Painting by Symone Duddy

WHAT AN amazing treat on offer in Da Gadderie this month. Shetland Schools’ Art Exhibition is a perfect antidote to the prospect of gales, winter and Christmas shopping. Take anyone from any age group to see the show and they will surely find plenty that stands out for its quality, intrigue and style.

Emerging from the show I had the same, brilliant feeling I get from seeing an epic film; bewilderment at the richness of the work, the attention to detail, the slick production, the feeling that a huge cast and crew have devoted so much time and effort to a project that has come together with sweat and (probably) tears to make a classic that will have a lasting impact for years to come.

Highlighting work from schools throughout Shetland, from nursery children through to S6, the exhibition showcases painting, drawing, collage, design projects, three-dimensional work and animation in a packed and varied display. The broad range of techniques, materials and styles demonstrates the breadth of talent, imagination and energy from both pupils and teachers.

The whole show is tied together beautifully by the installation; no hint of the temporary fold-out display boards that characterise most school exhibitions, these young artists and their work have been given status and deference by well-framed and professionally presented work. The standards are high and the creativity is bountiful.

The Shakespearian subjects by Claire Laurenson at both entrances to the show are quite stunning; the eyes of both Lady Macbeth and Ophelia are huge and menaced and disturbing, the technique is mature and expressive and the use of colour is very alluring.

Contrast this with the lines, colours and simplicity of the pipe-cleaner fish from P2/3 children at Dunrossness and you start to get a feeling of the massive range of styles and ideas that have gone into the work on show. Imagine the heaps of interesting work that did not make it into the exhibition… .

There are myriad hints of the environment that makes Shetland a magical childhood playground and an inspirational subject; Hannah Anderson’s Ringed Plover shows great attention to detail and texture. The composition of nine weather-related images from P3 at Aith Primary is Monet-esque in its bold, expressive and energetic style.

From this wild expression to the close observation of Stephanie Wiseman’s still life compositions of The Feast – kitchen implements, reflected asparagus and folded cloth are luscious and well executed. And to Hazel Hunter’s Imaginary Bird and Emma Sandison’s Scabby Man’s Head, both small three-dimensional objects tucked away behind glass but which show such simple yet bold understanding of shape and colour, each a beautiful object.

If I have to pick a favourite from the show it is Jake Spooner’s Self Portrait, a free and explosive charcoal drawing that shows great skill in mark-making with a tricky medium that can often result in a mess. Here it is used well with a mixture of tones and lines to create a fantastic composition, striking and funny, and Jake is only in P1!

I write as someone who loved art at school. My art teacher and what he taught has dictated my entire professional life and who I am. The notion that a good teacher can change a person’s life is certainly true and I imagine that will resonate in years to come with many of those whose work is on show in Da Gadderie.

It is a fabulous exhibition full of talent, energy and promise, and, like a great film, will reveal more and more over several viewings. Go, and then go again.© Jane Matthews, 2009

Links

• Shetland Museum & Archives

From 7 minutes of Explosion. © Jeanette Sendler

OUTSIDE Shetland Museum & Archives in Lerwick, amidst the voices and music that continuously float out of a dockside sound installation, is something new.

There are a group of large rocks that weren’t there before. Across and around the rocks are carefully laid, red textiles. They are like fishing nets that have wrapped themselves around rocks after a storm.

But they are not nets. Look closer and two distinct types of red fibre, a vibrant and an earthy red, become apparent. The pieces are not made from the regular knots and holes of nets, rather these are delicate threads knitted together to form a subtle pattern.

Look through the holes at the rock underneath. You see contrast. Contrast between rock and wool, between hard and soft, between red and rock colour.

This is a taster of the art exhibition currently on show inside the building. It is entitled 7 minutes of Explosion, and is a collaboration between textile artists Barbara Ridland and Jeanette Sendler.

Enter Da Gadderie, the building’s temporary exhibition space, and you enter a room filled with structural and suspended textiles and installations. There are objects, film, sound and photographs. Not a rabble of things but rather a carefully considered placing of made and found objects that seem connected. But how are they connected?

Strict, thematic colour is evident. Grey, cream, black and red dominate. There are large constructions that hang like unrolled tongues from the ceiling and out along the floor. There are bright workman’s clothes, a hard hat or two, some tools, film, voices and photographs from the past.

But there are also elegant little felted hats and suspended garments. Small pieces of rock lovingly placed on pedestals. What connects all these things?

Titles, such as ‘Red Bing’, ‘Red Burn, Quartz’ and ‘Metamorphic’ reveal the theme for this exhibition. This exhibition is about the visual power, natural and social history of Scord Quarry, Scalloway.

In the wool and felting you now see rock strata, rips, explosions and bursts. Nature and industry, peace and explosion are worked by hand and by stitch into the textiles. Landscape, iron ore and quartz have somehow been knitted into installations, hats and jackets.

As the explanatory text tells us, “7 Minutes of Explosion is the period of time from the sounding of the quarry siren to signal that the shot is about to be fired, to the sounding of the “all clear” once it has been decided that the blast has gone well and it is safe to return into the quarry.”
However, this is just one interpretation. The title has many meanings. It can also refer to the two women’s experimental approach to felting and textiles. Ridland is an experienced local textile designer. She is acutely aware of the heritage that she comes from.

It is a long heritage of wool and stitches that she now technically breaks apart and ‘bursts’ in her work. Sendler works independently and in collaboration with Ridland. She merges ideas, often about social history, with creative machine knitting skills.
How did this collaboration start? The title could also refer to the moment that the two women met. Sendler took part in a three month Shetland Arts schools craft residency in 2005. During this time she was keen to meet someone who could teach her to knit.

At the end of her residency she was about to step on the boat to leave when she met Ridland. They had minutes to talk and it was, indeed, a creative explosion. An explosion that now binds together their passions and exploration of artistic techniques.

Ridland and Sendler went on to meet three or four times a year and exchanged skills and project ideas. This exhibition furthers our understanding of what is happening between the two women but also with the third collaborator, the quarry itself.

A film shows images and interviews. It introduces us to the two artists and people who have worked at the quarry. Personal reminiscence and creative process are shown together. Close ups of textures such as rock and tyre tracks, images of explosion and textile pieces laid down in the quarry itself reveal layer upon layer of interpretation.

Photos, gathered by quarry manager Billy Butler, are shown on a small computer screen in the gallery. We see machinery, people and nature inhabiting the quarry. There is also film footage from 1955. We see heavy work but also laughter and solidarity.

Ridland explains the importance of this to her work: “Recognition of the efforts of people like Shetland’s hand knitters and quarry workers. Stone from the quarry is used for roads which provide an essential infrastructure for local communities, and the incredible textile heritage handed down by the island women has made Shetland a knitters’ ‘Mecca’.”

In 2006, supported by Ridland, Sendler took part in two independent exhibitions in the Museum of Arts & Crafts, Itami, Japan & at the Collins Gallery in Glasgow. Pieces from both exhibitions are on show here.

These include the striking installations Moder Dy. Moder Dy is an old Shetland form of navigation that is no longer used. Fishermen found their way home through reading patterns in the waves. Their wives would estimate their husband’s return by the amount of yarn they had knitted.

Now great skeletal forms in greens and browns, inspired by the Moder Dy, hang suspended from the ceiling of Da Gadderie. We see waves and we see patterns. On the wall behind is a piece called ‘Sea Haul’, felted balls of wool are gathered up as if they have been dredged up from the bottom of the sea.

Large wall pieces such as ‘Metamorphic’ are constructed from twisted lines of wool to create delicate structures and bold areas of texture. Such pieces simultaneously convey the immensity of landscape and the minuscule detail of rock. The descriptions of the work are technical but also strangely poetic.

‘Metamorphic’ is “Mixed yarns needle punched onto Shetland and merino fabric”; ‘Red Bing’, “Hand tooled Shetland wool ns Japanese paper yarn needle punched onto Shetland fibre”.

We see the Manager’s Chair. This chair from the quarry office has a strong resonance to quarry workers to whom it is a familiar piece of furniture. It now sits in Da Gadderie with a thick felted textile draped over it. The chair’s own cracked leather surface and burst upholstery is as tactile and curious as the work on show.

Heritage, social history and men and women’s work have been carefully brought together in this exhibition. 7 Minutes of Explosion is about collaboration and connections.

As Ridland explains: “While out walking in Shetland I have always picked up and dragged home found items. Even as a child I felt that Shetland’s environment and what women hand knitted were connected.”

This exhibition continues this tradition but also bursts with new ideas and experimental techniques.

© Karen Emslie, 2008

Links

• Shetland Museum and Archives
• Jeanette Sendler
• Barbara Ridland

Clippit Cloots and Steekit Stitches

THE HUMBLE needle can, in careful hands, be used to conjure up a boundless array of creations. ‘Clippit Cloots and Steekit Stitches’ is an exhibition by the Shetland Needleworkers that demonstrates this point to fine effect.

The collection of intricate designs and bold wall hangings ooze vibrant colours, pattern and texture. The work also serves as testimony to the technical mastery of the members’ skill in fabric arts.

The Shetland Needleworkers, previously known as the Shetland Branch of the Embroiderer’s Guild, has been running for eleven years. With around thirty members in total, the group meets monthly and runs workshops, classes, talks and demonstrations on fabric arts.

It is a curious world of strange technical terms such as sashiko, stumpwork, and slipwork. Along with more familiar terms, such as appliqué and patchwork, these words form the needleworkers’ glossary.

Needlework is the term applied to decorative sewing in the textile arts. Any work that involves the use of a needle for construction can be called needlework. One of the most common forms is embroidery, the embellishment of a fabric using hand and machine needle work.

The word embroidery derives from the Anglo-Saxon word for “edge”, stemming from its use in decorative stitched borders. Now it applies to any such decoration on textile fabric and other materials.

Embroidery stitches may be functional or purely decorative. The names of the stitches, like the techniques, are intriguing to the uninitiated: chain stitch, blanket stitch, featherstitch, French knot, satin stitch, cross-stitch and tent stitch.

In this exhibition we also find patchwork and appliqué. Fabrics have been carefully layered and stitched onto one another to create exhibits such as wall hangings, blankets and padded baskets.

Historically the art of needlework has been entwined with the notion of the domestic and in this exhibition many pieces have been made as homage to the family or for functional use in the home.

For example, the gloriously bright ‘Duncan’s Memory Quilt’ by Jude Ross Smith is a large hand-pieced, hand-quilted patchwork made from scraps of fabric with sentimental value. The artists’ children helped to arrange the squares.

Likewise, ‘Hearts all a Flutter’ by Marjory Scott is a machine embroidered cot quilt, made for Marjory’s first grand-daughter. Whilst ‘Family Tree’ by Gilda Sim is an embroidery using cross stitch and was made for Gilda’s parents’ Golden Wedding.

The stitching samplers on show evoke a sense of continuum in needleworking. Of generations of needleworkers practising, refining and handing down their skills.

Sheila Peterson’s sampler ‘Land O’ the Simmer Dim’ is a stitched representation of Shetland with a map, place-names and illustrations of some of the creatures found on the islands. The piece demonstrates a range of technical skills and imaginative detail.

‘Victorian Alphabet Sampler’ by Diane Evans features cross-stitched letters surrounded by peacocks and topiary. In ‘Miniature Garden’ by Rita Fraser, hand embroidery, stumpwork, needle weaving and slipwork are combined to create a tiny world of exotic flora and fauna.

There is a sense of otherworldliness in this exhibition. Stories and wishes could almost have been stitched into these pieces along with the threads and fabrics.

‘Dragon Quilt’ by Glenda Smedley is an appliqué work using machine embroidery that has been hand-quilted. But these are not devilish dragons, rather they are friendly creatures who could have been created to keep watch over sleeping children.

The miniature and the detailed hang alongside large, abstract pieces that make for a striking first glimpse of the exhibition as visitors enter Da Gadderie. There are huge maple leaves in autumnal colours, repetitive floral patterns and complex kaleidoscopic designs.

This, then, is a world of delight, fantasy and magic. There are no dark depictions in this exhibition. No malevolent undertones. Here we find magical creatures, bonnet-adorned figures, flowers, gardens, idyllic landscapes and animals.

These needleworkers have also turned their stitches to the landscapes before them. Shetland features in ‘Winter Landscape’ by Marina Anderson. But there are no gales lasing the land is this winter scene. Rather shades of blue and silver patchwork sparkle around a croft house. It is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s ice-covered Narnia.

On peering closely at many of the works it is clear that the individual fabric shapes that make up the cohesive whole are in fact highly patterned and complex themselves. Drawing together these contrasting pieces to create a harmonious image is no mean feat. Again technical skill underlies seemingly simple designs.

The techniques include processes with names such as fusing, slashing and burning. Brutal sounding terms that are somehow at odds with this exhibition so full of celebration and colour. The contrast between the names of the processes and delicate subject matter is quite intriguing.

Display cases hold fine items, including greetings cards, boxes and sketch books. ‘Sketch Book’ by Sheila Peterson serves as an interesting insight into technique and experimentation.

The pages contain handwritten details that read like poetic recipes, for example, “Brown paper crushed, painted, bonded to black Vilene then stitched into freely by machine (no hoops)”

These are accompanied by notes, “Lighter than I had in mind but very pleasing overall”. We learn that the fundamental techniques that have been used for generations are still subject to experimentation and playfulness.

Many textile artists are represented in this exhibition. As well as the intricate samplers and large colourful abstract wall hangings there are Christmas themed pieces, cushions in autumnal colours, Japanese inspired bags and neat, padded boxes. But all contributors share a delight in developing their dexterity with the needle and a lightsome, jovial sense of life and colour.

© Karen Emslie, 2007

Links

• Shetland Museum & Archives

Gunnie Moberg's exhibition in Da Gadderie.

SHETLAND is not one island; it is a group of around one hundred islands and skerries. Likewise Orkney is made up of about seventy. But before I lived in the most northerly of the two island groups, Shetland, they merged into one wild rocky outcrop in my imagination.

I am not alone. Not so long ago I saw a photograph in a national newspaper of Shetland’s world famous Up-Helly-Aa festival. Jolly good, except it was illustrating an article about Orkney. Well, it’s all kind of the same up there, isn’t it?

Confusion between the island groups is perhaps born from their geographical location (infamously separated by a box but adjacent to one another on TV weather maps) and shared Nordic histories. Travel another 200 or so miles up and over a bit and you reach the Faroe Islands – yet another rocky North Atlantic archipelago.

Gunnie Moberg’s exhibition seeks to fine-focus our eyes on the unique aspects of these distinct places. The exhibition features photographs drawn from over twenty years work by the Orkney-based artist. It is on show in the large exhibition space at the new Shetland Museum and Archives in Lerwick, which aims to show a range of local, national and international art and cultural exhibitions. This is the third since the building opened in June.

Moberg’s images range from the illustrative to the abstract, and include landscapes, portraits and aerial photographs. It may be hard to untangle them unless you are familiar with a particular landmass, building, tradition or face. It is upon closer inspection and with the aid of descriptive titles that you start to see the qualities that Moberg has identified as unique to a given place.

The exhibition has toured the Faroe Islands, Denmark, is now in Shetland, and will end its tour in Orkney. It will appeal to inter-island curiosity. Take, for example, the photograph of a seashell covered building Honeysuckle Cottage, Hamnavoe, Shetland. As Moberg expains “They liked this one in Faroe because they don’t have shells there.”

Titles serve an interpretative function. Propeller blade from the OCEANIC, wrecked off Shetland in 1914, Shetland is an image familiar to Shetland audiences but may be a curiosity to others. The title hints at the story behind the photograph.

Shetland Museum & Archives attracts visitors from many lands. These wildly scenic islands with their unusual, changing light have been a favourite of photographers for years. They are part of the public imagination. What is personal is the photographer’s selection of a particular shot through the lens and the choice of which images are displayed.

Moberg’s photographs are simple and balanced. Line, texture and composition dominate. They do not agitate or ask awkward questions. In Alternative Energy, Orkney, a wind turbine propeller blade slices through an iridescent sky. It creates a bold composition and linear contrast with the pale moon seen behind the turbine.

Likewise landscape is pared back to the fundamental building blocks of art. In !??, road on Streymoy, Faroe, a road covered in strange marks of uncertain origin (hence the title) becomes a black and white study of tone and line.

Agriculture, too, is described in terms of the shapes and patterns it creates, but also as timeless representations of tradition and culture. This can be seen in photographs such as Curing Sheepskins, Aith, Shetland or Taking in some hay, Gjógv, Faroe.

However, even amongst some of the most balanced composition and archetypal subject matter an underlying tension can be found. This arises from a disorientating use of perspective that stems from Moberg’s long interest in aerial photography

“From the air it is all two dimensional. You do not need to worry about the sky, distance, foreground, it is all dead flat. The only thing to play with is the light. Winter lighting shows up patterns in the land.” According to Moberg.

She explains that from the ground there is more to think about and even when on the ground she often takes photographs from above, if only a matter of a few feet up. These start to look like her aerial photographs “I didn’t want clutter. I wanted something simple and started going back to my aerial photographs.”

Thus perspective is skewed and it is often unclear from which point of view we are looking at the subject matter. In images such as Triplets, Orkney, a ewe and her three lambs are presented at an angle that makes it hard to discern where Moberg was when she took the photograph. It makes for a more unusual take on familiar subject matter.

Moberg was commissioned to produce a series of photographs for the new Scottish Parliament. Several of these are on show in this exhibition. In North Ronaldsay Lighthouse, Orkney the shadow of the otherwise unseen lighthouse cuts across the land. Sheep run across the shadow.

She was by the lighthouse where a film crew she knew happened to be filming and had access to the top of the building. She climbed up. “I just opened the door and saw the picture. I saw the sheep and only had a few seconds. It would be boring without the sheep. Something just happened.”

Moberg is also known for her illustrative photographs made during collaborative projects with writers. She has worked on several books about the three islands, such as The Shetland Story and The Faroe Isles with Liv Kjorsvik Schei and studies of Orkney with poet the late George MacKay Brown. Many of the photographs on show in this exhibition were originally taken to illustrate text.

“When you work with an author you have particular shots that you have to take but I try to add something creative” Moberg explains.

With Mackay Brown however the process was turned on its head. Moberg had shown the writer some photographs of Orkney in the hope he would supply some poetic captions. It was only when she spoke to the woman who typed for Mackay Brown that she learnt he had, in fact, written a series of poems inspired by what he had seen through Moberg’s eyes.

Moberg is also drawn to other artists as subject matter. The exhibition includes portraits of poets, writers and artists from the three islands. These include MacKay Brown, Shetland’s Christine De Luca and Faroese writer, William Heinesen. Intriguingly she hints at the existence of a large collection of portraits of well-kent writers built up over many years during Orkney’s annual St. Magnus Festival.

Of course all three island groups exist on many and complex levels, and not all are beautiful. But Moberg does not show us these. Ugliness, be it aesthetic or social, are absent. Subject matter has been pared down to its simplest and most beautiful form.

The differences we are asked to consider are differences in tradition, agriculture, architecture, culture. Variations in landscape, shape, pattern and texture. Even difficult subject matter falls under the spell of aesthetics.

This becomes apparent in two photographs of the Grindadráp (the pilot whale kill in Faroe) The kill happens only occasionally and Moberg explains that, unlike the whales, she was lucky to have been at the right place at the right time. She found the subject matter difficult.

However, the camera can form a protective barrier between photographer and subject and in turn audience and photograph. Yet it is not impervious. In Grindadráp, Fámjin, Faroe a beautiful, vivid red dominates the image. This is gallons of whale blood seeping into the sea. What is a familiar and traditional image in Faroe is one that may repel viewers in other places.

Moberg has unashamedly not embraced the digital age and delights in basic equipment. “My best photographs were taken on a 35mm Olympus with a 28mm lens. I am not technical,” she explains. She spends hours seeking timeless images. She returns to subjects again and again in order to show them to us at their most beautiful.

What we are being asked to consider is a personal view, a love affair with these three places. While some aspects of the islands’ cultures and topographies do have similarities, the longer you look at Orkney, Shetland and Faroe through Moberg’s eyes the more unique qualities you find.

Maybe the difference is sinking into the public imagination too. Not only do Orkney and Shetland now have their correct locations on several television channels but even Faroe can sometimes be spotted in the far left corner of the weather map covering our most northerly regions.

© Karen Emslie, 2007

Links

• Shetland Museum & Archives

The new Shetland Museum and Archives.

WELL BEFORE you get to the actual exhibits, Shetland’s new Museum and Archives showcases a dynamic dialogue between past and present.

Its very location, at a restored Victorian boatyard that was once the busiest in Lerwick – itself the busiest port in Britain a century ago, at the height of the herring boom – embodies a key element in the history it seeks to illustrate.

Protected by the rebuilt finger pier of Hay’s Dock, the striking contemporary design of the building itself – by award-winning Glasgow architects BDP – not only evokes the shapes of ships’ sails and Iron Age brochs, but makes extensive use of recycled materials and traditional craftsmanship.

Once inside, for instance, the first thing you’ll encounter is an imposing reception desk fashioned by artist Stuart Hill from the keel of a 19th-century German merchantman, the ‘Elenore Von Flotow’, which was discovered buried in mud during excavation of the dock.

You’ll be standing, meanwhile, on weathered flagstones salvaged from all areas of Shetland, whose differing colours and textures point towards the islands’ turbulent geological history, explored in the first of the main displays.

Stone for the building itself was similarly gleaned from demolition work, and the drystane walls enclosing the “Early People” displays were particularly aptly sourced, from ongoing excavations at Old Scatness Broch, near the southern tip of Shetland, currently the biggest archaeological dig in Britain.

Wooden flooring, shelving, and all wrought-iron fixtures feature reclaimed materials, while the entrance walkway is paved with Enviroglass, a stone-like surface made from recycled bottles, which has been patented by the museum’s proprietors, Shetland Amenity Trust.

Besides having won an official Scottish Executive commendation for sustainable architectural practice, these elements imbue the museum with tremendous warmth and character, qualities often lacking in brand-new buildings.

In constructing the main displays, curators have adopted an essentially narrative-based approach, with material arranged into twelve themed zones. While the overall sequence is chronological, some sections – such as “Harvest From the Sea” or “Home and Land” – take a more trans-historical approach, emphasising the continuities as well as the changes in Shetland life.

The sheer diversity of objects on display immediately gives a flavour of the islands’ richly layered and distinctive history, from rare Pictish carvings to whalers’ harpoons; delicate hand-knitted lace to a cast-iron “grøtti kettle”, used for boiling up fish livers; 19th-century oil-paintings to a reconstructed replica of the now-extinct indigenous Shetland pig, or grice.

Among the larger exhibits are a life-sized model of an 18th century croft-house, a 1933 Singer Le Mans sports car and a working lighthouse optic, while in the building’s structural centrepiece, the 20-metre-high Boat Hall, hang five restored or retired craft showing the development of boatbuilding in Shetland since Viking times, viewable from upstairs galleries.

Complementing the historic artefacts are numerous other reconstructions and replicas, including a disconcertingly lifelike model of a 5200-year-old Shetland woman, created by forensic facial reconstruction from a skull found near Sumburgh Airport in 1977.

Younger visitors are well catered for with plenty of hands-on opportinuties and interactive installations, not least a specially-constructed “trowie knowe”, purportedly the customary abode of Shetland’s little people, or trows, as well as a ring of traditional storytelling chairs.

With such a long, wide-ranging and eventful story to tell – Shetland having been inhabited since around 5000BC, subsequently undergoing periods of Pictish, Viking, Norwegian, Scottish, and finally UK rule, all the while fostering its own unique culture – it would be easy for such variety to start seeming scattershot.

Both main themes and sub-plots, however, have been assiduously and imaginatively thought through, with materials arranged such that the whole retains an admirable clarity and coherence, even as the layout invites you to meander down any number of fascinating byways.

Should you wish to pursue any of these further, professional and amateur researchers alike are welcome to step along to the archive section of the building, which now houses Shetland’s collection of some 120,000 historical documents, photographs and sound-recordings in state-of-the-art storage facilities, as well as holding probably the world’s biggest library of Shetland-related books.

The working boat sheds adjacent to the main building are another of the museum’s unique features, offering visitors the chance to watch shipwrights in action, restoring a variety of Shetland vessels. Already back home on the slipway is the ‘Loki’, a former herring drifter originally built at Hay’s Dock in 1904, which will eventually take passengers on cruises around the harbour. The boats sheds will also house a variety of other traditional craft demonstrations.

The museum’s emphasis on promoting Shetland’s present-day culture as well as its past is reflected by a major investment in contemporary art and crafts. An open invitation to submit ideas was issued to artists both within and beyond the islands, and the resulting commissions are plentifully on display throughout the building.

The inaugural exhibition in the gallery space, Da Gadderie, features an array of work created in Shetland itself, while other pieces are permanently installed among the musuem exhibits. Outside, in front of the main entrance, stands Lulu Quinn’s intriguing sound-sculpture, ‘Shetland Receivers’, and even the tables in the Hay’s Dock Café Restaurant, with its stunning panoramic view over the water, feature individual inset art or craft panels.

Eight years in the planning, and with a final price tag of around £12 million, the museum and archives project was always freighted with high expectations. Now that it’s launched, however – and with suitable royal fanfare, by Prince Charles, Camilla, and Queen Sonja of Norway at last month’s official opening – there’s no disputing the arrival of a stunning new cultural flagship for Scotland’s far north, of which Shetlanders can justly be proud.

© Sue Wilson, 2007

Links

• Shetland Museum and Archives

French Fancies, Acrylic 80 x 50 cm by Brian Henderson

The Veer North Exhibition in the Shetland Museum Gallery is a real eye-opener in more ways than one. First, it’s interesting to learn that there are enough practising professional artists in Shetland to form themselves into a group and secondly, the range and diversity of the work is exciting.

Veer North had its origins in an earlier project promoted by HI~Arts when Marcus Wilson, the visual arts marketing officer, came to Shetland just over two years ago. A meeting of artists who were invited to meet him sowed the seed which led to the constitution of the group.

At the time of that meeting, painter Ruth Brownlee was already investigating the idea of a web-site for Shetland artists. She, Peter Davis and Roxane Permar are among the founding members who got involved from the start. According to Roxane, Veer North now has a “stable” of twenty artists whose membership demonstrates a commitment to their professional development.

This first exhibition is only a “taster” of what’s to come next month when the group will occupy a much bigger space to display their work in the former Shetland Woollen Mill premises in Scalloway.

The “taster” certainly got me hooked. I’ve been back a few times since the opening because – in what is a relatively cramped space – it’s difficult to appreciate individual works without a return visit or two.

Coming into the gallery, my first impression is of the contrast of hot and cold colours around the walls.  You can almost taste the salt spray in Ruth Brownlee’s mixed media “Summer Gale” and feel the dampness in Peter Davis’s watercolour “Cloud over Whiteness”. Mike Finnie’s gouache “Red Desert” and  Jennifer Perry’s acrylic “Red Sea Sand” evoke the heat of a dry landscape.

These aren’t the only contrasts. Howard Towll’s three monoprints have captured the quickness of gannet, crow and avocet, and they hang alongside Mairi Macdonald’s charcoal of dead birds on a beach.

Veer North doesn’t only include painters. Andrew Graham’s “Reckless Wren” is made of steel and John Cumming has been working in oak. There are also ceramics, silk and a wood/photograph exhibit.  Perhaps the most unusual is Roxane Permar’s DVD of a project she was involved with in Newlyn in Cornwall. Earlier this year, hundreds of people made 1,100 tin rosebuds to commemorate the 1937 journey of the fishing boat Rosebud from Newlyn to London, with a petition signed by nearly 1,100 people calling on the government to prevent their homes being demolished. With archive footage and oral history recordings as well as the film of the art project to watch, it was an absorbing element of the Veer North show.

My own personal favourite is “French Fancies”. Brian Henderson has painted a table-top with the cakes in question, cups, coffee pot and cartoon characters, among them Tintin himself. I’d like to hang it above my mantelpiece and invite every guest to invent their own version of the story in the picture. It’s characteristic of Brian’s paintings that they capture a fragment of a tale.

Brian is one of the Shetland-based artists who’s exhibited outside the islands – as have Roxane, Ruth Brownlee, Peter Davis, James Thomason and others.  The group plan future links farther afield, with Sutherland in Scotland and Faroe to the North already showing interest.

This exhibition has demonstrated the depth and breadth of which Veer North is capable. Next month’s exhibition will be a bigger challenge. It will also be the launch-pad for the website www.veernorth.org.uk.  Watch this space.

© Mary Blance, 2004