of baseball board mounted up high. (maybe that hides a camera or something? Or maybe it’s a statement about shape? It’s square…) The room is bare – no seats, blank walls. You feel a bit like a monk in a cell looking at the sun. Except that you can’t really look at the sun directly – but here it seems you can!

There’s a perfect circle on the screen, which changes colour. As I enter it’s in a grey/lilac phase, and the walls are all washed in it. I’m thinking Newton would have loved this – it’s all about Optics, a kind of cathedral erected to Technology and Science. A world away from the colour cards we had in art class – hot colours this side, cold the other.

Ooh, now it’s blue and turquoise. Ooh, now there’s a flash of red. I think I see something floating, but maybe it’s just an after-image. Where’s the beginning? Which bit have I come in at? Is it “the wall slowly decreases and increases in intensity”? Or is the central aperture (aw shucks, it’s an aperture, I thought it was the sun) “breathing rhythmically?”

Oh no, not another colour. Oh blimey, that looks awful against the circle shape. Oh, this is a bit like a snowy light – I quite like it, I could stand in this for a while – eek, it’s changed again. Light is so cold, pure light. There’s so little texture that the eye starts manufacturing its own. It feels empty of humanity. You try to coat it with ideas – this is a dawn light, that’s like late summer, that’s a pulse, that could be a storm. Then your eye starts doubling up the images, as if you’ve been looking at something a bit too bright and moved into darkness. I looked for a bench to sit on.

The overall running time is 31 minutes and 30 seconds. I have to tell you, Constant Reader, that I lasted about ten minutes. I loved the first four or five of those minutes, and then it got increasingly annoying and disorientating. No human being can watch an aperture and a wall doing all the colours of the spectrum for 31 minutes without having some sort of conniption.

I may have said before that the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome abounds in the arts – nobody likes to say what they’re really thinking (he’s naked! The King is in the altogether, as Danny Kaye put it – we’re all just pretending!) in case it sounds philistine, or gives fuel to the why-are-we-funding-this brigade.

I believe in pushing boundaries, and doing strange things, and funding what seems unfundable. But there is always a case for saying honestly: I think there’s a bit of self-indulgence here. So I’m saying it.

This installation is too long. Too portentous. It collapses under the weight of its own self-importance. Perhaps two works would have been manageable. It’s like being collared by an enthusiast who forgets about his audience.

When I came out, and moved on to the last gallery, I had spots and black cobwebby things before my eyes. It was a relief to see a relief, all bronze brown, chunky, rectangular and unassuming, by Robert Adam (1917-1984), and Hepworth’s sexy stone round Involute 11. These I want to touch. These make me think, and warm to the endeavour that goes into art.

I thought hard about Colour Play, and the best thing to say to explain what I felt it lacked is: do you remember Lava lamps? Those reviled objects – they became an object of derision, a mark of a your class and your taste. Well, they had warmth, and a kind of magic about them. They made unexpected shapes in interesting colours. They didn’t make your head buzz.

Okay, they didn’t make you think profound thoughts. But they had something about them. Play. That’s what Colour Play doesn’t have. And if you say – maybe the light-installation man wasn’t interested in play, I’d say – clearly not, and what a shame.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Contemporary Art Society
  

visualarts,orkney

IT’S OVER a week ago now, openings night in Stromness. That’s the Christmas exhibition openings, not to be confused with late-night shopping, Christmas tree lighting, Norwegian linking nor anything else on the festive spectrum on this fertile archipelago.

Pier Arts Centre Christmas Open exhibition (© Ian Stephen)

It’s not just farming that thrives here, judging by the wide range of creative arts revealed. I’ve been back now to study the work more closely and it’s been a real pleasure to get a glimpse of the vitality of inventive makers.

There were some strong signs before even entering The Pier. I’d met one Jean Tulloch who was taking a course in felting and was working away at a large scale piece, bristling with invention but within a structure.

The a diversion into the Waterfront Gallery revealed a profusion of made objects. You could don gloves to turn the pages of a timeless artist’s book by Denise Campbell, a sea poem, continuing the tradition of using the texture and colour and typography on the page as part of the meaning of the work.

I was caught by two monoprints hung close. If I said a puffin and a seascape you would not get a clue of the fresh approach of Mirran Hall, who also shows in the Pier. You see so much work that is a bit like the Alfred Wallis pieces you’ll find upstairs in The Pier’s permanent collection – but these two works stood out from a whole range of competent pieces, by their boldness and clarity.

One great thing about the redeveloped Pier Arts Centre is the opportunities presented by the different rooms and corridors. These are fully exploted in a skilful hanging. Somehow, a huge number of works, in all styles and sizes, just doesn’t seem cluttered.

A corridor provided a minimal way in. Breathing space with work which has a meditative feel to it – akin to the Alan Johnstone drawings you’ll find permanently installed up the stairs.

Heather Aberdein presents a series of two coloured drawings with continuity broken by mounts so there is a triptych in each frame. The lines and bodies of colour don’t quite meet, but suggest a way from one to the other, so you get the feeling the whole work could continue. Maybe she’ll find a long corridor to keep it all going.

At first sight Colin Kirkpatrick’s harmonic drawings on board look like they could have come from up the stairs down. A closer look shows a playful balancing of ideas. Those who know his work will recognise the motifs, cattle-skull and planet. It’s contemporary art in the sense that the concept is crucial, but it happens to look grand too.

Jean Malone frames a shawl that can pass through a wedding ring as per tradition – but this one’s in copper wire. What you might call a twist in a story you think you know. And Isla Holloway also uses metal, but not very heavy stuff. Pins are nailed over a small grid of squared paper. One arrangement comes close to being a circle and the other an oval. In one work a connecting white thread also falls short of being a line and in the other a stone is trapped. A different way of drawing.

Unlike Pukka’s [that’s the aforesaid Colin Kirkpatrick to his friends – Ed.] work I couldn’t try to discuss what the concepts behind these are, but I’m intrigued. Ordinary objects are arranged so you stop and look again. Perhaps that’s also what’s happening in Colin Johnstone’s interventions on a worn and stretched catalogue – presented as another layer of its own self.

In presentation and medium it’s completely unlike Rebecca Marr’s photographs from island visits. But the crisp stems and sharp strands of down in a photograph of bog cotton are caught to let you look again at something any islander has often seen. In another room, Dana Collins applies scientific scruntiny to the same subject.

So we are now in a room of flora and fauna. And there is another room of fish and birds. All of them contain arresting works. Again a subject that you think can hardly be interesting any more is celebrated with a fluency that stops you short.

Take the elegance of the lines in Anna Meadows’ long look at Kirkwall harbour, lit with sweeps of watercolour. And these rooms lead back to one where we’re well into freestyle mode. In Peter Brown’s lines and paint on canvas you can see the light hitting the landscape still. But the titles are clues, a way in – ‘Between Day and Night’. And Laura Drever’s ‘Marwick’ still has the recognizable shapes of stones.

So we’re not into the abstract but maybe the light is also filtered through an open mind before it manifests itself in the work as surely as the rays of the sun are channeled by Roger Ackling to burn their lines of marks.

Patty Boonstra’s oriental prints find a peaceful balance in energetic lines. Fluent marks just fall into the suggestion of a figure with folded arms. The tone of these takes us through into a more distant room – the pier side of the gallery. John Struther’s ceramics are well displayed here. Again, there is something of a homage to the Gardiner collection, but there’s a dash of signal red, or burned orange to emphasise the fact that a natural geometry is modified by the human hand.

Amongst the large range of skills demonstrated in other fine examples of applied art, Morag Ewing’s jewelry has a presence beyond its size. These are works which impress by their quietness, whereas Peter Rowland’s carafe and beakers, though simple in shape, were surely made for a surviving Norse Earl.

It’s a huge contrast to John Vincent’s welded horseshoe cactus which could well have appeared in an installation by the aforementioned Kirkpatrick. In a room of landscapes and contructions, Alayne Dickey dares to marry the elements. She works in wire, threads, copper strips and glosses all in a resin with a sheen. Amazingly she still keeps it simple, so when you step back you see the fall of a much loved hill.

Vera Sperling also coats surfaces in an astonishing collage coating on a café chair. It’s as smooth as good latte but with at least one extra shot of espresso. And if we go upstairs we meet some of the human figures who might occupy an object.

The paintings and drawings here show a continuing energy. I thought of the Stanley Cursiter portraits you keep coming across, building to building in Orkney and you realise of course that interest in the human will never date. How it’s expressed will be shifting all the time. A bit like how wind works with tide.

Bold figurative painting alternates with smaller scale monochrome works in a balanced showing of shared concerns. There’s one work in this room which is like a coment on how we must celebrate what we see, Alasdair Peebles shows a flat plain landscape photograph, but in it there is what appears to be a trailer. Landscape paintings are being unfolded out of it, right by a piece of field still to be ploughed.

There is no shortage of skill or originality in the visual arts as practiced in Orkney today, judging from what’s on show here. And an open show must always yield some surprises as well as sharing the work of seasoned campaigners with the interested public.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Waterfront Gallery
• Ian Stephen

Voewood 2007 (photo - © Annely Juda Fine Art)

THIS EXHIBITION could have been a curator’s nightmare. There are so many pieces. Many are small. They are titled by number and material – ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with wire’, ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood’ – rather than having tricksy names which might divert and direct the viewer.

They are without exception monochrome, natural colours, apart from a Mexican orange box with faded red lettering and a few still jaunty naïve depictions of fruit and veg on the side.

However Ackling, who knows the Pier space, having been here last year, made his installation here, according to staff, in a calm and almost Zen-like manner, with hardly any rethinks. He knew what should go where. His relationship with the gallery dates from an acquisition of four works in 2006, which counterpoint the original Margaret Gardiner collection, allowing us to see old in new, and new in old.

He is one of those 60s St Martin’s graduates who turned things around a bit, and from whose influence younger artists may struggle to emerge, so confident was their way of looking at nature, found objects, and what happens when you put things in unexpected places – Richard Long and Hamish Fulton were contemporaries.

Over forty years he has developed a painstaking, completely time-tide-and-light-bound way of working. He uses a microscope to burn holes in wood, or paper, working from left to right. This burning is all done in one take, it seems – if the sun goes in, the work stops. It’s best, it seems, to work in the afternoon – things can go up in flames if the beam is too intense. He’s been developing this technique for forty years. He works on location or at his Norfolk home.

“I’ve got a dot, which is an image of the sun… a dot and a dot builds into a line. It’s not now about the dot and the line, but where you start and where you stop… I’m drawing with light.”

Orcadian light held up to the technique, thank goodness: Ackling talks of his interest in how our local industry (or perhaps the demise of some of it?) is reflected in the debris he beachcombs and rescues, and also of the wind and wave power which renders wood “sand blasted, battered, slowly smoothed away.”

Gallery 1 in the Pier is a long thin corridor, rather like a voe, given light and strong verticals by the long slim windows. Outside the window, where the working piers have railing sand masts, there are more. The rain is also runneling down the glass in straight lines.

The series of works opposite echo these lines, and also the muted ochre of the flagstones outside. These Voewoods, with their regular, close, mathematically precise burnt lines, look like ancient Japanese musical instruments, clappers and spiral combs – or units of measurement.

They look African, too – votive offerings, things made to propitiate something. But look closer and you see why the exhibition is called Brought Back – this is about material which has been tossed away, its original purpose lost in the ocean or the back garden of a croft.

Ackling brings them back, intervening, rearranging, playing sometimes with empty space (blackened rectangles where slats once were) or with weathered paint – so they become something new and yet ancient, full of history. It’s a work of artistic reclamation, and also imitation. The salt which has rusted these old nails, the shape and state of the old wood, all pulled together by Ackling’s own version of the effect of hundreds of years of light – his burning glass.

I’m intrigued. These woods are like deconstructed fishboxes. It’s hard to find wood in Orkney on beaches now – plastic rules, and the days of boxes with legends like Buckie, Aberdeen, or Stavanger burnt into them are over.

An artist’s intervention to give plastic a history would be challenging, because it wears away so smoothly. Wood is like Rembrandt’s face in the self -portraits – it carries stories. Perhaps it’s because the beach isn’t as wood littered that this man hunts for it – the works are about honouring it in a new way.

As we proceed through Gallery 2 the objects change. They’re more block-like, and also more like domestic detritus. Here’s something like an old doorstop. Here’s a triangle like a Sphinx – all whorled by burn marks – and a door knob with a pin in it, which manages to look sleek and much turned, but also, from above, like a pattern in a sand garden.

The pin, I think, also has to do with dots and circles. Circles recur in a hypnotic kind of way. There’s a trapezoid block with an Aztec-like sun and a mysterious squat kind of presence to it. I begin to think up metaphors and images – it’s impossible not to. The artist however – while I’m sure he’d allow this – says, “I don’t need to have symbolism to give something presence… a motif… holds in condensed form… something which was very simple… but actually loaded with complexity and emotional intent.”

You really want to finger these things, feel the textures.

The big Room 3 can be a puzzle for some installations – it’s high and echoing, and a daunting space where work as muted as this (“I’m not interested in colour – only in light and dark,” he said) could get lost. But ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with metal’ holds its own. We’re in the croft now – this has been an ancient bucket handle with a worn wooden handle. Set sideways, it resembles the mandibles of some big insect.

Here size jumps around and tricks us – a big spar becomes an enormous pencil, or possibly a rocket, about to hit the ground. I see carpenters’ tools, spirit levels – because the burnings now shine like brass. This is a room about work – things forgotten that can have new meanings.

It’s a bit like writing the History of a Penny when you were in Primary, looking in here. You want to work out the journey they’ve taken to be here. I’m perplexed by my familiarity with a strange 20 cm wood and burn handle, with a twist of iron on the top – again, a bit insect-like. Is it a dentist’s tool? Three hours later I remember – it’s the remains of a washing up mop, the sort with a string head.

Right across from the door, all alone on a vast wall, off centre, is ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with string’. Up close, after all the monochrome, and burnt string effects, this stuff is a surprise and a pleasure. It’s like a bit of old pulley rope that’s been in the sea for years. The scarcity of soft textures means you really pay attention when there are some.

Move further back and suddenly it’s like a crucifix. The lights in this room give each work three shadows – from some angles they’re fan-like, or feather-like. Farmers’ lives are here too – rusty fence staples are transformed into vertical handholds. A rectangle of wooden slats is Doric temple, a washboard, a series of lights and darks in an abstract pattern – whatever you like.

Room 4 and there are my boxes, all intact. The burnt lines echo the workmanship and play with the linearity of the shapes. The wood is of different quality – rickety or tough – but they’ve all travelled, from Mexico, Italy, France, still bearing ancient slogans on their sides. Taylor’s Bulbs box (Ackling has a nice sense of hidden humour) may have come less far and contained less exotic things, but it’s stout and solemn, as befits a receptacle bearing something which would grace someone’s garden.

In the corner, two rectangular boxes arranged like speakers, positioned so you can see light streaming through the holes. This is the room with the view of the harbour, and the colours and lines once again inhabit the outside scene – shadows, light, circles, squares. The calm in this room is irresistible – and there’s mystery amongst the ordinary.

One box says – DE GEUS DEIL. It barely needs the artist’s intervention – but it’s there, very subtly. The length of time these burnings have taken, and the precision with which they are executed, and the differing textures he achieves – burns like wool, like rope, like onion rings, like iron, like cat gut – has to be seen to be understood. For such a limited sounding discipline to set yourself, it’s amazingly versatile.

Room 5 always has a long low brooding presence to it, I think. Here is a venerable kirn lid, perhaps, warped and holes – with a diamond burnt into it. It’s a shield, for me; someone else might just enjoy the physicality of the strong shapes. A fishbox – like a radiator! A dice! A wooden tiny tower block!

‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with nail’, and ‘Voewood 2008 sunlight on wood with elastic band’ are placed on window sills, and rightly so – both accept the view outside, the circular holes mirror the car headlights and lifebuoys on the pier beyond.

Finally the intimate Room 6 has a different atmosphere. Six of the seven works are sunlight on masking tape on card. The card, grained grey rectangles, occasionally with punch holes like a student notebook, is covered with beautifully precise burnt strips. Lines and circles, and the scorched edges of the yellow paper, make these feel like sunlight. They have a warmth, lightness, which contrasts with the woodwork. It’s like having a sorbet after steak.

There’s long term engagement here with forgotten things, and with time and the effects of attrition, be it sun, sea or wind. It’s fitting that this should be seen by Orcadians first. Leave the last word to the artist, from the Pier’s Gallery catalogue:

“I work outside on the ground and under the sky… thoughts are reduced to a minimum… what is made from the simple concentrated ritual is held within the work itself… like many others for thousands of years I believe that insight can be seen and rekindled through a pragmatic dialogue with material.’

He’s right. But I can’t help wondering about the back history of every piece, and imagining its reinvention as something quite other. Perhaps that’s what Brought Back is all about

© Morag MacInnes, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

The Orkney Ferry

Orkney has always been a place I hold dear and when we were planning a Makers’ Day that would bring together craftspeople from different areas of the Highlands and Islands I could think of nowhere better to hold it.

With the wonderful Pier Art Centre in Stromness, the range of craft studios, trails and shops as well as the consistently high standard of work, the landscape and heritage, I felt that makers could only go home inspired.

I also wanted makers to realise that location should be no deterrent to making and retailing and indeed, can be used as a selling point and should inspire your creating. The makers in Orkney have long proved this with a first class reputation for work that really takes advantage of the place that is their home.

With makers such as Jenna and Lizza Hume returning back to their roots on Westray (1 ½ hours by ferry from Kirkwall on a calm day) and building an internationally known company that really sells their location, I felt that by speaking with and visiting the islands our makers based in other areas would have no excuse to say that where they stay is holding them back!

Like all good plans, this one grew and we finally ended up with over 50 makers coming from the Highlands, Shetland, the Western Isles -as well as Orkney- to gather at the Pier and then disperse to workshops and shops all over the islands.

The weather proved a challenge as it can often do here, so gales and driving rain added an extra dimension to the ferry and plane travel of many of the participants!

Makers Days are all about networking or rather; catching up, exchanging ideas, making new friends and contacts, developing plans and this one was no exception – the noise level was particularly high and you could feel the buzz and excitement!

Many people work in isolation so events like this really help with connecting you to the wider craft community.
Being a maker in a remote area is essentially a life style choice with many parts making up the whole; family, animals, homes, community all having to fit in with the thing that really drives you -that all essential part that makes you tick and comes from your heart – creating your work.

To be able to do that in a place that is truly Home is a privilege that many aspire to and the lucky ones can realise.
Eoin Leonard put it so well when he talked on the Makers Day, ‘after 27 years doing a so called ‘proper job’, I feel that this is really my first Proper Job and I want to do it for as long as I can!’ No talk of early retirement and pension plans for Eoin and his wife Jane, just the wish that they can continue doing what they love, in their home for as long as they are physically capable.

Lizza Hume said something similar when she recalled a visitor who asked her why there were so many craftspeople in Orkney and they then suggested that perhaps it was because there was no ‘real jobs’here!
The makers we meet are certainly doing real and proper jobs and fitting them in with all the other things that make up their lives in a place that shapes and guides their choices and work.

Many of us in the Highlands know only too well the difficulties and issues we have to face in choosing to live here – travel, weather, isolation to mention three!

After my 2 hours on a stormy ferry followed by 6 hours of night time driving to get home from Orkney, it is something I know only too well!

I love this excerpt from a poem by Andrew Greig, as it seems to sum it all up, especially after spending time in Orkney.

Orkney/This Life

This is where I want to live, close to where the heart gives out, ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry’s engines thrum
this life this life this life.

Pamela Conacher
29th September 2009
]]> http://northings.com/2009/09/29/a-proper-job/feed/ 1 http://northings.com/2009/06/23/bill-viola-being-time/ http://northings.com/2009/06/23/bill-viola-being-time/#comments Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:08:17 +0000 http://northings.com/?p=3520 Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 5 September 2009

.”]HE LOOKS like a tidy chap, Bill Viola. A bit like a chartered accountant or – hey! – a sound engineer for Radio 3. Perhaps this is appropriate; he’s the video art man, the one who realised the possibilities of the medium – think what Man Ray did for photography, update the technology and you’ve got Viola.

He’s the Alexander Graham Bell of LCD/flat panel/plasma display/all surround installation video art. He’s got a BFA in Experimental Studios (yes – studios. It’s not a typo) from Syracuse University. And he does electronic music too.

The problem with pioneers (every press pack and biog on the web calls him that) is that they’re just that – they have the dubious distinction of thinking of it first. Then lots of youth with its jeans falling down – not tidy at all – jump on the poor pioneer’s efforts, refine them, extend them and pull them around until they’re unrecognisable.

Technology moves so quickly now that things are dated as soon as they’re invented. We’re such sophisticated viewers, accessors, downloaders. I thought this when I was in the Pier’s darkened rooms looking at this very important artist’s work. I’d just been in Edinburgh at the Dean Gallery – the ‘modern art’ one – the day before, checking out Paolozzi and the Surrealists – and how dated they seem!

Galleries freeze artists at a particular point in their development; this exhibition has four works which are all nearly ten years old. Nowadays, Viola is still travelling. He’s interested in primitive cultures, Buddhism, ancient traditions – he’s been in Bali, he’s looked at Native American rock sites, he’s taken his sons to a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama – and in 2005 he collaborated with Peter Sellers and Esa Pekka Salonen on a production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – not for the faint hearted.

You can see work by him now in the Natural History Museum in London – part of their After Darwin, Contemporary Expressions exhibition, inspired by the great man’s clumsily-titled book The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Viola’s still energised by the basic rituals which keep us all happy in the human zoo.

Two things occur to me. Being Time is a precise title; these images are about us in an intimate kind of way. They’re coolly shot; nothing intrudes between us and the image. It could be like looking at a Vermeer – except – it moves! Crucially, that changes the viewer’s perceptions and expectations. A lifetime watching telly – from the Lone Ranger to Big Brother – tells me that movement means action. But not here. Movement means meditation. Being Time also means – you are here, you the viewer, watching people like you; you’ve got a responsibility to pay attention and react.

Secondly, I think – we can’t leave the image alone; we have to make a narrative out of it. Just as you bring your own perceptions to a poem, so it is with these room-filling images. It’s impossible simply to view them as shapes and colours. Indeed, Viola would not want us to. He was studying medieval and early Renaissance devotional works, and coping with personal angst when he was putting these diptyches together; seen as a group, they read like a coping strategy for being human.

‘Catherine’s Room’ (2001) is a jewel-like series of observations of a woman, a room, some light and a cherry blossom tree in a square window. Very Dutch – down to the blue of the material she sews, the slant of the sun, the purity of the profile. It’s like a short story full of subtle clues – why has she moved the table? What happened to the flowers? Who are all the candles for? Does she always sleep alone?

It’s got a tranquillity and serenity that’s Zen-like, and because there’s no emotion in it at all, the viewer fills in the gaps. Sort of like seeing a series of stills from a Bergman film. It’s compelling – partly, however, because it’s nice. She has an apple, not a Big Mac. The postie doesn’t leave a bill. She does yoga, not a workout to Five Live. There’s no need to hoover. It’s like a parallel world. Bliss, really – a wee look at Catherine’s room, to remind us of spirituality and simplicity – then back into the grubby sunny Stromness street when there’s a few drunk boys spitting and swearing at the tourists…

‘Four Hands’ is just that. It’s described as four small flat panel display screens mounted on a wooden shelf, presenting moving images of four pairs of hands. Viola says they are ‘influenced by a variety of sources from Buddhist mudras to c17 English Chirogrammatical tables.’ They’re different hands, making shapes – heart shapes, cup shapes, praying and clenching.

I tried hard to see them as a sequence of ritual movements which define our humanity, our similarity to one another – but they left me cold I’m afraid. I thought they looked contrived and tired, and I wanted to see better hands – workers’ hands, foreign hands. Maybe it was just a failure of the imagination, on my part; or maybe it’s what I was talking about earlier – seen this, done it, old hat now, where’s Tilda Swinton really asleep in a glass case?

‘Silent Mountain’ (2001), we’re told, is ‘a study of the onset and aftermath of an explosive emotional outburst as it courses through the human body… a visual record of the human capacity to withstand self-destruction and strive for renewal.’

Well, what it really is is two actors, on a loop, getting upset and then calming down. Slightly different blue t-shirts, I noticed, and the bloke does a kind of girly thing with his hair when he’s really traumatised, whereas the girl has a certain conceit about her hands – excellent nails, no chewing at all. I hated it. You shouldn’t try and pretend trauma. Metaphor works; the literal doesn’t. If you want trauma, get to a war zone. Don’t give me two pretty people emoting.

I’d seen ‘Ascension’ (2000) before, but in a busy crowded gallery. In the silent Pier, this work is simply stunning; you realise the subtlety of the sound track, – there are whales there, and tug boats, and breathing – and you really experience the shock of the event – a man’s sudden plunge into another element – starry shiny pure water.

This work is like a poem sequence, rich with the metaphor I wanted, simple, dynamic, freighted with all the big questions we don’t quite like to ask – what will happen when I die? Are there angels? Will there still be a me-shaped space when I’m gone? Do we rise? The white shirt fills with water as the man sinks, and it looks like wings; the light – that same slanted light which is so persuasive and elegant in ‘Catherine’s Room’ – is like some sort of message of hope.

The veined feet are of course like Christ’s on the cross, and you look for the nail holes. The penis is visible – so you remember this is a real person, and you worry about how he breathes. The hands barely move until the very end, when there’s a gesture of supplication almost. The air bubbles have a life of their own – literally! – and once he’s gone and the water returns to its primeval sludginess, you feel the imprint he made on it.

Viola likes slow motion, and perhaps was one of the first to appreciate its possibilities – how we can focus intimately on our actions, and experience them in a new way, when we see them taken out of real time.

I’m not religious, but I do notice the marks we make on earth; and this work honours that. If you are religious, I suspect you will find deep comfort and solace from ‘Ascension’.

So – caught in the two thousands, this show, but interesting because of the flaws. Why don’t the ‘Four Hands’ and the ‘Silent Mountain’ work? Because video, like all art, has to show and suggest, not tell. I’m guessing Viola has learned not to be didactic any more. I suspect too that his new work is not so much about people, and more about place. In the end it all comes down to rocks and stones – they’re much more challenging than people. Perhaps he’d relish a bit of time at the Ring of Brodgar.

© Morag MacInnes, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• St Magnus Festival

ALISTAIR PEEBLES wrestles with reflections inspired by Mel Gooding’s recent lecture at the Pier Arts Centre

WHEN THE celebrated art critic Mel Gooding began his lecture at the Pier Arts Centre last month to introduce the current exhibition of drawings, A Discipline of the Mind, by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) – and well aware that he was sacrificing etymological precision for rhetorical emphasis – he began by saying how pleased he was to be speaking “in not only probably the best space for art in the Orkney Isles, but possibly the best space for art in the British Isles.”

This is only one of many well-informed comments one might expect to hear about this inspiring gallery – from a visitor or from someone closer to home – but for anyone interested in the idea of art and in the appreciation of visual experience, his remark helps explain why what has been created over the past thirty years at 28-30 Victoria Street in Stromness is so significant and so deserving of support.

Lava Forms Lanzarote 2 by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

After the lecture, delivered to a full house on 18 April, I mentioned to the speaker some of the other comments that I’d heard or read about the space recently, and he admitted that he wasn’t sure whether it might be very widely known here with what enormous respect the Pier is held in the country as a whole. Nor indeed why that should be the case.

Thinking about his talk overall – a little lengthy for some, but like some others I was spellbound and would gladly have sat through the same again – I feel certain that not only did it help us towards a better understanding of the superb work on show, by this famous daughter of St Andrews and St Ives, but it also helped build a better sense of the importance of the Pier’s permanent collection.

This not least because the gallery contains the work of many of the artists of the 40s and 50s who formed Barns-Graham into the particular kind of prolific, creative spirit that she became. (And through its presence in Orkney – which she visited several times and which fascinated her greatly – has also helped form the outlook of many artists from here.)

But his talk also clarified the reasons why such excellence in a facility dedicated to the nourishment and celebration of visual experience is so important, and so widely regarded.

Anyone who missed Gooding’s talk, but has visited the Pier in the past few weeks, will perhaps understand the force of the few quotes, notes and conclusions below, taken from scribblings made in the course of his presentation. He had been invited by the Barns-Graham Trust to curate the exhibition, which is now set to travel throughout Britain, having been launched at the Pier.

This selection of works was chosen from the extensive resource which was left by the artist in care of the specially-created Barns-Graham Trust at Balmungo in St Andrews.

The Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney

However anyone looking for more detail about the talk need search no further than the excellent catalogue, inexpensive and very well illustrated with her drawings (including one or two from Orkney, as well as Lanzarote and elsewhere). This gives the gist of the lecture in an essay, that conveys no less passionate enthusiasm and clarity than the spoken version.

With illustrations of work by Hepworth, Nicolson and Gabo as well as Barns-Graham herself, he told us that the St Ives “project” was not directed at producing an “art of physical description, but of felt and thought equivalencies: what it feels like to be standing in space, experiencing time.”

He further explained that the Russian émigré Naum Gabo, a key artistic figure in St Ives, whose work explored the interchange between external and internal in our experience of the world, had a profound influence on the young Scottish artist.

“Our thinking and perception are creative acts,” as he wrote in 1957. His example led her to understand that “the proper purposes of art were not individual or social purposes, but to reveal the real nature of things.”

If this sounds like science, Gabo was indeed a scientist as well as an artist, and through him Barns-Graham came to understand art as a form of research. Her own very Scottish cast of mind was one that responded readily to this purposeful interdisciplinariness.

Gooding drew parallels with others of the era whose work crossed the usual boundaries: among them Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd, D’Arcy Thomson (Professor of Biology at St Andrews), the Hungarian Georgy Kepes and George Elder Davie, author of The Democratic Intellect.

But what in simple terms does this notion of art as research mean? Surely a picture’s a picture, and no more to be said. Gooding observed that for all of us, scientists and artists alike, the experience of the world can convey feelings of simple wonder, but if we’re being serious about it, serious about being here, that’s not where the thinking should stop.

Stromness, Orkney 1 by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Thus the simple wondering reaction, isn’t this a marvellous view?, important and necessary as it is in itself, can lead on to an understanding of what gives the view such energy, and thus of what it means to be experiencing it, phenomenologically.

In a similar way the more scientific reflection, isn’t this a marvellous rock?, can lead on to a geological understanding of the world and how we come to be in it: the discovery of fossils, ores, oil, evolution. Not surprisingly, as an artist drawn to landscape, geology was as interesting to Barns-Graham as are bones and musculature to a painter of the human figure.

Thus making the drawing is like conducting an experiment: to discover something about the circumstance of being in the world, and to convey that understanding visually, rather than in charts and words. (Interestingly, some of the drawings seem to borrow that more mathematical graphical vocabulary, and are intensely successful in conveying an experience of space and sound.)

There is still time to visit the exhibition and see all this for yourselves, and as far as the talk is concerned (and the catalogue essay), it was very useful to be reminded that visual art is not now, nor has it ever been, simply something to fill a space on the wall or shelf, nor an activity justified by visitor numbers and the interests – important as they are – of the tourism or investment industries, but that it is an essential and very ancient means of coming to terms with the nature of experience.

Given the fact that we live in a world that we can see, that is to say, this is a vital means to help us see it better and understand it and ourselves more completely. While still coming to it all through the experience of wonder. (See also R W Hepburn, Wonder and other Essays, EUP, 1984.)

To come back to the point made by Mel Gooding at the outset, the importance of that intelligent probing beyond the surface of things is one of the main reasons why not only the artists they show but the building and indeed the whole institution of the Pier Arts Centre, and its location, engender such awed appreciation near and far. Visible energy indeed!

© Alistair Peebles, 2009

Links

• Barns-Graham Trust
• Pier Arts Centre
• Alistair Peebles

Wilhemina Barns-Graham

WILLIE, as she was called, was born in 1912 in St Andrews. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, despite some objections from her father, and , hampered slightly by bouts of illness, graduated in 1937. By 1940 she was in St Ives, hobnobbing with Hepworth and Nicholson, Alfred Wallis and Naum Gabo, whose philosophy – that ‘life and nature conceal an infinite variety of forces’ she took on board wholesale.

The Pier’s connection with the group of creative souls who congregated in and about the St Ives coast is well known – but Barns-Graham was sidelined somewhat, and her work has only recently been receiving renewed critical attention. There’s a wonderful picure of her – a handsome girl with elegant hands – inspecting a rubbish tip in 1947, clad in velvet jacked and baggy corduroy trousers, her board slung over her hip, satchel on shoulder, every inch a (rather tidy and soigné) bohemian.

I have an inbuilt resistance to having things explained to me in more complex terms than those the artist herself might use; others might call it an inbuilt bullshit detector, which bleeps when pretentious phrases recur on gallery walls. Well, something was bleeping as I walked around Willie’s work – I found the information on the boards very annoying and repetitive.

Why not let the artist speak for herself? She clearly kept interesting diaries, or work details – the quotes from these and her comments are illuminating. She is fascinated by ‘things of a kind, in order and disorder.’ She sees the business of her art as ‘a contemplation of sensing out, feeling and understanding particular rhythms. Not just on the surface, but underneath.’

Fine! Then all I need is place, biography, influences, dates, development – not another layer of philosophy explaining the philosophy. However, rant over – the drawings themselves calmed me down.

She came to Orkney on a residency in 1984 and you can hear the enthusiasm. ‘So much (sic) work ideas here, – drawings, colour, shapes, moods. Space – elongated shapes – & then the light & rock groupings – water movements, changes – It is overwhelming – choked with it all.’

Despite this breathlessness, what we see in the lovely Pier light are the serenest of studies – capturing the geometry of fields in ochres, greens and yellows. September in Orkney – oil on hardboard – takes the eye across a long low swell of land, quivering in the hot empty air you sometimes get at harvest. The sense of repose is quickened by small intimate texturing, where stubble and corn intrude.

You might think September Evening in Orkney – gouache on paper – might be much the same – but no. She has a quick eye for the island’s subtle transformations. The light is apple-y; the landscape empty of people but full of its own shapes and colours. The little child-like farmhouse, cardboardy in comparison to the depth of the autumn fields, is a St Ives touch, but not at all faux naîve. It fits.

Drawing for her was – not secondary, I think, but separate from her abstract painting and printmaking. It was ‘a discipline of the mind’ which helped to ‘develop one’s awareness to inner perception.’ She is a collector of shapes ‘that become my shapes – so I can express myself in my own language.’ Da Vinci’s wave drawings, for example, are an inspiration – and I wouldn’t be surprised if she liked Durer, and the tree drawings of Dutch and Flemish painters. It’s as if she used drawing as a poet might use a thesaurus or a dialect dictionary, to raid from and store ideas.

Maybe I went the wrong way – but I was drawn through a corridor full of Italian studies – some from the fifties, some from the eighties. In comparison with the coolness of the Orkney scenes, these are rich. Monte Olivetti (1954) shows a sensual swinging pencil. It suggests heat, sterility, and yet vitality. You can see her looking beneath, into the texture of stone.

Some of the later Italian pieces are less vital – rather dry studies of Tabayesco and Arrieta look a bit like what Edward Lear might have produced on his hols – but then – an inspired bit of hanging in the grey floored room which looks out on Stromness harbour and is filled with the cool Orkney weather – two more Orkney studies (plus a rather sketchy fussy little daub of the Holmes).

These controlled, cool, clear drawings of Stromness, sharp with eaves and chimneys and dykes, just a hint of colour in their skies, are a joy. A clear Orkney day does illuminate the linear, the triangles and rectangles – what Mackay Brown called ‘Euclidian light/ which ruled the town in segments blue and gray .’ She gets it dead right – notations of shape become patterns which compel you to enjoy their stripped down simplicity.

Suddenly we’re in Lanzarotte, which she visited four times between 1989 and 1993 – just after Orkney. The contrast is abrupt and exciting. The volcanic nature of the place, the turmoil just under the surface, was grist to the mill of an artist who wanted to look inside hills, rocks, trees, as in lava Muerte . The opposite of our gentle farmland, this landscape bristles with tension. Her eraser is employed with vigour, as are all the B pencils in her satchel. The energy of the drawing fuels unease. Something’s lurking ready to – well, erupt.

In this room the rich colours – crimson, orange, green, scraped and traced and scratched – make me want to see her abstract painting – if these are just notes, imagine a full blown canvas. The skies are fiery – Lanzarrote is an alien world in flux. In La gena, though, we’re in a different atmosphere – it’s almost playful – the hill is a bit like a woolly hat, the rocks are waves, there’s lace, where water’s tumbling.

Maguez is brooding – the little white farmhouse and the cascading stream are a reassurance that movement goes on. This room gets the essence of a foreign landscape – the vines cut across the mountain, soft poplars break the horizon.

I realise I’ve missed a bit; and heck, it’s the epiphany that really set her off – the little room off the corridor takes us to her seminal visit to Grindlewald Glacier, under the Eiger, in 1949. She was stunned. ‘It seemed to breathe,’ she said. Study for Upper Glacier Grindelwald, an off set drawing, is Klee – like in its freedom and elegance; Glacier Drawing 2 – oil and monotype on paper – pulls you in to the massiveness of ice – and then there’s a suggestion of things overtaken by the slow slow march of the cold: boat shapes, bird shapes, stones are engulfed.

The conventional studies of St Ives and Porthieven, pretty, are a let down after all this intensity. Such pretty pics need people. They have a perfunctory look. Perhaps they capture the self-satisfaction of a comfortable little haven, an artistic retreat? Her kirk series, always with gravestones to the fore, have a Caspar Friedrich Romantic melancholy – a wee man in a boat, behind the mass of St Monan’s, is a bonus.

They’re workmanlike, these, but they aren’t ‘getting to the real essence of things’ This is clearly what she was trying to do in a series of meditations on seawaves and currents, in the last, dark little room. Rather Bridget Riley-ish, these, and I’m not fond of them. They make my eyes cross. But perhaps they are simply notes for the painter, mnemonics, and that’s why they seem perfunctory.

The catalogue notes her Scottishness; mentions her contemporaries Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd. Latterly she dotted between St Andrews and St Ives. But I suspect her influence has more to do with a general British post war move – in all the arts – towards nature, away from the tangled metal remains of war. At its simplest, you can see this expressed in the Shell calendars of the fifties. Born later, she’d be doing installations, a child of the eco-movement.

Whatever her motivation, she’s an interesting artist. The higgledy-piggledy way I stumbled through her work (I should go back and do it all in order…) perhaps makes me more aware that she didn’t sing one song; she had many ways of drawing, many different notes in her notebook. But she certainly caught the essence of our Orkney hairst blinks.

© Morag MacInnes, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

• Wilhemina Barns-Graham Trust

Charles Avery - 'Coscienza Woodcut', 2007 - from Scotland & Venice exhibition

THE VENICE Biennale was established in 1895, to promote contemporary art. It’s now an international showcase. Scottish artists began exhibiting independently here in 2003, buoyed up no doubt by a Scottish Arts Council commitment to identify Venice as a Priority Project, to be supported over three Biennales.

Luckily, the British Council didn’t see sudden devolved enthusiasm from Scotland – and Wales – to be a threat, and supported the initiative. Amanda Catto tells us, in the lush book accompanying the exhibition, “we were clear that our intention should be to complement the programme of the British Pavilion. By presenting new work from Scotland we hoped to strengthen international interest…”

I can imagine the feverish meetings, the reassurances (we’ll no step on your toes!), the visits to check out venues. No talk of recession then. Perhaps the next showcase will have to be in Italy’s version of Pilton.

Each exhibition was different; each challenging. The Pier has brought together work from three artists – Simon Starling (2002, a show called Zenomap); Cathy Wilkes (2005, Selective Memory) and Charles Avery (2007, Scotland and Venice) Starling won the Turner Prize in 2005: Wilkes is on this year’s shortlist. Avery ought to be on the next one, if there’s justice in the world.

I was under the impression that the work the Pier had was shown at the actual exhibitions; in fact, it’s not. In Venice Starling exhibited a pile of rhododendrons on a bed of loam and pebbles, floating on blue and yellow plastic pipes, attached to what appears to be a shiny green oil drum – perhaps a float, rather like a St Kildan message boat? – in a sumptuous Venetian corridor hung with oils and graced with a very hefty chandelier.

(It looks as odd as it reads, believe me.) It was a meditation on the history of the Spanish plant, brought here in the 18th century but now considered a weed. The curators said ‘Island of Weed’ “obliquely challenged the openness of any system, whether natural, nationalistic or conceptual.” I thought the Pier might be challenged, and wondered if it’d be the same rhododendrons.

But no – and rightly, I guess. Artists develop. Starling’s contribution is called ‘Autoxylopyrolcloboros’ (sigh). It was a slide show – 38 6×7 cm colour transparencies, lasting ten minutes, done in 2006 during a residency at Cove Park, close to the Clyde and Faslane, tracking the final journey of a 20-foot clinker boat called the ‘Dignity’. Bear that name in mind.

‘Transformation, of one thing or another…is at the heart of Starling’s work’, the info informs us. The vessel was salvaged and made seaworthy. The slides are of her being made unseaworthy again on a calm day on Loch Lomond. The stove burns away powering the boat; two lifejacketed fellas (wise, those lifejackets) saw off bits of the boat to feed the stove until there’s no more boat. She sinks and the fellas, presumably, swim to the trusty vessel on which the artist is taking the pictures.

Poor old Dignity. The seats, which look like good mahogany, go. The guys cut away at the middle of the boat, not the stern, perhaps to make it all happen more quickly. The propellor sinks last. A bit ghostly, that slide. There’s a sad little pool of oil. Then a lot of flotsam and jetsam. Then a whirring and riffle of projector noise, and the whole thing starts again.

Maybe it’s because I come from a place where boats are iconic in all sorts of ways, and fishing boats seem to be doomed – but I found this to be a self-indulgent and facile piece of work. I hated seeing the destruction of the salvage work, and was not inclined, as perhaps I should have been, to think about change, or returning to the sea that claimed you before.

The images are beautifully shot; the clarity is remarkable, as is the detail of oily pumps and splitting wood. I’d rather celebrate restoration than lovingly film a stubby wee boat with a black stove glowing wood red, funnel puffing white smoke being destroyed. But perhaps the point; it’s a metaphor for all the destructions on the Clyde and elsewhere?

If so – then that’s a metaphor which demands engagement on another level with politics and economics. It had a Boy Scout-ish look about it, a gimmicky look I didn’t warm to. And who’s going to see it? Only me, that morning. It won’t be showing in the dole offices or workingmen’s clubs, that’s for sure. But it certainly got a response from me, albeit an irritated one, and I haven’t forgotten it.

The next room was low-lit too. Cathy Wilkes’ Biennial show She’s Pregnant Again has had some coverage in the press recently because of the Turner nomination. I was expecting a pram, a kitchen sink, a plastic bowl with the remains of porridge in it. Perhaps a mannequin with tights on next to a buggy but cunningly not touching it. Her curators described her work as “scaveng(ing) expression from the orchestation of everyday materials…these…become ecologies of representation just within our grasp, yet they knowingly indicate that they have been touched over and over again by her own hands.” Oo – kaay.

No. She shows 6 bundles of decaying brown grasses. They either lie on polythene sheeting, or are covered in it, shroud-like. Half way along this mournful sheet are placed 24 red clay tiles in a small neat pile. The tiles have a faded stripe down the middle. Beside one of the bundles is what looks like a bit of expandable trellis – white paint flaking off.

It’s very different from the mechanistic, hard installation I was expecting. No strangers to dead grass, broken trellising and poly sheeting, Orcadians. Part of a day’s work. But this room feels like an Egyptian tomb, a kind of book of the dead. It’s unsettling. The meaning of the tiles eluded me.

It was wonderful to come into the light, and find Philip Avery’s book The Islanders, an Introduction on the windowsill. I opened it at random.

“On the island, the locals are mad for eggs pickled in gin…many of the prospectors who came … during the kelp rush, found ruin in the form of eggs, and now live destitute…”. I’m hooked.

The fronispiece is his own globe, with wonderful names – ‘the principle of the dithering eel’, for example. The story of the Hunter and his companion (they think they are Miss Miss and Only McFew, but that’s a misunderstanding) and his investigation of the Island’s Gods and mortals, is Borgesian in its perfectly compelling evocation of another world.

Avery told Tom Morton: “before The Islanders I had started to find being an artist a bit itty-bitty. I wanted to create something that could grow… the structure is the art… not the artefacts, which are the terms of the structure.” Now that, actually, I understand. This is part of what was at the Biennale – and it keeps evolving, like a world does. It’s an ongoing engagement with philosophy and culture through all kinds of media – the words, the evocative, funny, sad, highly accomplished drawings, the models of Gods .

The Ancients – three sturdy cobras – “stand erect as that is how their beards may be best admired.” Dha accommodates passion on his logical linear outline. Avery tells us ‘when visiting Dha of an evening, take care as you go, lest you catch ardent lovers well advanced, for Dha is the God of ’em. The curves of this strangely familiar form provide an ideal cradle for the passion.”

This mix of sly references, wit and discourse on the meaning of things provides a Swiftian freedom. The book is a treasure house. Avery is an inspired draughtsman – like Laura Knight, like Lucien Freud, like Mentzel. He’s unafraid, witty, observant – Heidless Magregor’s, where Gods and mortals meet to drink, the pickled eggs are piled high on the shelves by the stag’s head and the muzzled lurcher (he’s very good at dogs) sprawls under cigar smokers – is as busy as Frith (his love of detail, of narrative, is very Victorian – but not Scottish kailyark. Kailyard transformed into an Athenian discourse perhaps.)

He’s as moral as Breugel, as compelling as Mervyn Peake. The freedom of creating a world which is an island, like our islands, yet not, provides a perfect space in which to roam, be unfettered by prosaic, literal interpretations. It’s important to say too that this is by no means disengaged, in-me-own-heid work. Avery poses important questions, about the search for knowledge, and about how we learn to live, what we use to get us by.

My favourite picture is of ‘Triangleland Bourgeoisie studying the head of an Aleph.’ It’s a perfect little satire on the audience and the artist. The couple, dressed in their best, peer at their catalogue, and at the Aleph, in utter bemusement. They are from Onomatopoeia, the Island’s town, “outpost turned boomtown, vulgar theme park…”. Islanders will feel instant recognition, yet rejoice in the strangeness.

The accompanying show, Circles In Landscape by Philip Hughes, makes a strange contrast. He records landscape, and there are twenty drawings of stones here, done usually in one sitting. The info says “the physical act of working within (or in some cases against) the elements adds a sense of immediacy to the work which will be appreciated by anyone who has experienced a wintry day in Orkney.”

Well, I certainly thought they were the coldest drawings I’ve seen, but not because of physical immediacy. They look computer generated, like architect’s drawings. It’s as if someone had decided to paint the apses of 20 churches and they all turned out looking the same. Callanish could be Brodgar; Avebury could be Stonehenge. The familiar outlines, rendered so starkly, are so Classical as to be dead. Not a shadow in site. Not a hint of weather.

We have enough terrible Romantic swirly cloud and sunset paintings of stone circles, and enough people desperate to invest meaning in them, be Druids round them and search for alignments with this that or the other, I suppose, so I should be glad of a little severity. But I’m not. I looked for rubbings out, or a slip of the hand. Not one.

They all cost around the four thousand mark (they’re big, mind), and the couple who drifted in beside me thought they were “fantastic.” An odd choice of word; fantastic, i.e., existing only in the imagination, they are not. Nary a hint of the fanciful. But if you want an absolutely correct rendition of a stone circle, he’s your man. Avery’s book is about £65 I think. I know where I’d put my money.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

Alistair Peebles and Alec Finlay (photo - Caroline Smith)

ALEC FINLAY, poet and maker, son of Ian Hamilton Finlay, has a residency at the new and Renewable Energy Centre in Blythe. He loves Orkney, where his father spent time maintaining roads – well, one road which went round in a circle.

He tells us that we are at the cutting edge of development here. The phrase strikes me as apposite. There are a lot of blades around, where wind farms are concerned. But this lecturer distances himself from the political and environmental aspects of the shall-we-shan’t-we-how-do-we-if-we-do debate over wind energy and the Orkney skyline.
He’s not an expert. He knows there are strong opinions for and against. He has his preferences, but he doesn’t live here, would never want to persuade anyone ‘further than they want to go,’, says turbine decisions have to be made by our community. It’s encouraging – if a little overwhelming – to hear that ‘the discussion itself is a work of art’ and that ‘debate gives intelligent refinement,’ that ‘Orkney is engaging in a culture of perception.’

We could be a model for Britain, depending on the way we embrace renewables. But it’s not the task of the artist to proselytise. ‘Artists are about being useless,’ – and yet, they’re also ‘the grit that makes the pearl.’ Why? Because of their way of seeing, of perceiving the possibilities inherent in what the world throws up as technology changes the world around us.

He’s inviting us to forget the debate and the practicalities. He wants to explore the turbines’ possibilities as an art form. He encourages us simply to accept their presence in the world and celebrate how ‘sublime’, ‘powerful’ and ‘truthful’ they are. He compares them to kites and windsocks.

They show us what we can’t see. Most energy sources are hidden – is it possible to choose that seeing it is better? He suggests too, that the artist can be a healer, allowing us to find possibilities in what seems impossible to come to terms with.

Art has always been about the tension between the familiar and the new. If you look at a photo of the first Russian Constructivist exhibition – the post WW1 development out of Futurism – you see windmill shapes just like those in the sequence of photographs Finlay shows us (the most striking of which is an image of Sanday windturbines by Alastair Peebles. The blades shimmer in the distance through a heat haze and the foreground is a sharp stubby black and blue boat funnel. Old and new juxtaposed.)

Constructivists were interested in the aesthetics of machinery. They investigated the balance between the material properties of objects and their spacial presence. In 1919 the movement split over Vladimir Tatlin’s plans for an enormous piece of public art, a steel and glass tower 400 metres in height. This rotating twin helix was to contain, among other things, a projector which cast messages onto the clouds on dull days.

Naum Gabo, Constructivism’s founder, told Tatlin, ‘either create functional houses or bridges, or create pure art. Not both.’ No understanding of the importance of the art inherent in architecture there! Gabo wouldn’t have liked the Pier Arts centre, which Finlay makes a nod to, describing the ‘knit between old and new’ as a useful way to approach his philosophy.

The tower was never built. Russia hadn’t enough steel anyway. But the story sticks with me as I listen to Finlay’s arresting and eloquent outline of his position with regard to the spatial and material qualities of windmills two centuries older than those Constable painted, and yet perhaps not that different, in terms of their technocological impact. Just much much bigger.

Another Futurist offshoot, from 1929, were a group who called themselves aeropainters. Their manifesto says: ‘the changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing to do with the reality constituted by a terrestrial perspective. ‘They were energised by planes, and the new views they provided. (How they would have responded to 9/11 would have been interesting.) This passionate engagement with what’s unfamiliar yet here to stay rings a bell too.

The unity of form and function windmills exemplify, in Finlay’s view, make them public art of the highest order. If the artist has a task, it would be to cross the bridge between science and the arts by interacting with ‘the thing itself, the form,’ and simply seeing what comes out of that creative process. Nothing is ruled out; it’s like playing; but what results is a rollercoaster of ideas.

He calls it ‘engaging with culture’ and the sense of wonder and enthusiasm is catching. He compares windmills to standing stones – they’re verticals which combine cutting edge technology with a purpose – to be conductors of ideas and values for their societies.

The strength of his argument lies in his commitment to accommodating the new, and the dynamic way he encourages us to do so as well. When he says George Mackay Brown described the islands as whales, and then speculates whether a wind farmed landscape here might be more like a porcupine, I laugh, because it’s what I think.

I like the whale shape and I don’t want lots of these prickly things disturbing the line of my land. But then I realise that all he’s doing is trying to shift our perception a bit. He’s not making an adverse comment, he’s playing with an idea. He might even quite like porcupines (and then I’m off on a track about poor misrepresented porcupines, just because they’re prickly, another story, but it describes how this man encourages you to think laterally.) [and while you may see a whale around Orkney’s shores in the natural ord r of things, a porcupine would be an alien invader – Ed.]

A windmill is a ‘contested object’ and that interests him. It’s also the ‘most imposing public sculpture in the world.’ Here again we see his indentification of beauty and function – the Arts and Crafts movement comes to my mind now. The ‘Angel of the North’ is wonderful; but it’s purely symbolic. A windmill can be beautiful and work, can give something practical back.

The poetry he paints on windmill blades has a profound simplicity – imagine watching the circle poem:

‘turning
toward
living’

endlessly reinventing itself. Or:

‘someone calling:
someone coming:
someone waiting.’

He has also been experimenting with colour, being ‘speculative.’ This is more dangerous ground, I think. He shows us a ducky little set of turbines at the Earth Centre in Doncaster. They look like seaside lollipops, all stripy and shiny. We see some pretty Danish ones. They are a world away from the forest of white on the Caithness peat. I meditate on the crucial difference between a single mill on the end of a croft – and a concrete-based farm of them, feeding the National Grid, on a populous island with few empty spaces and lots of vulnerable peat, mosses, birds. In a World Heritage Site.

I see the enthusiasm he has for ‘a painting that turns’, but I remember those sick-making cardboard spinners we had as children – you pull the string and the circle of colours melds into a blur. I don’t know Damien Hirst’s spin paintings but I bet they might be nausea inducing. Aeropainting surfaces again – he’s been thinking about how turbines might be seen, from above and below, if they were in colour.

The designs he shows are very Op Art, though there is a nice leafy one and a blue one which reminds me of those ornaments with melting wax in them which make globules of colour, constantly changing. But then he says : ‘what would it mean to use colour on small domestic windmills? Could you go down and choose one from B & Q?’

This really disturbs me. Capitalism is not famous for its taste. Remember when Maggie Thatcher draped her scarf over the new tail decoration for the B A planes? He doesn’t mention customisation – but I’m sure wouldn’t be against it, since he believes I think in art being free expression – but that could lead to windmills in Millwall strips and Elvis tribute windmills… perhaps that’s OK?

Garden gnomes I have developed an exasperated affection for – but something higher up on the sightlines? Then there’d have to be new planning laws about offensive windmills, racially, sexually or politically objectionable ones… the mind boggles. Finlay says it’s ‘a natural market development, that a fashion element will come in.’

Someone mentions logos. ‘Well yes’ he says. I hadn’t even thought of that. Calm down dear, I think, it’s only a commercial. Then I think what a snob I am. If they’re here to stay then people will customise them, as they customise mobiles and cars and everything mass-produced. Then I think, no, I’m not a snob. But I have to think about why I’m not. It has to do I think with the enormous presence these turbines have. Yes, they’re sublime. I like them, in empty open places, in Holland for example, or along the Baltic coast. But on a wee island? And coloured, on a wee island?

It’s a most thought-provoking interesting, intelligent disarmingly self-deprecating presentation. What it doesn’t in any way do is address the debate outlined in the post-talk discussion, over who owns Orkney windfarms, how many windmills are appropriate, if any, what size they are, what proportion of revenue they generate for us or what they do to the Neolithic outlines of the whale – land.

That’s for us to fight about. Finlay has his own ideas about community-owned, environmentally-pleasing structures, which work, are beautiful and liked, indeed, treasured. They might carry poems, or whine or whirr or sing or riot with colour – one design is a giant sunflower. That’s his task – to open us to the creative possibilities, to illuminate the debate from another angle. He certainly succeeds.

But the argument is still ours, and it’s a contentious one. We are some way away from commissioning a sunflower and certainly don’t want a bunch. Investment in marine technology might be a better way to go. Speculative, not community development is risky, since it may alienate those who have to embrace the upheaval in their sightlines. If we go down the windmill route, Finlay will be there, I’m sure, to make artwork inside science, make poetry out of technology.

He says they’re here in the world to stay. If the issue of ownership is balanced so that local people feel it is their own investment, the way is open, he says, for exciting developments.

I go out thinking about Edward Lear’s poem ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose.’ It’s about the invention which rocked early Victorian society – the train.

‘A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal black night –
A meteor strange and bright.’

The windmills seem to me to be as lonely, silvery and strange as those trains seemed then. We’re used to trains now. But there are none in Orkney. Small spaces can get very crowded.

Skying was hosted by Porteous Brae Gallery at the Pier Arts Centre, and sponsored by a number of local firms and public bodies: AJB Scholes; Aquatera; Scotrenewables Ltd; James Wilson (Orkney) Ltd; Orkney Today; Orkney Islands Council; HI~Arts. A video stream of the lecture will be available on Northings shortly.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Alec Finlay
• Porteous Brae Gallery
• Pier Arts Centre

Gunnie Moberg

THE UNTIMELY death of this beautiful, gifted woman shocked the three island groups she loved. Everyone had assumed that Gunnie would always be around capturing the images we sometimes saw ourselves but did nothing about; that she would always be stopping an airport bus to snap an archaeological site buried in blue plastic and black tyres, or hiring a plane to turn the Stromness harbour line, or Skara Brae, into intricate, unexpected sky geometry.

Her last exhibition has come home to the Pier, a little depleted – originally there were 60 works but many have been sold. On 19 July there will be a Gunnie Day, where folk are encouraged to bring mementoes which celebrate her life and art.

Mine will be a picture by my father, Orcadian marine artist Ian MacInnes. Once he was painting a steep close, on a hot summer day, and Gunnie came and complimented the work-in-progress. She said she had always wanted to paint, like her mother, but couldn’t somehow feel satisfied with what she produced.

My father pointed to the brutally modern handrail bisecting the flagstones, mathematically central, out of kilter with the Mediterranean colours and ramshackle 18th century houses. “The great thing about painting,” he said, “is that I can leave out what I like” (he was essentially a Romantic – and the handrail is not in the finished picture).

Gunnie looked, particularly at the pattern the shadows cast by the rail were making, the black on the ochre sandstone. “I could do something with that,” she said.

There you have it in a nutshell. Gunnie was a Classicist; what was there was what you represented, with elegance, wit, and impeccable technique. But what she saw was not what others noticed, and often what others saw and then discarded. She had an inspired eye.

When she was asked about how she approached the task of choosing the pictures which were to be hung in the Scottish Parliament, she said she wanted “simple statements of place, closely observed details that would be immediately recognisable to Orcadians and Shetlanders.” Another nutshell. There is nothing pretentious about Gunnie’s photography, and therein lies its strength.

I’m drawn first of all to her signature – stylish, a confident curl of the ‘e’, a Swedish ‘g’ neatly stroked across. It has her clear blonde gaze written all over it. Just the first name, too – that intimacy says a lot. Then to the work. She finds beauty in the most unexpected things – ‘Talc from a quarry in Unst’ is a symphony of grey and white textures. There’s a sense of deep stillness – a world away from the gritty dusty quarry world we expect to see.

In contrast, ‘Sand Dune, Sanday’, which one might find a predictable subject, turns out to look just like an ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s selection – vanilla and chocolate chip, I rather think. Never thought I’d see coarse marram grass and think of seaside treats.

In ‘Curing Sheepskins Aith’ there’s a pebble dashed hut with (probably) an asbestos roof, and a line of framed sheepskins, three white, the last one moorit. The more you look, the more drawn in you are by the dance of shapes – the hard wood, the stretched wool – and the clash of textures, stone against softness. In the car, driving by, you’d have just thought – Oh, they’re curing, and driven on. Gunnie stopped.

She doesn’t shy from the controversial. ‘Grindadrap, Famjin, Faroe’ has men knee deep in a bloody sea, curiously arrested in heroic positions like figures on a Greek vase. The slaughter of the whales doesn’t seem frenetic, but curiously inevitable. It reminded me of Breugel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’.

George Mackay Brown, who owed Gunnie a great debt – she was a staunch friend, but more than that, she helped the agoraphobic poet travel – would have approved of this rendering into the heraldic and mythic of an ancient tradition.

Meditations on time surface again and again, poignantly now. Her ‘Bronze age trough quern’, squatting centrally, unexpectedly looks like a brooch; look again and there are two neat daisies, symmetrical as tin tacks, pinning the picture to the wall on each side.

‘Maeshowe, chambered cairn’ is typically unexpected – no picture postcard stuff here. The wind has shifted the crop, and it dominates the landscape, making you think about settlement and sustenance, long patterns of habitation. In the distance, the burial mound sits, as it always has, regarding generations of farmers.

‘Stone Wave, Gjugr Faroe’ – black and white and all the more powerful for it – reminds me of Victorian images of St Kilda or Lyme Regis. There’s a man poised, standing, to give a sense of scale perhaps, who looks for all the world like an early palaeontologist regarding this incredible rock formation, the beautiful sweep of it.

The best Classical art, ironically I suppose, does what Wordsworth says – it gives us emotion recollected in tranquillity. Photography is art, no doubt about it; and this beautiful meditation, caught on a misty cold day, with the stone wave curling as if it’s about to crash and break into foam, is haunting, elegant, sad.

Two ‘St Magnus kirks’ – the one in Egilsay, from the air, casts a long shadow which looks for all the world like the outline of her bigger sister, in Kirkwall. Lemon stone tower, snaking white fences – it’s startling. As for the much photographed Orkney cathedral – who could have more to say about that? But she does. She points out patterns, patterns, like knitting. By focusing on the rise of the roof, she gets the essence of the place – that it’s massive, and yet light, full of quiet space.

There’s the fragility of Outskerries salmon nets; the sweep of a Faroese kirk roof in front of a waterfall; positively noirish vertical and horizontal shadows at a boat station – not to mention the proud plaited ribbons on a horse’s arse.

There’s a midsummer cow from Sandness in Shetland rising out of a mist. Best of all, there’s Buttercup. ‘It is me, Buttercup, going to a wedding dance’, we are told, and there indeed is the soft big cow, that big-eyed head and dainty feet. Mary Fraser is all dressed up, with her corsage, hat and veil, invite in pocket, an inadvisable necklace and her best shoes.

But, in all the stramash of prettying herself up, she has forgotten to feed Buttercup. The animal noses her shoes, for all the world saying, whit on earth is du dressed up lik dat fur? Whar’s de wellies? It’s a perfect picture, full of stories, serendipitously caught.

No – serendipitous is wrong. It was lucky, maybe. But Gunnie had the eye to catch it and keep it. What a pity we couldn’t have kept her a bit longer to catch more things in our islands for us, show us things we walked past and never noticed.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

Ash Island

THIS EXHIBITION, or bits of it, has been touring since 2004; it’s been to Lisbon, Dieppe, and, more prosaically perhaps, Plymouth. But it hasn’t been shown on an island till now. Interesting, because it’s all about islands, apparently. The erudite and reverential intro to the catalogue tells us an island is ‘a bounded region which can isolate but also insulate its inhabitants.’

So – can we expect a Donne like metaphorical meditation on our common humanity? Ooh! Then – ‘all of the titles refer to British and Irish islands (although one is actually a peninsula)’. Wot? It’s not an island then, is it? And then – ‘Woodrow and Deacon never intended to associate the sculptures with these particular places: the titles were designated en route after they were made.’

Oh. Imagined islands, then. Names shoved on after. Made of lead, timber – some of it Tudor – and glass. I’m glad I headed, instinctively, to the beautiful open gallery where the sea feels as if it’s inside the room. The steady natural Orkney light bathes the sculptures, and makes it a pleasure to pick out details and textures.

‘Rough Island’ has a battle-scarred look, and the colour and weight of the lead doesn’t lend itself to levity. I find myself smiling, though – there’s a thing like a canoe with feet and great big paddles; above that a sail/flower object, mounted on what looks either like a gun casing or a tom tom. It makes me think of Easter Island, and ’50s filmic renditions of happy native peoples in grass skirts.

I recall the long explanation of the importance of lead to medieval folk, the directions towards Primo Levi, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De Proprietatibus Rerum, Mandeville’s Travels and other such worthy tomes, in Dr Stacy Boldrick’s catalogue notes, and think – no , Stacy. These guys are havin’ a laugh.

Three works called (en route!) Isle of Man are, honestly, sweet. The old wood supports lead stories on wobbly legs, sometimes hooved with bark. There’s a clear medieval theme – masons’ marks etched in the wood, figures caught in a calendar of activities, like ‘Les Tres Riche Heures’ – a couple in mid-saw cut, a hammer about to fall, a wine press twisting.

‘Man 11′ has a holed and punctured lead wood with deer and a dead man; his murderer still had the sword raised. I’m reminded of the Britains’ lead animals I had as a child, and I love the suspended morality tale being told. ‘Man 111′ is a simple memento mori – a wood cutter on one side, his skeleton cut down on the other. The medieval preoccupation with death was really grim acceptance of the ‘skull beneath the skin’ and in this sculpture there’s a suggestion that, whatever happens to man, the wood , the tree survives.

That’s medieval too, as you can see in any cathedral – that lingering sense, cut into stone or choir, of something magical and pagan, to do with oak and ash and rowan, flowering and seeding. In The Hidden Landscape, Simon Schama describes the persistence of Europe’s relationship with woodland, and the Green men, the naturals and innocents who inhabit it. There are echoes of all that here, and the exhibition began in Wiltshire, home to many a Druidical musing.

So far so nice. Islands certainly – and a fine play on words – Isle of Man. ‘Bait Island’ and ‘Ash Island’ investigate eels – another iconic symbol, best deployed by Gunther Grass in his meditations on German history and myth – resonating in Orcadian folk myth as the Stoorie Worm, a dragon-demon. There’s something annoying about how real and yet lumpish these lead eels look, and the netting draped about looks tricksy. Maybe this is because, on a real island, real eels and real nets are not obliging and do not inhabit the world of myth.

It’s the next room and I’m flagging. There’s a whole series of islands sitting on three lead legs. They look like camera tripods, or those monsters out of The War of the Worlds, and they’ve all got minotaurs on them pointing up to constellations of lead pocked through wood, sometimes in cruciform shape. How did the Greeks get in here?

There’s also a telescope theme going on – ‘Brownsea Island’ has one with a frog on it; and, of course, a compass. ‘Black Isle’, which is mounted on a tom tom with a bit of twine round it, and a lot of very visible caulking material (this would give the folk on the Black Isle a jolt), has a skull looking through one. The glass distorts the image in a clever way; illusion and reality, Gods and no Gods, perhaps. But it’s getting a bit samey.

The physicality of sculpture is always the great thing, and this exhibition doesn’t disappoint. The wood is marked and pencilled and grooved by time, ‘Amber Glass’ is a smooth shock after the coruscated leadwork. Lead itself forms plasticine shapes I’d never thought of, and had made me think in a whole new way about flashing.

The collaboration was a fruitful exercise for these two vastly experiences makers. I did come out, though, thinking that there’s too much grand seriousness about the art world; maybe, like the story of the Emperor’s Clothes, so aptly summed up by Danny Kaye as ‘the King is in his altogether…’ Woodrow and Deacon are having us all on.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

Pier Arts Centre

Rough Seas, etching - Sue Jane Taylor

SINCE it first opened in Aberdeen’s Maritime Museum in 2005, Sue Jane Taylor’s exhibition ‘Oilwork – North Sea Diaries’ has toured the country. The final venue before some of the work goes on permanent display in the new 20th Century Gallery at the National Museum of Scotland in July is the recently extended and renovated Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.

Orkney is a fitting venue for Taylor’s work, not least because of the islands’ role in the Scottish oil industry – the nearby oil installation at Flotta has been an important part of Orkney life for over thirty years. But the oil industry, by popular consent, is now in decline, and many of the fabrication yards and other sites associated with the industry are now, almost incredibly, part of our industrial heritage – forgotten, dismantled, and redundant.

Taylor’s involvement with documenting this vastly important industry began over twenty years ago when she travelled on a supply vessel serving the oil platforms in the North Sea. As her fascination with the industry grew she documented the life and work of places such Kishhorn, Invergordon, Nigg, Ardersier and the UIE construction yard in Clydebank, as well as venturing to various offshore platforms including Piper Alpha, which was destroyed by fire in 1988 with the loss of 167 lives. Taylor seemed the obvious choice when a memorial to those who died in the Piper Alpha disaster was commissioned and her sculpture, in Aberdeen, is a fitting tribute to those who died.

Whatever your views are on the oil industry, there’s little doubt that Taylor’s work as an artist takes its rightful place in the long historical fascination of British artists for industry and engineering. The work of Muirhead Bone, Stanley Spencer and Steven Campbell are just three examples of artists working in this tradition.

This show, which represents a small selection of work from the original exhibition, gives an insight into Taylor’s working methods and includes notebooks, sketches and maquettes as well as a number of etchings and pencil drawings. Taylor is fascinated by structures and the human figure, and her skill in depicting both is self evident. The colour etching, Rigger, completed in 1987, is an image which tends to stay in the mind; it is generic as well as specific and shows a noble, hooded, moustachioed figure in a safety suit. The figure resonates with a kind of heroic glory and is indeed a testament to the bravery and endurance of the men who work in extreme conditions to bring back the ‘black gold’.

‘Looking up at Santa Fe 140′, another colour etching, from 1984, shows Taylor’s interest in the massive, ingenious engineered structures built in the fabrication yards around the Scottish coast. The odd perspective of the study, seen from below and slightly askew, adds to the sense of this as an imposing and slightly threatening structure. Like most of Taylor’s images, it’s big, bold and confident in its lines and execution. As if to counter-balance this sense of monumentality, there is a smaller, quieter image here, easy to miss on the stairwell. ‘Offshore Flower’, from 2005, is an abstracted image – a spiral, a vortex and pattern somewhere between the organic and the man-made.

Elsewhere in this small collection of work there are other images of the men whom Taylor photographed and drew in her extensive periods of study of the oil industry. These images combine the literal and the metaphoric. One, ‘The Oilman and the Stag’, from 1989, shows man and nature not only pitted in opposition but also connected by some mystical bond. The stag and the tree, symbolic of nature and its fragility, are juxtaposed with the image of the ‘oil man’ clutching a knife which he has used to kill the stag.

The image, which alludes in part to the ground-breaking play ‘The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil’ by John McGrath which toured Scotland in the 1970s, is therefore freighted with emotional and political sentiment. Its companion piece, ‘Oilworker’, from the same year again depicts the juxtapostion of man and nature. The symbolic ‘oil worker’ holds a bird and fish while in his right hand he proffers a spiral of black gold. At his feet a delicate flower awaits his crushing boot.

Such allegories, although easily decipherable, are powerful statements and testify to Taylor’s compassion, not only for the men who are merely small, dispensible cogs in the machinery of big business but also for nature, the perennial victim in humanity’s need for wealth, fuel and power.

© Giles Sutherland, 2008

Links

• Sue Jane Taylor
• Pier Arts Centre

Work by Colin Johnstone

I DON’T know much about the system of booking exhibitions, but do suspect that the essence of a good gallery experience is variety. The Pier have provided this in spades; upstairs we see 20 years of the oil industry’s impact on Orkney, big gutsy lusty images by Sue Jane Taylor; downstairs Colin Johnstone takes is on a metaphysical journey into the meaning of identity, and what happens when it’s lost.

It’s entirely appropriate that the title of this exhibition comes from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and the artist’s memory of a skull, a memento mori. There is something very Flemish and visceral about Johnstone’s take on death – he has looked at Van der Weyden, Grunevalt, Bosch, and like them, fills his work with texts, mottoes and proverbs, to help us understand why things go wrong, what sadness is like.

‘Jacob and his twelve sons’ combines the most delicate lettering with the texture of wood, spotted and stained; each son’s plaque, or tombstone, or coffin has a different shape, bent or holed or worked somehow, like the shapes the world carves out for us.

Three meditations on bravery in the face of tragedy, ‘Thus I strove to keep my heart above the water of fear’, compels the viewer, pulling you into a narrative that’s only half explained – the bosun’s whistle, beautifully worked and bravely centred, like a dragonfly, that delicate; the kit bag, its coarse fabric contrasting with the delicate creamy colour of its folds and seams – and the words, almost disappearing into the textured canvas – Drifting, Drowning, In the Sun.

The palette is cool – mauves fading to whites – for such angry work, but that only makes the sudden splashes of red, or shiny green varnish, more interesting; the words provide a physicality that can be really evocative – we feel the deer’s ‘little antlers’, empathise with the meditation on illness and loss etched on old 78 records – lots of metaphors going on there, about repetition and remembered snatches of a life – ‘Her last injection will be the good one…my mother’s orchid skin…a dressing soaked in water.’

There’s a spiritual iconography going on – Catholic kitsch features, a deposition in gaudy colours – but there’s also a great deal of gentle humour. You can see a jaunty Edwardian jockey – and then the ghost of a jockey cap , and you will know that’s exactly what one would look like! There is Kamikaze cherry blossom – flowers, we’re told, turn people’s blood crazy – and there are two spinning tops, garish 50s efforts which take you right back to seaside shops and sand pails – but they’re trapped in glass.

Still, they inhabite an organic life – they’ve got fungus sprouting from them. Moths, butterflies, clowns, childrens’ cautionary tales cover the walls, marred by blots, or holes – Jenny Wren! The little girl who beat her sister! Everything erodes, or changes form over time, in one way or another; there are transformations everywhere.

The artist is a romantic, hung up on the power of tales; and yet, he’s a northerner, toning everything down, controlling excess, delineating precisely. ‘Poor Icarus’ deserves serious contemplation; beautifully situated with the gallery’s natural light falling on it and the sea moving outside, it tells you what it’s like to be grounded. Johnstone has learned well the lesson that less is more; simple is profound.

The exhibition is his first in Orkney, though he has worked here for twenty years.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

visualarts

ALISTAIR PEEBLES completes his two-part celebration of the re-opened Piers Arts Centre in Stromness

SIX MONTHS later – and a whole year nearer the Pier’s thirtieth anniversary – it’s time at last for Part 2: a glance back again to the reopening of the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, and its first, meticulously curated exhibition, A North Light: Cynosure. As you’ll remember, we were all caught up in the mid-point of the event, a wondering, happy crowd on a balmy northern evening, poised together on the brink of departure, discovery, delight.

We were about to discover also, from Senan Kelleher, Casey Construction’s Project Manager, what the redevelopment process had meant to himself and to the firm. We were studying the notes of the opening speeches to find out what it all meant to the Pier’s Board, and the Director. We were gathering press releases and some reviews, and then suddenly it was Christmas…

In the meantime, there have been two major attractions at the gallery: A North Light, as I mentioned, and A Winter Festival, featuring more than 200 pieces of work by Orkney artists, which has just concluded. There have been satellite displays, including Consequences by Christil Trumpet, Ferry Loupers by postgraduate students at ECA, and a show of work by Rebecca Marr from her Art & Agriculture Residency.

There have been readings, conferences, lectures, tours, outreach activities, mentoring sessions and workshops. There has been much going on behind the scenes as well as in the public arena, and there have been awards: the Scottish Museums Council’s Recognition Scheme being one of the earliest to make an impression in the Pier’s new life.

Ingenuity, enthusiasm, determination and, not least, a high level of technical skill, were the qualities quite evident in all parties involved in the construction process

Doubtless we’ll hear of more in time to come, but in November another major prize came the Pier’s way, when the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland Andrew Doolan Best Building in Scotland Award 2007 was presented to Reiach and Hall, the architects of the new Pier. At £25,000, it’s the biggest cash award in British Architecture. “The jury was particularly impressed with The Pier Arts Centre,” said Douglas Read, a jury member, “because of the seemingly effortless way in which the new gallery has been settled in beside its neighbours as an integral part of the townscape.”

What did they say at the time of the opening? They were right on track. Neil Gillespie, design director of Reiach and Hall, led the team. “The project for the Pier Arts Centre is one of those ‘once in a career’ buildings,” he said. “The site, client and collection are very special. Our intention from the start of the project was to attempt to realise a building that grounded itself in the town, creating a form that while being somehow familiar, also clearly expressed a contemporary ambition and confidence.”

Richard Calvocoressi: “The refurbished and enlarged Pier Arts Centre, filled with light and with views to the harbour and sea at every turn, promises to set a standard in the cultural life of Orkney that will be hard to rival – a worthy home for Margaret Gardiner’s collection and for the ambitious programme of acquisitions and exhibitions that will attract visitors not once but many times.”

Amanda Catto, Head of Visual Arts at the Scottish Arts Council: “The Scottish Arts Council’s vision is for Scotland to continue to be recognised as a centre of excellence in and for the visual arts, nationally and internationally. The development of the Pier Arts Centre will make a significant contribution to this vision, offering many more people the opportunity to engage with art of the highest quality and providing artists with a unique setting for the presentation of their work.”

Colin McLean, the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Manager for Scotland: “This project has cleverly combined the old with the new to create a dynamic and contemporary setting worthy of its fantastic collection of British art. It now has universal appeal, which is sure to make it popular with schoolchildren, families and visitors from overseas. The Heritage Lottery Fund congratulates the Pier Arts Centre on its transformation. Orkney can be justly proud of this impressive showcase for one of Scotland’s outstanding art collections.”

Neil Firth, Director of the Pier Arts Centre: “From the outside, the building is strikingly modern, but it sits comfortably in the midst of Stromness’ unique street and seafront buildings that appear to have grown almost organically. The real magic is when you step inside – the art and the harbour environment combine and complement each other to provide a charming effect.”

The sense of agreement in all these views is striking, and it’s been evident time and again over the summer as visitors I’ve met have described their reactions to the new building. One of the main comments is how effectively the exterior and the interior are made to play off against each other architecturally. This was also noted in Part 1. What became more clearly apparent over the months was how effectively the art is made to play off its architectural setting and its locale, and how much is gained from this. It’s a knack that the gallery staff have, of getting everything in exactly the right place, for the right reasons.

One of my favourite examples of the correspondences they were able to evoke by their use of layout and setting (I mentioned the Camilla Løw last time) was the juxtaposition of Callum Innes’s Exposed Painting, Deep Violet, Charcoal Black, seen side on, with the harbour basin beyond the window to its left. The side-lit striations of paint brought a sense of the water’s space indoors. The outside, in turn, was “exposed” by the painting: made deep violet, charcoal black. (This with the Merlin II, you remember, hitting on 4+4 upstairs in its curvilinear yellow and turquoise.)

Another more obvious but very important correspondence was created between the cardboard column-sculpture Stackwork by Lesley Foxcroft and the nearby concrete pillars. The Helmut Federle drawing in the same area of the gallery had been referenced in the architects’ rationale, just as Ackling and Robertsdottir upstairs had informed the structure of the building itself. Altogether the more you looked, the more the entire experience – of space and light, exterior and interior, structure and content – made, as it continues to make, an endlessly pleasing whole that’s at least as great as the sum of its parts.

The idea of correspondence operated at every level in the opening exhibition: in the relationship between past and present for example. The Naum Gabo sculpture in the Pier collection, Linear Construction No. 1, and Stadium (Concept V) by young Orcadian painter Steven MacIver; the painting by the late Ian MacInnes juxtaposed with works by Anne Bevan and Colin Johnstone; Sylvia Wishart’s lovely drawings that depict archetypes of the Orkney landscape, catching form, movement and rest in an unending airy dance; Lawrence Weiner’s texts and their own material counterpart, ageless beyond the glass; Christine Borland’s family tree in silver, agate and gravity.

The title, cynosure, is full of this kind of suggestion, implying that the gallery itself is star-like, while also referencing the many stars and skies it contains: in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Colin Kirkpatrick, Rebecca Marr, Mary Newcomb, and inverted, simultaneously near and far, in Alison Watt’s Dark Light. And a north light: the gallery as a guide: a good, reliable, stable thing.

Some Swiss visitors I met were far more impressed with the new Pier Arts Centre than their own much-celebrated new galleries. Partly this was because of the matchless way the interior relates to the exterior, visually. How many galleries in the world can function in this way? In Scotland, Inverleith House comes to mind, but no others. The Pier has always worked thus: its many coigns and sightlines suit the character of the collection, the setting and the integrating genius of the place very well indeed.

Ingenuity, enthusiasm, determination and, not least, a high level of technical skill, were the qualities quite evident in all parties involved in the construction process. As well as the many thanks to individuals that were included in the opening speech made by Board of Trustees Chairman Bob Shaw last July, and as well as the observations made by Neil Firth on the opening exhibition, both made reference to the way in which everyone involved in the project had aligned themselves very productively together, making what Neil Firth described as a “constellation”.

Though he has since left the firm to take up a post in Glasgow, Senan Kelleher was project manager for Casey Construction for thirteen years, and this particular project was a real high point in his career. “Paddy Casey and I were delighted,” he remembered. “It was a landmark project in Stromness and to be at the forefront of that, from the construction point of view, was great. Then, trying to work out how to do it. A lot of the ingenuity was Paddy’s, of course, finding simple solutions to complex problems.”

Bob Shaw made reference in his speech to the elegance of the crane the company brought in to the pier area, and of course the infilling of the harbour basin. Many remember the “super trolley”, dreamed up by Paddy, for the efficient removal and transportation of Barbara Hepworth’s Curved Form (Treveglan), as the building project got underway in 2004. A simpler framework of bolts, wheels and angle iron could not have been imagined, around the priceless bronze and its Portland stone plinth.

“An understanding of the complexity,” Kelleher continues, “and a readiness to meet the challenge of making it a success were very apparent from the start, and shared by the whole design team. My over-riding memory was of the energy and effort that the whole team put into it. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience: I’ve never been part of a project where that level of cooperation has persisted throughout the whole period.”

And as far as Orkney is concerned, he says that the project has established a benchmark in its own right, irrespective of the standards of existing architecture, that demonstrates the rich resource of talent that exists in Orkney today. At the end of the summer, Reiach and Hall returned in force, when a coach arrived bearing the whole office, on an outing to visit the gallery and celebrate its success. One architect I met on the stairs ran her hand down the wooden railing, and looked round at the panelling and concrete work adjacent. “The workmanship is incredible,” she said. “You’d be very lucky to get anything like this on a project on the mainland.”

The long term challenge, continued Kelleher, is to make architects aware of what’s possible here. “A tough act to follow,” as he says, but I’ll conclude with Bob Shaw’s words summing up his thoughts on the opening, and on what makes the pursuit of this kind of excellence here so worthwhile.

“George Mackay Brown, who loved the Pier, described Orkney as a place of order: a place of remembrance and a place of vision. Margaret Gardiner’s refurbished Pier Arts Centre…reflects exactly that description, as it sits here in GMB’s Stromness, rooted in the Orkney landscape and in Orkney’s heart. The architecture of the new pays honour to the style and accomplishment of the old, while making its own statement of vision for a long and rewarding future.”

© Alistair Peebles, 2008

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Reiach & Hall Architects

ALISTAIR PEEBLES reflects on the re-opening of the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness

I’VE READ somewhere that it takes about 48 hours to get to know a place well enough to feel you’ve found your bearings. Having been in and around the regenerating Pier Arts Centre for some months, to take photographs for the most part, I had begun to feel I’d got to know it again, following its two-year closure.

Then came the Opening, and it seemed immediately to have become new territory. I know many people that evening experienced a similar feeling, amongst others I’m sure.

It may not have been their first time inside the new building – refurbished and extended spectacularly, and comfortably within its £4.5 million budget – and they could probably remember very well the previous Pier – what’s now the “old part” of the gallery – but all were suddenly in a place that was full of people – and full of possibility. It was no longer an idea but a building in use. It was connected to the world.

And it was packed – about 600 invitations had been issued, each accompanied by a commemorative medallion, stamped with the new logo and engraved with the date, 6 July 2007. Many were the stories next day of friends missed – in the crowd, in the corridors, on the stairways and in the lift, in the many rooms and corners, and outside on the piers – though each had been looking for the other.

Thirty cases of champagne, several hours of dancing and a lock-in doubtless helped to carry us across rather dazedly into the new Pier world, but there was no question the next day that things had changed. “It was a magical evening and that sense of surprise lasted for several days,” remembers Isla Holloway, the gallery’s retail and marketing manager. “We all felt overwhelmed by the response we were getting.”

Neil Firth is a son of the town, and when he says the county has taken the collection to its heart, he knows whereof he speaks

A month later, the visitors are very plentiful, the comments enthusiastic. 12,000 people have passed through the doors to date (6,500 in the first week). They have admired the building – in itself and in its relationship to the town, the sea and the harbour – they’ve remarked on the quality of the light in the gallery, and some (we may find this more difficult to squeeze into the visitors’ book boxes, perhaps) have left favourable remarks about the works on show – the opening exhibition, A North Light: Cynosure, and about the permanent collection, with its more recent additions.

In the 1978 publication for the first Pier Opening, The Pier Gallery, the artist Patrick Heron wrote: “The collection … will certainly come to be regarded in the near future as one of the most distinguished and perfect of the smaller selections of twentieth century art on permanent display anywhere in the world.”

And, discussing the Orkney-St Ives connections, he commented that, “St Ives was one of the seminal centres of mainstream European art. The Pier Gallery collection has become one of that mainstream’s focal displays.”

That collection’s journey around Britain during the Pier’s period of closure, to Tate St Ives, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery and Aberdeen City Art Gallery has brought it to a wider audience, obviously, but it’s been interesting to hear comments, from time to time, about how differently the works look in those different locations – generally to the effect that they seem much more at home in Stromness.

Their space in the Pier Gallery was designed in the 1970s by Kate Heron and Axel Burrough, and it has been left by the architects for the regeneration project, Reiach and Hall of Edinburgh, looking almost indistinguishable from the original.

I’ll get on later to the design and construction of the present building (and it is all one building now, all joined up – and the joins are as good and interesting as everything else about it), but first I’ll take the chance to emphasise how right Patrick Heron was, thirty years ago, and indeed how inspired and generous a collector was Margaret Gardiner.

Only six weeks ago, at the end of June, the announcement was made in Glasgow by the Minister for Culture, Linda Fabiani, that the Pier had been one of ten national museums successful in the first round of the Executive’s Recognition Scheme, a programme designed to “help to make sure that these important collections are identified, cared for, protected and promoted to a wider audience.”

Douglas Connell, Chair of the Recognition Committee, said, “To achieve Recognition status, the applicants had to demonstrate the uniqueness, authenticity, comprehensiveness, and national value of their collection. This first round announcement highlights the wonderful diversity of Scotland’s collections and we are confident the scheme is recognising the best the country has to offer.”

Neil Firth, Director of the Pier Arts Centre commented in response, “The Pier Arts Centre is thrilled to receive this national recognition… Our small collection of Modern art is a gem that Orkney has taken to its heart since the museum opened… It is perfectly at home in its island setting – something that Margaret Gardiner, the founder of the gallery and donor of the collection, knew intuitively would work.

“As an independent museum this recognition will help us reach out to new audiences and to promote the benefits of engagement with our artistic heritage. The award of this new status for our collection will also strengthen our case in approaching public sources of funding and demonstrate the social and economic importance of significant cultural assets that are held outwith Scotland’s main centres of population.”

As the terms of the award observe, the Pier’s collection has grown steadily since 1978. The original collection, given in trust to Orkney by Margaret Gardiner, contained 67 works. It now numbers 116, grouped around the central idea of Modernism, spanning the period from 1929 to the present day. “Most recently, work by internationally acclaimed contemporary artists, including Sean Scully and Olafur Eliasson, has been acquired, adding new depth to the historic core of the collection.”

Neil Firth is a son of the town, and when he says the county has taken the collection to its heart, he knows whereof he speaks. In that connection, it was very interesting to observe at public meetings held in early spring this year in Stromness, about its future needs as regards civic regeneration, how readily the example of the Pier Arts Centre – the building, primarily, of course, but that’s only there because the collection lies at its heart – was referred to as an model of architectural vision and as a seedbed for economic growth.

It will be interesting to see how differently the town looks in thirty years, though if the Pier development is taken as an example, and bearing in mind the imaginative doggedness that seems to be part of the spirit of Orkney’s “second” town, it will be no less interesting to see at the same time how similar it is.

For that’s what you get in the new Pier Arts Centre. It manages, in an exemplary manner, to be both the same and quite different. I can remember a comment that Exhibitions Officer Andrew Parkinson reported the architects as having made a couple of years ago, that following the work, the gallery should look essentially as though it had only been given “a lick of paint”. Clearly they understood the importance of what was there already, and felt the need to preserve it as strongly as the corresponding need to make it new.

There were various factors that had to be taken into account – the location above all, in every sense – visual, geographical, historical, cultural, architectural; the domestic quality of the original collection and its purpose-built rooms; the need for improved access to all areas of the building; contemporary requirements regarding environmental control and security; better office space for an increased complement of staff, including an education service led by Carol Dunbar, with trainee Amy Todman, and retail sales and marketing; and the growing importance of Orkney and this venue in particular as a focus for art – its creation and appreciation.

In his assessment in The Architects’ Journal of 5th July, Jonathan Woolf welcomes the building, paying careful attention to its many expressive and technical features. Better informed than most of us – of course – about its particular qualities and its relationship to the work of other architects, it’s gratifying to find that his views in general are consistent with the way most people have responded to the new place, inside and out. With immediate surprise, that is, with delight and fondness. And pride: “It’s right fine that it’s through here in Stromness.”

What Woolf says about the interior balance between the new pier gallery (it is literally on a newly-built pier) and the old pier gallery – their different character and ambience – is instructive and thought-provoking. On the one hand, we have a domestic-feeling space that subtly evokes the context in which Margaret Gardiner collected the work in the first place, and on the other, a space much more neutral and doubtless better suited to the art of today – as for example the large pieces here by Olafur Eliasson, Ragna Robertsdottir and Alison Watt.

Again on the one hand – or to turn Woolf’s metaphor of the stubby-fingered hand that is the waterfront of Stromness – on the one pier, we have a stone building that has variously been a recruiting station for the Hudson’s Bay Company and a coal shed, and on the other we have a building part glass, part black zinc that takes its aesthetic as much from the sheds and gables of the town as from the work of such artists as Robertsdottir and Roger Ackling.

Finally, while the new environmental controls that were an essential part of the impulse towards the whole redevelopment benefit both buildings – as well as the street premises – they are undeniably more obvious in the new than in the old. If you’re looking for them, that is. And if you are looking for them, then their presence might strike you a little awkwardly. However, it’s the kind of thing one can easily get used to.

I was writing these few paragraphs in a very special room, one I could easily get used to – the research room that has been created in the loft space of the new building. With fitted shelves filled with the extensive Pier collection of books, pamphlets and catalogues, this new library forms a perfect research tool for anyone with an interest in the collection, and it’s certain to be a great asset in the development of the Pier and Orkney’s potential as a location for academic study.

The old library, now named The Brenda M Robertson Room in honour of a Trustee of long standing, and a great supporter of the Gallery, has been lovingly restored to its original state, though the rest of the former house gallery interior has changed considerably. More about the street part of the premises will follow later.

So as I say I was sitting there, reading about the Pier and writing and I thought I should wander around again. What a pleasure, to check out the subject matter. Go downstairs – would the Robertsdottir lava piece still have that surprise – the almost total black that opens as you move to a white reversal of a clear Icelandic sky? Why, yes. Does Camilla Løw’s 4+4 still delight you in juxtaposition with its bobbing harbour counterpart, the Merlin III? Indeed it does.

And the soundtrack to Margaret Tait’s film, Jock MacFadyen, The Stripes in the Tartan, has it leapt from its place in the ambient Scotch groove? Not a bit of it – still dancing with those marvellous flickering figures. Around you – Eliasson’s watchful spectrum, Garry Fabian Miller’s ecliptic light drawings, Ackling’s boards of light drawn into lines of darkness; and there, and there: Sean Scully, Alan Johnston, Douglas Gordon and over the end of the corridor I Love Real Life.

There isn’t space here for a review of the whole exhibition, and I’m only mentioning these works because I’m on my way, as it were, to cross from the new gallery’s first floor to the first floor of the old part. And I’m walking I now realise through the space that I watched Neil describe one afternoon at Christmas 2004, as he faced the wall of the upstairs Pier Gallery and spread his arms to show where the aperture would at length occur.

I was going to have looked back to see what someone had mentioned to me the other day, the beautiful connecting distance between this old part and that new. I was going to have described it, but in the near distance, through a couple of those longer-established apertures in the Heron/Burroughs interior, I caught sight of Senan Kellaher, and went to speak to him instead.

Now, I’m glad I ran into Senan, because his part in this story and in the success of the whole project is fundamental, and demands to be recorded. Indeed it was mentioned, with the parts played by many other people, by Bob Shaw, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, at the Opening.

But I have Bob’s notes: they’re not easy to read, and if that’s the only record we have, we’re in trouble. So I’m going to take this chance to summarise them and briefly describe an intense, fruitful and to a large extent adventitious period in the history of construction in Orkney.

But it’s going to take a day or two – so this has to be the end of Part One. In the meantime, we’re out on the old pier on 6 July with a crowd of Pier supporters. Champagne corks are bursting in the shop-area behind us, and the air is filled with hubbub, magic and light. Bob Shaw and Neil Firth are standing side-by-side on the low wall of the little garden, about to start their speeches.

How informal, how very relaxed and optional it seems – we can hardly hear them. We move closer if we want to – behind us the corks are still exploding, the hubs are still bubbing, the magic growing momently – and soon we’re launched, and flowing together towards a new Pier, and we’re doing it in exactly the unfussy, cheerful manner we’d have been steered towards by the founding and continuing spirit of the place, Margaret Gardiner…

To be continued ….

© Alistair Peebles, 2007

Links

• Pier Arts Centre

REBECCA MARR reports on progress in an unusual artist-in-residence project in Orkney

WINKING farmers, storm-tossed seaweed, marked beasts, wind-sculpted clouds, modified hen houses and noble turnips – these are a few of my favourite things.

This year I have the privilege of working to what must be the wildest and widest of briefs. ‘Art & Agriculture’, a collaboration between two organisations who feed the county, whether it be filling bellies or firing imaginations – the Pier Arts Centre and Orkney Auction Mart makes for an interesting partnership.

Here in Orkney every life is surely touched by the farming community –the influence of agriculture shapes the landscape and narrates the history of the place. Two months into the year-long project, the conversations I’ve had, the books I’ve read and the places I’ve been to have all filtered in to a crop of ideas, and I now need to see which ones are worth harvesting.

First the winking farmers. This is part of an ongoing series of portraits of farmers displaying to camera their individual ‘bidding gestures’. One of the first things I noticed at the Mart was what I couldn’t see. The hidden, covert language of bidding was at first lost on me. I wanted to record these small, personal movements and moments.

The portraits are taken on a medium format camera on black & white film. The backgrounds of the prints are painted out in white acrylic to further the isolation and stillness of the gesture, usually made in the busy, stimulating environment of the mart mid -auction.

The main challenge is to make work that is relevant and engaging, but my immediate challenge is to make like a clucksmith (brooding hen), and sit on a clutch of the ideas to hatch them out

It became apparent (and should have been obvious) that some farmers wish their gestures to remain discreet, their bidding anonymous. So, a further series of portraits is planned, this time with the translators of the gestures – the auctioneers – showing the various nods, flicks and winks they interpret from the box.

The camera will take up their usual position looking out to the ring, and the auctioneers will occupy the farmers’ place, around the ring, making gestures to me. I can imagine what some of them might be, too.

Farmers taking part have been given single use cameras, also with black & white film, so that they can record the pride or concerns of their lives. I’m looking forward to collecting the cameras back and pulling together a show of the images at the Mart.

Learning new languages extends to the cloud portraits and skyscapes I have been obsessively collecting. Drawing on the farming knowledge of sky reading, weather predictions and folklore to provide layers of meaning will, I hope, make my cloud appreciation a wider pursuit. Working with farming families to explore Orkney words for clouds and weather and perhaps creating some new ones, this project will acknowledge the inextricable link between weather and agriculture.

Continuing this elemental journey, another project idea involves looking down, not up, and combing the beaches. Linking the 1840’s later kelp boom (for which the farmers abandoned the fields) with the invention of photography this idea explores early photographic techniques to make images of seaweed. I also hope to use iodine (the gold that was harvested from the kelp) to make some images.

Seaweed is the munch of choice for the North Ronaldsay sheep, some Shetland ponies, and is still very much used in farming today as fertiliser and feed. I’ve been eating the stuff too, and literally immersing myself in the subject. Word to the wise – if bathing in seaweed and you want to avoid boiled shrimp and crunchy snail soup, give your weed a wash before you steep it.

This project also refers to Anna Atkins’ early cyanotypes of seaweeds in the 1843 ‘Photographs of British Algae’, believed to be the first photographic book. Anna herself was believed to be the first woman photographer, although apparently Mrs Fox Talbot took a keen interest in the pioneering work of her man. I’ve been enjoying the darkroom and making tangled photograms of wracks and kelps.

Hen houses & the egg boom provide another agricultural avenue to get lost in. A trip to the musuem revealed that Orkney was the biggest egg-producing county in the UK for over fifty years. Examining the boom and the factors leading to its demise (including the devastating storm of 1952) through a photographic study of henhouses is next on my project plan.

I aim to contrast the earlier economically rewarding, large-scale industry with current smallholdings and free-range poultry keepers, possibly with audio recording of people recalling the boom.

And then there are the buses. Everywhere a bus. The pragmatic Orcadians, natural recyclers, find farmyard uses for a bus I never imagined – greenhouses, grain stores, sheds, hen houses. I fancy making a gallery full of photographs of them.
I haven’t begun to tell you of the beasts, rare breeds, native breeds, favoured breeds, reared on the sweet Orkney grass. I look forward to working with farmers to identify the specific characteristics that encourage them to maintain their breed for economic or aesthetic reasons.

One farmer talked about liking black cows in his field when discussing his breeding strategy at a recent seminar. This struck me as a peculiarly visual motivation that calls for a photograph.

There are rich pickings in the fantastic farm museums (one dedicated to early and one to later 19th century) and the superb photographic archive, especially Tom Kent’s beautiful images. If I sound giddy, I think I am.

Whether looking to the skies, looking into henhouses or looking up old Norse weather words, every day reveals something more.

The main challenge is to make work that is relevant and engaging, but my immediate challenge is to make like a clucksmith (brooding hen), and sit on a clutch of the ideas to hatch them out.

Rebecca Marr is artist in residence with Pier Arts Centre and Orkney Auction Mart

© Rebecca Marr, 2007