Saturday 20 October: Events across Helmsdale and Portgower, 2.30pm – 10pm

Supported by Scottish Community Foundation, Creative Scotland, Age Scotland, LUX, Scottish Screen Archive, Arsenal Film Distribution

Margaret Tait, acclaimed Scottish filmmaker, poet and writer is celebrated at The Big Sheep Symposium – an event exploring her time at ‘Slowbend’ near Helmsdale which was her and Alex Pirie’s home between 1965 and 1973. The Symposium will open a discussion on four themes: The Sheep and The Land, by way of A Film, and A Poet’s Voice. It is timely to revisit Tait’s film work and ask why the start of the 60’s was a very productive period for both Tait’s writing and films.

‘Splashing’ (1966), recently rediscovered, will be shown as part of a talk by Dr Sarah Neely (author ‘Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings’ by Fyfield Books). Neely will highlight the cross-over between Tait’s films and poems, both experiments in structure, while capturing the lyricism and the simplicity of the film.

‘Caora Mor – The Big Sheep’ (1966), shown in 16mm film format and introduced by Peter Todd (artist and co-editor of ‘Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader’) tells a story of sheep through the seasons, their sale and transportation; subtly considering the ‘clearances’ as part of an on going sequence of ‘Improvements’ to effect the lives, games and gatherings of Highlanders.

Margaret Tait was reflecting on ‘The Big Sheep’ and Sutherland, for an interview with James Wilson in BBC Scotland’s Spectrum series: “I don’t think it’s about the Clearances exactly. You can’t live there without some sort of allusion to the Clearances because there’s a feeling of them all around you … But if its about anything it is about the place as it is now.”

“Margaret Tait’s work in Sutherland exquisitely reminds us of how to allow ideas to breathe. She evokes a rich sense of the area, the passage of time and unfolding of a rural landscape in these self financed films, which she would describe as film-poems. “ Oliver Mezger

‘Land Makar’ (1980) will be shown in Helmsdale for the first time. After moving to Orkney, Tait followed the year-round cycle of work of her farming neighbour Mary Graham Sinclair – a woman’s solitary stewardship of the land, she is presented as a ‘poet of the land’ – the meaning of the Orcadian term ‘land makar’. Cara Tolmie (artist / performer) has been invited to lead an afternoon workshop, where older residents can respond to the film with memories of crofting and their relationships to the land. Cara Tolmie will also respond with a new performance work. Her performance and Lesley Harrison’s poetry reading will present the way artist and poets work in the landscapes of Scotland today.

Vintage Bus tour will be led by Esther McDonald (Crofter, Portgower) and Jacquie Aitken (Timespan Archive Officer) to ‘The Big Sheep’ locations. The tour will be returning to the original screening location of Portgower Hall after nearly fifty years for a traditional highland high tea. Followed by the talks, performances, screenings, and a time to reflect on “… the place as it is now”.

You can read more about Margaret Tait and view clips of her films on LUXonline and on the Scottish Screen Archive

Artists, Filmmakers, Poets and Writers in the event. Lesley Harrison, Sarah Neely, Margaret Tait, Peter Todd, Cara Tolmie.

 Source: Timespan

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

THIS latest exhibition at Timespan is the culmination of a three month residency by visual artist Graham Fagan following the cyclical path of the river from hill to sea in Helmsdale and the Strath of Kildonan.

Universal images of nature are dominant in his new HD video work Baile an Or, accompanied by seven short films by members of the local community; Podi Plass, Ben Keighley, Sean Robertson, Heather MacDonald, Lisa MacDonald, Brian Adams and Jacquie Aitken, who worked with the artist during his residency.

Still from Graham Fagan's film

As a sequence of fixed frame images Baile an Or is certainly well composed and communicates universally symbolic images of nature; timeless cycles of growth and decay in the seasons, the buds in spring, the ice and thaw of the Northern winter and the ceaseless flow of the river. There are references to local landmarks and history such as panning and the Kildonan Goldrush, and a ruined stone cottage evocative of the Clearances.

However, the nature of this imagery is essentially scenic rather than penetrative or insightful. The landscape is pivotal in relation to cultural identity, but Baile an Or ironically feels more like a series of postcards than a deeper examination of cultural histories or the poetics of visual language. While appreciation of natural beauty is universally appealing, fixed methodology in terms of the moving image sustains a pleasing but largely unchallenging view of the landscape and of the Highlands as both empty and naturally beautiful. The first assertion is a national myth and the second we already know.

Images such as a rusted bedframe being overtaken by natural growth are reassuring in terms of the continuation of natural cycles of life, but the identity of East Sutherland feels subsumed beneath this undergrowth. Guest Curator Kirsteen MacDonald describes the way in which “the film doesn’t illustrate a community” but changes in nature “that frame human experience and create conditions of work and life”. This dominant universality could be arguably be observed anywhere.

Still from Graham Fagan's film

There are hints of a capacity for greater depth of exploration in terms of visual language; in the juxtaposition of image and sound within the moon/ tolling clock tower sequence, in the isolation of memorial text within the frame and in the image of water slowly engulfing a single stone in a river bed, an interesting symbolic image of contemporary rural life.

However, the immovability of the frame of reference doesn’t allow for the fluidity of perception and imaginative engagement with land, people and memory unique to this place to actually be felt. There is an overall tone of the safe and familiar throughout the exhibition that does not help facilitate depth of enquiry or understanding of “our place” on the part of the outside viewer.

Human memory is what defines us, it is intrinsically linked to cultural identity and while I am certain that familiarity of place will have resonance for residents in terms of memory and histories, both personal and collective, anyone not originating from the area will have difficulty unpacking this authenticity from what is essentially a series of pleasing views. The crafting of the image doesn’t allow perception of strata of experience, or the multi-layered nature of place. Painting, Photography and Film are equally capable of capturing this fluid reality and engaging the viewer in a way that reveals cultural histories hidden in the landscape. Baile an Or simply doesn’t go far enough to uncover them.

Still from Graham Fagan's film

Films by members of the local community contain the seeds of future explorations of place and identity and it was great to see this work in dialogue with Baile an Or.

The Ice House by Brian Adams presents a local historical landmark in an interesting way, particularly in relation to the interiors. Beneath the vaulted ceiling the camera captures the texture of stone and shafts of light penetrating the gloom, glimmering wires suspended from the ceiling-like fishing line, evoking the building’s origin as a herring store. There are times when the viewer feels submerged under water due to the play of light and shadow and the grainy texture of the image.

Exploring the location tonally allows the viewer to imaginatively enter the space and experience a more multi-layered sense of place than simply filming a fixed shot of an interior or exterior of the building. Use of camera movement and lighting in The Ice House really beg further investigation and potential stylistic development. How the composition is framed by the film maker is pivotal to our reading of the image, our emotional investment in and understanding of the subject.

Podi Plass’s short film Fin also shows promise in the way that the soundtrack, movement of the camera, manipulation of film speed and reverse sequences of film capture the laid back character of the film maker’s younger brother with both humour and affection. In a wider sense the film also captures a moment in life, of carefree childhood and play. With more experience and development of film craft, Plass’s easy observational style could potentially evolve into something distinctive.

Still from Graham Fagan's film

Sean Robertson’s imaginative The Meeting of Worlds with its multiple selves and special effects was a delightfully unexpected take on identity, stepping beyond glens and outside the box. Sound (especially on the busy opening night) was problematic but the concept stood out amongst films which predominantly placed the natural world centre stage.

A Fisherman By Heather MacDonald cleverly uses assembled objects of flotsam and jetsam from the shoreline together with shots at low level and through foliage to bring the viewer closer to the subject. The construction of images from beachcombing is also evocative of childhood and although some of the natural imagery was repetitive this short had an engaging quality to it as a trigger of memories. In this way it was both uniquely of its place and universal in appeal.

Baile an Or is a fantastic focal point for debate about perception of place and identity in the Highlands and the relationship between residency and community, and it is encouraging to see the work of film makers in the community as a result of this artist’s residency. Baile an Or will be explored further in a talk by lead artist Graham Fagan at Timespan on 2nd September (7pm).

© Georgina Coburn, 2011

Links

• Timespan

SO IT was somewhat fortuitous that when I recently caught up with the Highland-based artists, their current exhibition examining the relationship between Street Art, music and childhood, Teenage Kicks And Other Works, had just opened at Timespan in Helmsdale. With this work initially forming part of the Wall Works exhibition at Eden Court in 2008, I began by asking what had prompted them to re-visit the work in 2011.

Fin Macrae: Well, the gallery don’t usually have a show at this time of year, but they have the Ruscha exhibition at the beginning of March and they thought Teenage Kicks would tie in nicely with that. Obviously Ruscha has influenced a generation of artists, us certainly, and they felt there were some strong similarities, so although it perhaps wasn’t the best timing for us, we were really excited to revisit the work.

Al MacInnes: Yeah, the piece was originally a commission for Eden Court two years ago, essentially examining the link between Urban Art and music. We were really interested in the response you have to the music you listened to when you were growing up, and especially the idea that, although you may like to pretend that all you listened to was Run DMC and The Beastie Boys, the reality was, there was a lot of other music which probably wouldn’t be considered so cool being played around the house too.  With us for example, things like Runrig, The Alexander Brothers, John Denver, and a whole host of other stuff, so there is a lot of humour in there too.

Teenage Kicks & Other Works (Image by Frank Bradford)

Fin Macrae: So, the main installation has remained as it was, a living room environment, with an old record player, an arm chair and twenty two wall-mounted records from our youth; and the idea is, visitors select a record, sit down and listen through headphones. We really wanted to recreate that feeling of listening to records on your parent’s stereo with the volume cranked up, and them not really knowing what you were listening to.

For me there is two ways of listening to music – one is as part of a community, and this can mean several different environments, a gig, party, etc, and the other is private listening, which can be a very different experience; especially when you put headphones on, the dynamic changes completely.  We also have a mirror positioned at head level, so you are sitting there slouched like a teenager on the armchair looking at your own reflection, and this generates an instant connection with the past and the present. So really, we wanted to take a very simple idea and create an environment which would help stimulate a response and prompt reflection.

The Doors- The Doors, Teenage Kicks & Other Works- Screen Print (Image by Fin Macrae)

Alexander Smith: How have you developed the main theme, and what additions have been made to the current exhibition?

Fin Macrae: Well, something we have wanted to do for a long time is get into the studio and do some screen printing, and this exhibition provided us with that opportunity. We really wanted to expand the theme further, so we worked with Highland Print Studios on a series of screen prints focussing on the albums we thought best represented that period in our lives.

Al MacInnes: Yeah, the screenprints are really the music we would associate ourselves with, so we eventually settled on five albums from a final list of around twenty and designed a poster for each one, with the artwork based around a key lyric from each album.

Alexander Smith: What albums did you eventually choose?

Al MacInnes: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, The Doors by The Doors, Nevermind by Nirvana, REM’s Out Of Time and Heartland by Runrig.

Alexander Smith: That’s an interesting choice, defining nineties guitar albums, classic rock and a Runrig  record, especially considering the type of art most people would associate you guys with and how strongly it’s tied to hip-hop?

Fin Macrae: I guess so, yeah; but there were quite a few hip-hop records in our top twenty, and there was perhaps an element of wanting to avoid that stereotype, but ultimately, we just wanted to end up with a genuinely honest representation of that time.

Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon, Teenage Kicks & Other Works, Screen Print (Image by Fin Macrae)

Alexander Smith: There are also some pretty dark themes running through those final five albums?

Al MacInnes: Absolutely, and that kind of surprised us, totally unintentional, but we certainly picked up on that yeah.

Alexander Smith: People tend to have a really strong attachment to the music they were listening to at that stage in their lives, and hearing those records instantly takes you back – do you think music’s power to do that is diluted as you get older?

Fin Macrae: Well, that is something we were trying to tap into certainly, that strong response to those albums, that sense of nostalgia. On the topic of nostalgia, we have even sourced a selection of retro food, like Creamola Foam or Creamola Fizz as it’s now known, Black Jacks and Fruit Salads.

Nirvana - Nevermind, Teenage Kicks & Other Works, Screen Print (Image by Fin Macrae)

Alexander Smith: All this talk of nostalgia and the music of your youth, is this DUFI reaching a stage personally when the world is no longer wide open?

Fin Macrae: (Laughs) No; I certainly don’t feel that, I don’t think. I mean, I don’t feel I have to keep looking back to a certain point in my youth and think, they were the golden days, if anything, these are my golden days, this is the best stage of my life right now, so I don’t think it’s a yearning for the past.

Alexander Smith: What about the workshop which forms part of the exhibition, Music: Response For People Aged 18-80?

Al MacInnes: Well, with the exhibition being concerned with response to music and how music has inspired us, the idea of the workshop is really to get members of the public to bring in their own music and open up discussions on the music that was important to them at that stage in their lives, so the retro sweets, etc, really just serve as an aid to stimulate memories and help open up the conversation.

Alexander Smith: Moving on from Teenage Kicks, you recently completed a project transforming Westburn Underpass in Greenock entitled 3573 Oak Leaves. What has been the response to that?

Fin Macrae: The response has been great, really positive. We were fortunate with that job as we didn’t actually apply for it, to be honest. Initially we were asked to come on board as consultants to undertake a feasibility study,  then we were  asked to be design consultants, and from there we ended up getting involved in the fabrication and installation, it really was a great job to be involved in.

Alexander Smith: It appears like a really ambitious undertaking, did it feel like that?

Fin Macrae: I think a couple of years ago it certainly would have, yeah; but I think we have steadily taken on more ambitious work, so it felt pretty manageable at this stage if I’m honest.

3573 Oak Leaves (Image by Fin Macrae)

Al MacInnes: I think the key for us, going right back to our early stencil graffiti work, is that sense of exploration and wanting to keep developing, so whether that is working in new environments, or with unfamiliar materials or techniques, we look at these things as avenues for being creative and a means to keep developing as artists. So, although we haven’t worked with COR-TEN weathering steel before, we conducted a process of research, spoke to the right people and it became another material to be creative with.

Fin Macrae: With that work as well, it serves a purpose, it has a function, and that is true for most of the work we do, we don’t tend to create something for the sake of it, we might do that in the future, but most of the work we have done has tended to serve a purpose, whether that’s way-finding or helping to direct people through spaces. The Greenock piece was really about unifying three spaces and design problem solving.

3573 Oak Leaves (Image by Fin Macrae)

Al MacInnes: Yeah, and the idea was not only to create a solution which was robust and secure, but also to try and generate a sense of local ownership and pride in the space.

Fin Macrae: A real highlight of that project was the opening night, standing there with the Provost, the architect and the client just listening to the public’s comments, they were just so enthusiastic about the space, which was just great.

Alexander Smith: There have also been some changes from a business point of view; you guys have consolidated you individual practises, Moose 77 (Al’s graphic design company) and Fin Macrae Photography under the umbrella, DUFI-ART Ltd. How has that changed things – I presume it’s a far sleeker way to operate?

Fin Macrae: Yes, it’s certainly a far sleeker way of working, that’s for sure.

Al MacInnes: It’s definitely changed the way we work; we had our individual businesses, and DUFI the partnership, so essentially there were three sets of everything.

Alexander Smith: So managing diaries was an issue I guess?

Al MacInnes: Absolutely, it was becoming more and more complicated as DUFI grew. I mean, we were collaborating so much we were losing sight of what was a Fin Macrae job, a Moose 77 job and what was a DUFI job, so there were some real crossover issues.

Fin Macrae: It’s also brought us into the same office space and studio which has really aided creativity. Also, it’s helped from a professional angle, too. I mean, for example, we now have weekly production meetings where we sit down together, examine the job list, and set priorities, things like that have streamlined the way we work.

Alexander Smith: Was DUFI starting to take over?

Fin Macrae: Exactly, DUFI became bigger than our individual practices, and we were taking on bigger and bigger contracts. We both had very successful businesses as individuals, but DUFI was growing and growing,  and the kind of work we were getting as DUFI was becoming more interesting and diverse, basically, exactly what we wanted to be doing, so it just made sense to consolidate.

Alexander Smith: You guys have also added another member to the team, what’s his role?

Al MacInnes: Yeah that’s right, his name is Jonny Sherlock and his official title is Project Manager, we really needed someone to help coordinate work.

Alexander Smith: Does he have any creative input?

Fin Macrae: He does yes, but his job is primarily to manage us, which is working out great, he’s really helping us find the right kind of projects.

Alexander Smith: DUFI are obviously really busy at the moment, and it seems like you guys have made really steady progress over the last nine years or so. Has this progress been aided by the general growth of urban art and graffiti art, highlighted by artists like Banksy, JR, C215 and major companies like Sony, for example, hiring TATS CRU for marketing campaigns? I mean, this is big business?

Fin Macrae: Oh yeah, its very big business and we have watched all that happen over the years we have been working as DUFI, and it’s funny in a way, because when we were getting into Street Art in the beginning, we were really into guys like Banksy, and hardly anyone knew who he was.

Al MacInnes: You could only read about these guys in certain creative journals. Now, if you asked most teenagers, even in the Highlands, they would all know who Banksy is, but we haven’t had Sony in touch yet, however.

Fin Macrae: We have actually Al, I just didn’t tell you. (laughs)

Alexander Smith: As you guys move towards nine years of DUFI, what has been a particular highlight?

Al MacInnes: Well, a real highlight was being part of Rough Cut Nation, a collaborative exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery last year, that was great.

Personal Jesus, from the collective exhibition, Rough Cut Nation at the The National Portrait Gallery (Image by Fin Macrae)

Fin Macrae: Yeah, that was a really fantastic experience. On the opening night of that exhibition we also found out we had been awarded a major commission in Derby as well, so that was particularly memorable night.

Al MacInnes: I also withdrew my last tenner from the bank that night as well.

Fin Macrae: What, you’ve never had any money since then, Al?

Al MacInnes: No, I’ve been stretching that tenner out ever since. (laughs)

Fin Macrae: Another key one for us, especially in terms of our development was Imagining The Centre in 2006. This utterly amazing girl called Evi Westmore came over from the US and began to devise an arts strategy for Inverness, and to give you an example of her personality, someone was telling her about the graffiti problem in Inverness, and her response was, great, let’s go and have a look at some, but she couldn’t find any. Just by chance I met her at a function and told her that we were graffiti artists and we ended up getting involved from there. That was an amazing experience, a real learning curve, and perhaps more than any other project, being involved in that really opened things up for us.

Alexander Smith: What about 2011, what’s coming up?

Fin Macrae: Well, we have some individual projects, but as DUFI we will be doing some work in The Victorian Market in Inverness, some installations and some stencil works, so we’re really looking forward to that. We have also been asked to curate a project up in John O’ Groats, we will probably work with three or four other artists on that project, and that environment should be really interesting to work in.

Alexander Smith: What about other artists, who’s getting you excited at the moment?

Al MacInnes: We really love The Small Stakes, an amazing print artist from the US, he’s awesome.

Fin Macrae: There is also a really cool website called OMG Posters which gathers together some great work. Screen printing is really back in fashion, and a recent example which I love is the poster for Aronofsky’s The Black Swan, it’s just beautiful, really simple, powerful imagery, we really like that.

Al MacInnes: And perhaps unsurprisingly we are back to where we started, as we have also been listening to a lot of great music recently which has been inspiring us.

Alexander Smith: Who are you currently listening to?

Fin Macrae: Bands like Yeasayer, Frightened Rabbit, we can’t seem to get away from The New Pornographers, and Al is quite into his bearded singers at the moment.

Al MacInnes: Yeah, especially William Fitzsimmons.

Alexander Smith: That’s a pretty trendy taste in music, guys?

Fin Macrae: Aye, not too bad for a couple of old boys, eh? (laughs)

Teenage Kicks & Other Works is at Timespan until 27 February 2011

© Alexander Smith, 2011

Links

• DUFI-ART
  Timespan
  

“At the heart of my work is the engagement and participation of those communities amongst whom I live. As a primary source of information and guidance, I rely on evolving relationships and subtle collaborations to arrive at a work that not only tells a story but also characterises the community that tells and retells that story.” Ruth Macdougall

Elephant Test Poster

THE ARTIST Ruth Macdougall was born in Glasgow in 1981, and studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Art (ALBA) and Universidad Catholica de Chile in Santiago before graduating from Glasgows School of Arts department of Environmental Art in 2004. In 2007 she was appointed to a two-year residency at Timespan Heritage Centre in Helmsdale, Sutherland, where she worked with local young people under a programme entitled Ours, as well as developing her own practice.

Previous to her Timespan residency — which was funded by Partners and The Paul Hamlyn Foundation — Macdougall worked in the community of Skerray, on the north coast of Sutherland, as an artist-in-residence under the auspices of the Mackay Country cultural project. She has also worked in Zambia and China. She is, therefore, not only well-travelled, but also well-positioned in her ability to contextualise her own art in relationship to local, national and international practices and standards.

Elephant Test (Photo - Ruth Macdougall)

The term “elephant test” — which may be unfamiliar to many readers — is defined as “a situation in which an idea or thing is hard to describe, but instantly recognisable when spotted”. Macdougall has used the curious phrase as a title of a book which documents her Timespan residency.

Although the term is apparently applied most frequently in legal contexts, it has been appropriated by Macdougall to describe the peculiar mixture of happenstance and circumstance which led to her undertaking an almost undefinable, consciously indeterminate art project based around a mythical elephant journeying across the mountain ranges of north-west Sutherland.

The basis for such an unlikely happening was a series of photographs uncovered by Macdougall in the Timespan archive. Much of the archive itself is derived from donated material, often with unknown or incomplete provenance. The photographs, taken by an anonymous photographer in Helmsdale around the turn of the 19th century, show a llama, a camel and an elephant — all in a setting of incomparable incongruity.

Elephant Test (Photo - Ruth Macdougall)

In one of these images, the elephant, Bosko (as he was subsequently discovered to be named), can be seen approaching two children — one, an older boy, is laughing. In the tip of his trunk the animal holds a shimmering disk — perhaps a plate or even a mirror. In the background (which also appears to show both the camel and the llama), can be seen the beast’s shackles — for he is tethered to a post.

Quite by chance Macdougall discovered the identity of the elephant and the travelling circus which was responsible for bringing him to Helmsdale from a guest at an event in Timespan. Mitchel Miller, editor of the The Drouth magazine, was taken aback to see images of his great, great grandparents’ circus, Pinder Ord’s Royal Number 1. This travelling show had plied the highways and byways of the Scottish highlands, stopping in Helmsdale on its route north.

Such a strange co-incidence prompted Macdougall to follow her instincts and to adapt a previously conceived artwork — which had not come to fruition — in favour of this new deus ex machina. The unrealised work, putatively entitled Coracle, involved Macdougall fashioning the eponymous boat-cum-shelter from local ash and hide and traversing the county of Sutherland, from coast to coast, in a more-or-less straight line, crossing whatever obstacles lay in the way.

Bosko the Elephant

Such an approach had been gleaned from Macdougall’s training in environmental art, originating from an exercise known as dérive. This technique consists of drawing a circle on a map and following its route, ‘on the ground’, precisely; the object is to require the participants to negotiate access to public and private space, thus fulfilling one of the basic tenets of environmental art.

As Macdougall explains: “…my artwork is socially engaged…involving people and other artists, collaborating with them, getting them to participate, fostering a sense of co-authorship. Most of my work is ‘site-specific’ so…I am working in somebody else’s space, in contexts which are particular to that area and are quite personal to a lot of people….that is an element which has run through my work since art school…environmental art is public artwork … you are working outside the gallery space in other peoples’ territory, so there is always a negotiation of space…”

Macdougall’s final work, Escaped Circus Elephant Lives the Dream, is documented as a short, eight-minute film and can be described as a site-specific intervention, part-spectacle, part-happening, with roots in the history of performance art, Absurdist theatre, and even, perhaps, commedia dell’arte.

Just as Joseph Beuys used the ‘canvas’ of Rannoch Moor in which to create part of his Celtic Kinloch Rannoch Scottish Symphony in 1970, so Macdougall uses the ancient flat-topped mountain Arkle as the backdrop and setting of her film narrative.

In a loose narrative structure we follow the ‘elephant’s’ escape (from the Helmsdale Icehouse, for all the world like a prison dungeon), and subsequent free wandering high up on the mountainside. The elephant’s golden mask and poncho were made by Macdougall herself — in themselves important pointers to Macdougall’s evolving practice which, increasingly over the two-year term of her residency, has involved her at a physical level with the making of objects.

Helmsdale Ice House

Such an approach to art – although well accepted in the European and international mainstream – remains, by and large, alien and vaguely threatening to most communities. Here discussion and exposure to the ‘avant-garde’ is often limited, if encountered at all. Such are the obstacles which any ‘non-traditional’ artist is required to overcome if he or she wishes to engage in meaningful dialogue about their own work as precursor to wider communal artistic involvement.

It is part of Macdougall’s significant achievement that slowly and reassuringly she overcame prejudices and doubts to involve local young people (they came to be known collectively by the ironic title, Spanners) in fruitful, collaborative work, using the practices and methodology of environmental art as the foundations for their efforts.

Part of this process involved the gradual exposure of the Helmsdale young people to her own work. Macdougall’s choice of Bosko, who had many years previously visited the village, was key to her success – a local event with local personality made identification easier and more direct.

Macdougall initially gained the young people’s support, trust and enthusiasm (during out-of-school hours) by establishing a film club, in which she allowed them to choose the features they wished to view and discuss. This led on to a film-making workshop, other projects and, ultimately, group visits to other parts of the county as well as different venues in Orkney.

One such project, which took place at a time of slow decline in the retail sector, involved the Spanners in a collaboration with local shop-keepers in what Macdougall describes as a “vinyl intervention spanning the length of Helmsdale’s main street”.

Macdougall adds: “The kids wanted to do some kind of installation and environmental art project. By this time they were aware of what this meant because I had given them a presentation on my work and the work of other artists and they were really up for it. It was a Christmas-themed piece of work… based around Santa Claus and his reindeer. Each child chose a window on the main street and they also chose a deer…The kids had a meeting with the shop owners to get to know them…The whole thing was very positive.

“The kids were making friends with each other, sometimes with other kids with whom normally they would have had nothing to do…they were collaborating. None of these projects were about the kids working by themselves to take something home to their parents…. It gave everyone something to be proud about and brought the community together. The shop owners asked for the vinyl to remain after the project had finished.”

Another unique outcome in Macdougall’s two-year period in Helmsdale was the restoration of the Icehouse and its transformation into a viable space for exhibiting art. Working with the sculptor and metal-smith Sam Barlow as well as the Helmsdale youth arts group participants, Macdougall transformed this unusual structure, which is situated adjacent to the old Telford bridge on the south side of the river, opening up access, installing electricity and fashioning a decorative, functioning doorway and window.

The building, which is owned by Sutherland Estates, had been part of the community for decades, was given a new lease of life, as a valuable space for arts-based activity. As such, it forms a lasting and valuable legacy of Macdougall’s residency

It is arguable that such exposure to multiple and various arts-related experiences and the consequent rich pedagogical outcomes could not have been achieved through any other methodology. Macdougall’s view is clearly an expanded concept of art and its practices and outcomes – what Joseph Beuys labelled ‘social sculpture’. While Macdougall’s type of residency is by no means unique, its relative rarity in the Highland context makes it a model on which to build successfully for the future.

(Ruth Macdougall quotations are from an interview with this writer in September 2009).

© Giles Sutherland, 2009

Links

• Ruth Macdougall
• Mackay Country Residency Blog 2006
• Timespan Youth Arts Blog 2007-2009
• Timespan Artist in Residence Blog 2007-2009

ALASTAIR Cook’s black and white photographic images of Caithness and Sutherland – shot on 35mm film and hand-printed – repay close attention. What at first sight may appear as rather stark, unpeopled studies of landscape, geology and abandoned architecture slowly reveal themselves as carefully composed and conceived studies which use the camera’s framing eye to convey rich metaphor and a sense of quiet, spiritual wonderment.

Dunbeath, Caithness by Alastair Cook.

Although Cook’s stated aim “to reflect back the beauty of the place to the people who live here” may sound vaguely patronising, one can see his point: landscape is frequently used and abused here in a way seldom found elsewhere. Often, beauty seems to exist in spite of human intervention rather than because of it. Aspects of the visual and physical environment such as the immensely rich geology and the complex shifting sense of light and movement over the sea can often go unseen and unsung.

On some levels, Cook’s work can appear clichéd: the studies of abandoned buildings and croft-houses are tropes employed in numerous instances elsewhere. The lack of human presence in some of the studies only seems to reinforce this rather bleak and uncompromising vision.

The familiar resonant refrain of The Clearances appears to sound loudly. But is this really the subject of Cook’s interest? Or is he delighting in the stonemason’s art and the sculptural quality of placed stone? That much is unclear. Perhaps he is conflating both the historical and the structural, melding a sense of appreciation at recent human intervention with the vastness of geological time?

Elsewhere, there seems little doubt that Cook’s fascination lies with the compositional possibilities offered by the many geos and wave-cut platforms of eastern Sutherland and Caithness. Allied to the interest Cook finds here is his particular captivation with the even spread of the light created by the eastern horizon. Often, Cook’s compositions reveal three constituent parts: sky, sea and geology. Sometimes these elements are accorded equal pictorial status and at others the sea, for example, is reduced to a thin sliver of textured steel-grey running along the middle of the composition.

In his study of a rope (used to help walkers and fishermen negotiate a particularly steep path) Cook suggests a metaphor. The rope forms a vertical division in the image as it lies frayed, makeshift and fragile on the foot-worn path. Our lives in the balance? The symbiosis of the natural and the man-made? Whatever its symbolism, it seems that the image is about more than simply compositional opportunism.

Cook highlights his working methods by including here a number of digital colour shots which acted as ‘sketches’ towards the finished compositions of the black and white images. These colour images offer a less atmospheric, more mundane sense of place; snapshots which nevertheless suggest mood and texture.

Coupled with these still colour and black and white images are a number of films which may loosely be described as meditative travelogues exploring the social and economic geography of Helmsdale and neighbouring Gartymore. Using a hand-held camera in ‘The Land and the Sea’, Cook offers an astute, heart-felt commentary on the stones and fallow crofts which haunt the landscape.

Looking at one abandoned building, complete with broken bed-stead, he comments: “There is something eerie…they’ve been empty too long you couldn’t really call them derelict…they’re ruins…they’ve consolidated themselves, they’ve fallen in, they’re not safe but they’re not dangerous but in lots of them, bedposts, pieces of bed-spring…poking from beneath moss-covered stone…people have left their beds behind….there’s no point in being romantic about it, let’s be practical…there is enough round here to be romantic about without contrivance.”

Cook offers a fresh, nuanced vision of these extraordinary topographical and historical landscapes, offering the promise of more valuable insights in the future.

© Giles Sutherland, 2010

Links

• Alastair Cook
• Timespan

A Gale in Strath Fleet (photo - Ann Davidson)

TO MOST of the population of these islands, the county of Sutherland, lying at the northern end of mainland Britain seems far off, remote and impossibly northern. But the north coast of Scotland was called Sutherland because those who applied the appellation – the Vikings of Orkney, Shetland and Iceland – situated it in their mental geographies as a southerly place.

The artist Ann Davidson, who was born in Dornoch in 1950, has attuned her mental and emotional compass, not only to the county of Sutherland but also to its northerly cousins, Iceland and Greenland. The result is a powerful, evocative and fragilely beautiful set of images, made with great skill, a fine sense of colour and compositional clarity.

Discussing her approach Davidson has commented: “I do not depict views literally, but rather try to convey the feeling of the land. I don’t usually know what a picture will look like or exactly where it will represent when I start working on it, though I generally choose colours intended to evoke a specific area.”

Davidson’s method is, therefore, intuitively and emotionally based, rather than mimetic and representational. Davidson’s sense of land and landscape comes from within, while the imagery records her own complex response to her environment which extends well beyond the visual.

It is telling that the eponymous composition (an Icelandic landscape) from which the exhibition takes its name was made before Davidson had actually visited Iceland. This work – and indeed all of the work here – might more accurately be labelled ‘mindscape’ or indeed, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it, ‘inscape’. Davidson is more interested in distilling the essence than giving an exact and identifiable literal description.

Her masterful ‘A Gale in Strath Fleet, Sutherland’ succeeds less in conveying the particulars of a given place but, rather, suggests a mood and presence of weather and light. A line of small wind-blown birches occupy the middle ground while a band of cool, clear light fills the horizon. Elsewhere peaty browns and smoky blacks express the prevalent tonality of Sutherland in winter.

Allied to Davidson’s great ability to communicate a genus loci is her technique – a combination of watercolour and collage. Davidson often creates her own coloured paper by applying “muted colours with a large soft brush in wide bands” and then tilting her drawing board “to encourage the paint to flow and merge through the water”.

When these newly created sheets of subtly varied colour have been created and dried completely the most attractive bands are torn from the sheets to serve as new collage pieces.

Davidson has clearly mastered this technique and made it her own. In a work such as ‘Blue Iceberg, Uummannaq, Greenland’, the coloured fragments of paper are assembled to give the feeling of gradated light as distant ridges recede into the distance. In the foreground a purple navy blue gives way to the cold turquoise of the iceberg above which a band of light grey, and another of darker grey-blue, suggest sky and land.

The work captures a sense of northerly, sparse light while conveying something of the climatic and geomorphological connectedness with Sutherland.

Davidson’s work certainly deserves to be better known. This show can only serve to bring her art to a wider and – one must presume – highly appreciative audience.

© Giles Sutherland, 2009

Links

• Ann Davidson
• Timespan

ANN DAVIDSON explains the context of the work in her new exhibition at Timespan in Helmsdale. 

I COME FROM a Highland family and grew up in Dornoch, Tongue and, mostly, Helmsdale in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ann Davidson

The Sutherland of those days seems to me like another world; it was and felt truly remote. Indeed, all the roads in this vast county other than the only trunk road were single track. Many bridges that we now take for granted had not been built. It felt like a great, pristine, undiscovered land. And, by and large, it was.

When I went to art school I painted Sutherland landscapes because I wanted to communicate their extreme remoteness, drama and purity. I was enthralled by Suilven, which I drew a hundred times.

My thesis was on life in Sutherland. There were no popular books then specifically about the county, so after college I came home to write one, which resulted only in a pile of journals. However, by this time I knew I would always paint Sutherland.

A Moulin by Ann Davidson

My abstracted landcapes are made using a form of collage I have invented. The method enables easy comparison between versions of a composition while ensuring that the final one is not lost when it is taken apart to be glued. It is a system of ”transference” of information regarding how papers are juxtaposed, using adhesive tape and registration marks.

As the method also enables judgments to be made from a distance, it allows me to ensure proportions are as I would like them to be. I usually try many combinations of collage pieces, sometimes hundreds, for a single image. This collection is almost ten years’ work.

For a long time I wondered what was beyond Sutherland. I wanted to visit lands that were more remote, more elemental and more sparsely populated: Sutherland, exaggerated. In 2002 I visited Iceland and, in 2005, Greenland.

Mist in Gleann Dhubh by Ann Davidson

I found that much of Iceland is indeed similar to Sutherland, with its inselbergs and odd shapes rising out of low land and the lack of tall vegetation to obscure vistas of those masses. The vegetation, mostly, looks just like that of the Scottish Highlands and there are fjords similar to our sea lochs.

What I saw of Greenland, however, looked exactly like the cnoc and lochan areas of west Sutherland: a giant version of Assynt, with ice added. Perhaps this is unsurprising as Scotland and Greenland were once joined.

The diversity of the types of landscape in Iceland seemed infinite; Greenland, by contrast, is infinite variations on a theme. Both places have much too that is very different from Scotland: ice and, in the case of Iceland, volcanic and geothermal areas – with immense fields of black and of white.

Ilulissat by Ann Davidson

I visited Illulissat in the Arctic – the town of the icebergs. The Illulissat Ice Fjord is a glacial ice-stream which flows from the Greenland ice-cap and calves into a fjord. It is the most productive glacier outside Antartica and the mouth of the fjord was choked with icebergs of immense number, size and beauty.

I feel that, because of modern developments and global warming, my work has a retrospective angle. Much of Sutherland has lost its pristine look; glaciers in Iceland have been receding; ice in Greenland has been melting. In 2005 I saw, on the Greenland ice-cap, ovals of intense sapphire blue which were lakes of melt water. The Inuit told me that they get less snow than they used to.

This year my brother flew over Greenland and saw that the blue ovals are about ten times as large and the choked icebergs have gone.

North From Sutherland is at Timespan Gallery, Helmsdale, from 1 November until 20 December 2009.

© Ann Davidson, 2009

Links

• Ann Davidson

• Timespan

Achavanich Standing Stone Pins (© Giles Sutherland)

PATRICIA NIEMANN originally trained and worked as a goldsmith and ran her own free-lance design studio in Vilshofen, Bavaria, before relocating to Scotland where she became ‘hooked’ on glass, firstly as a post-graduate student at Edinburgh College of Art and later at North Lands Creative Glass in Lybster, Caithness.

Her present show, which takes its title from the author Neil Gaiman’s description of the north of Scotland, brings together a number of Niemann’s artistic concerns and presents them in an eclectic range of media. However, for all their apparent diversity, these works coalesce around the core themes of sarcophagal ritual (including the artefacts and architecture of human burial); the human body itself; and the idea of decay, not as a degenerative process, but rather as a regenerative, cyclical one.

Central to Niemann’s practice and training is life drawing and here this discipline finds expression in a number of vigorously worked, expressive studies of the male and female figure. While the female figure appears fully fleshed and somewhat passive, the male figure is angular, taut and wiry – with a clearly defined bone structure.

These life drawings can be read as a metaphor for Niemann’s wider concerns – in particular, archaeology, and how this can reveal what lies underneath the ‘skin’ of the landscape, especially in Caithness, where she lives and works.

A number of the works here relate to the Achavanich stone setting, a horseshoe-shaped, Neolithic site adjacent to the Loch of Stemster. As well as the carefully constructed arrangement of stones, the site also contains a burial chamber which predates these by around 1000 years.

Achavanich itself clearly held a religious significance for the early Gaels, who named it (millennia after it had been built) ‘field of the monk’. Archaeological evidence has included charred bone fragments suggesting that the site was linked with the rituals of death, cremation and burial.

Niemann created a number of conical, brightly-coloured glass ‘flames’ which she placed alongside these remarkable stones, thus evoking the fire and ritual which are associated with the site. A number of these elegant, spiky sculptural forms can be seen here, as well photographs of them in situ.

Niemann has clearly developed a strong connection with Caithness and professes a fascination with its elemental geology and climate. The sparsity of population and the preponderance of archaeological sites have allowed her to foster a relationship to a distinct past which she views not as a separation but as a continuity. The ancient rituals surrounding death in the north of Scotland, Niemann seems to suggest, form relationships which cross time and space and allow us to understand our common humanity.

Such ideas extend across Niemann’s diverse media – stone and glass sculpture, jewellery, drawing and textiles. In her series of jewellery-cum-sculpture ‘Achavanich Standing Stone Pins’, Niemann shows her deftness as both metalsmith and artist. On each felted ‘stone’ she has attached a minutely detailed, bone-shaped piece of jewellery such as a broach or earring.

This motif extends to other larger scale works such as an installation of life-size, but stylised, femurs made from coloured glass and Caithness stone. The conceit is replicated elsewhere in a series of dramatic, over-the-top jewellery fashioned from chunky, silver, bone-shaped hoops, which form a chain from which hang, in turn, large glass ‘bones’.

Although many of these objects are bold and striking, they are also, nevertheless, delicate and finely made emphasising the careful craftsmanship which underpins all of Niemann’s work.

© Giles Sutherland, 2009

Links

• Timespan

• Patricia Niemann

Anne Brodie - 'Archive 1' (Photo - Giles Sutherland)

THE ICE HOUSE in Helmsdale has been described as the town’s ‘monumental deep freeze’. Owned by the Sutherland Estate, it once acted as a store for the salmon catch from the Helmsdale river and, as its name implies, as a storage facility for ice which was ‘harvested’ from a shallow pond above the building and funelled into the structure from above.

The building’s other incarnations have included its use as a fish and chip shop. Now the impressive double-vaulted chamber acts as one part of a venue for the last in a series of art projects, marking the end of Ruth Macdougall’s two-year residency at Timespan as artist and youth arts curator. Macdougall herself showed a new work, Elephant Test, in Timespan immediately prior to the current show.

During a short one-month double residency Anne Brodie and Yael Rosenblut have produced work which derives from and explores the immediate cultural and physical locale. They have done so using methodology and media which challenges preconceptions about what art ‘should’ be.

Brodie has focussed (in all senses of the term) on the activities in a local smokehouse run by father and son Sandy and Alexander Cowie, who “represent the current thin layer of Helmsdale’s once rich fishing industry.” Brodie has spent time as a salmon farmer on the West coast of Scotland, and more recently as an artist in residence with the British Antarctic Survey. Both of these experiences have informed her approach here.

A video work entitled ‘The Smokehouse’ is a carefully observed piece of documentary, edited and refined to such an extent that only the detailed technique of filleting remains. The camera has been placed at table level so that all extraneous information has been removed, including the identity of the worker whose repetitive task, honed over decades, seems sparse, perfect – and almost mechanical.

As the large, pink-gloved hands go about their task, the image has been overlaid with a soundtrack of fly-fishing, providing a disconcerting juxtaposition. In one sense the film can be read as a universal metaphor for the co-existence of brutality and gentleness, or indeed, humanity’s contrasting and conflicting attitudes towards nature.

Elsewhere Brodie presents a series of slide transparencies on a light-box (‘Archive 2′), creating a photographically-derived installation which reflects her interest in the village’s cultural identity, as well as it economic history. She has commented:

“I was struck looking at the archival photographs of Helmsdale, of the enormity in the scale of the fishing industry in the 19th and 20th Century. I wondered how many people in the images would have had to have moved away, and that out of the ones that stayed, most would now no longer be alive. This, combined with the huge amount of people coming from all over the world to Timespan to identify ‘lost’ relatives, informed the work … I wondered about the absence of identification, and the intensity of how much that mattered. There is a deliberation in the absence of faces.”

This work finds its companion piece in ‘Archive 1′, which, by marked contrast, consists of fish-bones and fingernails, the very physical fragments of fish and men. Perhaps it is the similarity between these objects, or their still quiet presence framed against a window, which gives them their impact.

Yael Rosenblut, who is based predominantly in Santiago, Chile, has chosen to concentrate on another archetypal aspect of Highland culture – dancing. Her three large PVC-mounted Lambda prints titled respectively ‘The Highlanders’, ‘The MacKay Garden’ and ‘La Mirage’ show colourful, even garish aspects of this strong sub-cultural grouping.

Rosenblut’s poetic accompanying text goes some way to explaining her fascination with the subject matter and, given the artist’s background, can only be read with the additional context of her own country’s troubled recent history:

A subtle tenderness is all that is left after the dance is over.
The tired, little feet are back on ground again.
In each girl it repeats an immemorial gesture that closes and reflexes with all their ancestors.
The identical sign of her mothers and grandmothers.
The loving tiredness of a strong heritage.

Both artists, in their differing ways, have engaged with their surroundings meaningfully, adding to the way in which we engage visually, emotionally and intellectually with its culture.

© Giles Sutherland, 2009

Links

• Timespan

GEORGINA COBURN outlines the progress made through the latest phase of the refurbishment of the Timepan centre in Helmsdale

LOCATED in the village of Helmsdale in Sutherland, Timespan has established itself as an important cultural centre, providing access to heritage and the arts through a varied programme of exhibitions, screenings, special events, education and outreach.

Easter weekend marked the reopening of the centre following phase two of its redevelopment. The reopening following a series of creative and capital projects is a magnificent achievement for everyone involved and a credit to the local community who have taken such an active role in all phases of the redevelopment.

In addition to a Geology and Community Garden on the riverside designed in 2006, the café and terrace were designed to reclaim space, providing excellent views of Telford Bridge and Helmsdale River, linking to the harbour and strath just beyond.

The redesigned museum, contemporary Art and Crafts Gallery, café and shop are now complimented by a large workshop space, artist’s accommodation, a community archive room, IT suite and storytelling room. The outer building has been decorated with a strong contemporary feel and new iron railings by Adam Booth reflect the importance of the sea in the history of the village.

The emphasis on real people and their stories presents a museum experience that allows the visitor to engage their imagination. Great care has been taken in treatment of each of the major themes and displays of artefacts relating to Helmsdale’s past. Events such as the Highland Clearances and Emigration, the 1869 Goldrush, the boom of the herring industry and records of everyday life through the croft, byre, smithy and local 19th century village shop displays bring the history of the region to life.

Flexible modules that can be reconfigured are an essential part of the main museum displays incorporating image, text and artefacts. With two new large museum-standard cases and climate control it is now possible for the centre to accept loans from national and other collections.

The main access corridor to the downstairs museum rooms is the site of a historical timeline linking the history of Helmsdale to world events. Collaged artworks form part of the timeline and these displays can be altered over time. Also in the corridor space lit niches provide the opportunity for varied groupings of objects from the collection.

The flexibility of all these spaces allows for reinterpretation of artefacts and changing narratives to be presented, keeping the collection fresh and engaging. There are is an exciting range of possibilities here including artists working directly with artefacts from the collection. This type of intervention would be an interesting addition to the centre’s existing visual arts programme.

Primary accounts from people who lived at the time of major events in the area’s history are the foundation of the museum, but it is also the activities taking place within the building and the level of involvement by groups in the local community that link the past to the present in such a compelling way. These links between “culture, heritage, the arts, people and their ideas” are a strong sign of identity but also, one could argue, the key to the future sustainability of many rural communities.

It is inspirational to see how people have worked together to create the new Timespan and all of the elements that make it unique, expanding the capacity for engagement with residents and visitors. For rural communities and urban museums or art centres there are important lessons to be learned here in terms of how a museum or centre represents its location, landscape, people and history.

The Community Archive incorporates documents, photographs and books with open access to the Museum’s database and supplementary information linked to the museum displays. The archive is an important resource developed with the assistance of the local history and genealogy group that may also be developed in the future to include a genealogy research service. The photographic archive is constantly evolving with hundreds of images that can be accessed via computer.

Timespan’s commitment to Visual Arts and Crafts is well represented in the new refurbishment with a Design Showcase featuring works in silver by Lucy Woodley, glass by Nichola Burns and Brodie Nairn, and silver and enamel jewellery from Michael Peckitt. The presentation of these pieces in a series of lit cases flanked by larger scale glass pieces form an impressive core display in the downstairs shop.

Also in this space is an Artist Showcase with paintings by Ullapool-based artist Sheila Robertson. Upstairs in the contemporary gallery and foyer the opening show, ‘Movement Through Light and Space’, presents a fascinating fusion of sculpture, photography and music by Norman Gibson, Liz Treacher and Lucie Treacher.

Timespan’s Outreach Residency Programme has facilitated seven artist residencies in Skerray, Strath of Kildonan, Helmsdale, Brora and Golspie over the last two years, with the most recent appointment of Glasgow-based environmental artist Ruth MacDougall who will be leading a series of developmental projects as part of a two year new youth arts programme, ‘Ours’.

Artist residencies have engaged with all aspects of “local heritage, historic, cultural, natural and built” and were devised in direct response to a preliminary survey in the area revealing that “if offered communities in Sutherland would be very happy to take part in the pilot programme and have artists working in their midst”.

Past programmes have established an excellent foundation of cultural access within the vast county of Sutherland and the new additions of the studio/workshop room and residential space for visiting artists and curators will help build on this success, providing greater capacity and opportunities for arts education in the area.

The large, airy and adaptable studio space equipped with sinks and storage can be converted via a drop down screen to a cinema. A film club for local youth has already started, initiated by the current artist in residence. Roof space has been reclaimed and the large workshop space is now full of light from a long horizontal window linking the interior activity to the street outside.

The artist’s flat is light and surprisingly spacious and proposals are invited from artists wishing to engage with the centre and the local community on a variety of arts projects including talks, workshops and classes. The 2006 Leader Plus Project provided the opportunity for members of the local community to work with artists and storytellers including John Hodkinson, Sean Martin, Inge Smith, John McGeogh and Bob Pegg to create one of the truly unique features of the new museum, its storytelling room.

An intimate and cosy space (with large comfortable soft furnishings handmade by the local knitting group) this is a perfect venue for live and virtual storytelling. Screenings of five animations of local stories can be viewed as in integral part of the heritage displays, each using a different animation technique.

The stories of ‘The Last Wolf’, ‘A Fisherman’s Tale’, ‘Gartymore’, ‘A Tale of Two Dogs’ and ‘Frakkok’s Tale’ are brought vividly to life with the audio tracks recorded by local people at Timespan during the project. The animations employ shadow play, collagraphs, digital and hand drawn, to communicate the magic of the oral tradition of storytelling and engage the audience’s imagination.

Active participation by the community to produce these animations has created a very special space within the museum. Timespan story walks and special events around the town of Helmsdale link land, history and legend in an entertaining and engaging way and this spirit is also evident in the animations.

What is so refreshing about this museum / arts space is the context of heritage and the arts as an essential part of real life with view to the long term sustainability of the whole community. For me it links to a holistic understanding of the land and its people, exploring all that is unique about the northern environment, sharing this with visitors and residents alike.

It represents engagement with culture that is about growth, being absolutely grounded in your location but also looking outwards to the rest of the world. I have no doubt that having successfully built such a foundation, Timespan will continue to grow and evolve as part of an ongoing cultural process of re-visualising the Highlands.

© Georgina Coburn, 2008

Links

• Timespan

Lucie Treacher, Liz Treacher and Norman Gibson

TIMESPAN’S purpose built contemporary gallery space overlooking the centre’s herb garden, River Helmsdale and Telford Bridge is a wonderful setting to enjoy the centre’s ongoing programme of Scottish, UK and International Art and Craft.

The first exhibition accompanying the reopening of the newly refurbished museum [see Georgina’s feature in the April Northings – Ed.] is a fascinating fusion of music, photography and sculpture. The collaboration of Skelbo based photographer Liz Treacher, Brora-based sculptor and designer Norman Gibson and the impressive debut of thirteen-year-old composer, singer and songwriter Lucie Treacher in the gallery space, demonstrate a multidisciplinary approach that enhances the enjoyment of each artist’s work.

In the upstairs gallery foyer a display of photographs is accompanied by a sound loop, whilst in the main gallery portable MP3 players with headphones provide access to soundtracks that accompany each sculpture. The interpretation of one artist’s work by another creates an engrossing dialogue, concentrating the viewer’s attention on particular aspects of the visual and spatial experience through the immediate evocation of sound.

The engagement of memory and imagination is facilitated beautifully by the 14 different tracks composed to accompany the sculptures, adding another dimension to the viewer experience.

Norman Gibson’s ’20th Century Archeology’, comprised of a series of found objects with wooden construction, is cleverly composed, framing our view through the piece with the repeated form of a rusted passing place sign. The passage of time takes on an archaeological significance with a series of mechanical parts forming a horizon line in the work. Different levels within the construction are arranged like earth strata with the framed motif penetrating these levels.

The presence of a suspended lens is for me an ironic comment on human perception in an aged defined by industrial and technological progress. In a modern age we are still subject to the same timeless forces of change as our ancestors. A tap juxtaposed with a solid block of Perspex-like material is brought curiously to life in Lucie Treacher’s soundtrack by the surreal sound of dripping.

Layers of sound in each interpretation of the sculptures featuring vocal, melodic, natural and industrial soundscape elements are sophisticated, demonstrating great promise and sensitivity in the work of Lucie Treacher. The visual is clearly a strong form of inspiration for this young composer and this fluidity is a wonderful foundation for future creative work.

‘Altered Horizons’ is another fine example, a beautiful sculpture by Gibson in which each found and textural element is integrated like the view of a landscape seen from above. The interplay of materials; delicately scratched glass, bird skull, wood grain and rusted metal find their aural counterpoint in flute, strings and percussion with a distinctly Eastern feel. The associations in much of the sound work are more abstract than literal which is what makes them so interesting – they bear a symbiotic relationship to the sculptures in terms of creative process.

The ironically titled ‘Terra Firma’ feels anything but, cloaked in a misty haze of dreamlike blue paintwork. Areas of painted wood have been sanded back in an instinctual act of creative exploration or anthropology. The form of this sculpture whilst mechanical and technical feels strangely figurative, with the inner workings of the “head” of the work accented in complimentary orange and yellow. Cerebral movement is suggested along with unconscious thought. The accompanying track is ethereal in feel, leading the viewer deeper into the work.

Photography is the art of light and illumination and this is beautifully conveyed in the work of Liz Treacher, transforming the ordinary with her exceptional ability to frame a shot with her eye and lens. Her use of 35mm black and white requires compositional skill often overlooked in an age of digital manipulation. This is an art that demands infinite patience, waiting for the light and conditions to align in just the right way to satisfy the mind’s eye. The play of light and shadow heightens the image to make a lasting statement.

It is wonderfully unexpected in a country which defines itself in shades of dreich and grey to see the streets of Scotland’s urban centres captured with all the magic and elegance of Cartier-Bresson’s Paris. Although Treacher concentrates her attention primarily on the legs and feet of people going about their day-to-day business on busy streets, she creates an intriguing narrative of relationships between the passer’s by.

Though urban contexts are often depicted in art as an environment of alienation, works such as ‘Hand Shadow’ and ‘Two’s Company’ suggest human connection through silhouette. ‘Aladdin’s Lamp’ with its magical quality of low winter light outlines the figures in an incandescent aura. ‘Reflections’ which concentrates our gaze on the texture of pavement, long deep-cast figurative shadow and the glass reflections in a shop window is another excellent example.

What I love so much about this work is how tone, composition and form create a scene which is explored by the viewer’s imagination. We cannot see a whole scene in most of these images, nor can we see people’s faces or expressions. However, even defined by shadow they are infused with life and emotion. ‘Skelbo Triptych’ with its shimmering light on water emerging out of darkness and populated by the dance-like movement of a single protagonist, is a poetic vision beautifully realised in celluloid. Based on this work I would love to see examples of the artist’s film-making.

This is an engrossing exhibition which immerses the viewer in “motion and stillness, duration, space, sound and silence”. The sound loops are “musical keys to unlock different elements in the work” but equally time should also be spent appreciating the photographs and sculpture in their own right. The way that each discipline informs the other opens up many possibilities for future collaboration and development of individual artist’s work.

This is an exciting show and an apt accompaniment to the range of creative possibilities offered by Timespan’s new refurbishment including studio/ workshop space, a residential space for visiting artists and curators and the centre’s ongoing artist residency, outreach and exhibition programmes.

© Georgina Coburn, 2008

Links

• Timespan
• VAS
• Liz Treacher
• Lucie Treacher

Timespan Artists Residencies

AT A RECENT symposium entitled ‘Outreach/Reachout’ in Timespan a number of speakers discussed the highly successful series of artists’ residencies hosted by the organisation since 2005. The artists were Julian Meredith, Jonathan Macleod, Nigel Mullan, Gemma Petrie, Beatriz Pimenta Velloso, Catriona Murray and Janis Mackay.

Each of the artists was required to work within communities in and around Helmsdale and to produce a body of work which was then exhibited. Some of the work was of a permanent nature, such as Julian Meredith’s fabricated steel whale which is sited at Helmsdale harbour.

Other work was more transient such as Gemma Petrie’s ‘fabulous beasties’ made with children from schools in Melvich, Tongue, Altnaharra and Farr. All of the work of these artists was exhibited in the Timespan Gallery and participants at the symposium were therefore given ample opportunity to experience some of the artistic end-products at first hand.

In a talk titled ‘Making Visual Art Visible’, Georgina Coburn, Northing’s Visual Arts Correspondent and author of the HI~Arts commissioned report ‘Five Challenges’, put forward a number of important points regarding the problems and opportunities which visual artists face in the Highlands and Islands.

‘Five Challenges’ (which was published in 2006 and is available online at www.hi-arts.co.uk/visualarts ), was based on a large number of face-to-face interviews with arts practitioners and workers in the area. The report formed the basis for a three year development plan for HI~Arts which has yet to be released pending appropriate funding.

Georgina discussed the five challenges in the eponymous report: communication, professional practice, infrastructure, education and vision. All of these relate to the central difficulty of making visual art visible within Highland communities.

Georgina pointed out the timing of her report was apt given the number of artist-led groups and networks in the region – although these networks (such as Visual Arts Sutherland [VASu]) are strong and committed, the infrastructure which would allow them to link up and communicate with each other has not yet been formally established.

Currently there is a combined climate of threat and opportunity to future development and existing provision of the arts. Georgina discussed The Draft Culture (Scotland) Bill (yet to be published) and the imminent dissolution of The Scottish Arts Council and its replacement by a new quango, Creative Scotland.

She commented: “the draft bill failed to recognise primary providers of cultural entitlement such as arts and heritage centres, the voluntary sector and artists’ groups and studio trails…and identified local authorities as primary providers of access to art and culture…”

Such fears as well placed given the fact that the new Highland wards have resulted in even larger administrative areas and the remit of posts which were at one time dedicated to arts development have been extended to encompass leisure, sport and heritage, stretching already thin resources even further.

Inevitably, it seems, the knock-on effects for the visual arts will be even less funding and general dissolution of already meagre resources. All of this comes at a time when, in the much touted Highland 2007 year of culture, there is a distinct lack of visual art in the official programme.

However, despite such disappointing developments there are also many optimistic signs in the visual arts, among them the ‘Window to the West Project’ hosted jointly by Sabhal Mor Ostaig on Skye and The University of Dundee’s Visual Research Centre.

Georgina pointed out that residencies and the resulting contact by communities with working artists are of great importance: “contact with artists builds self-esteem, confidence, pride and identity not just for individuals taking part but potentially for the whole community…”

Such observations are of great validity and have proved to be especially true in the case of Timespan, which (under the Directorship of Rachel Skene), recognizing such fruitful and long-lasting outcomes, appointed Meg Telfer to co-ordinate the residencies.

Meg has commented elsewhere that “the main attraction of the residencies to artists was the location and the heritage connection. Some had visited the far north previously; some had read about it and explored web sites. All were fascinated by the remoteness, the unique landscape and history. A case in point was Nigel Mullan whose residency was based in Golspie and he has commented that “the residency was successful in…allowing me to reside within a community and to develop not only my own work but also projects that involved members of the community.”

One of Nigel’s works, ‘The Book of Golspie District’, demonstrates the artist’s interest in place-names: his large scale book-work reads like a topographical poem with Gaelic place names on one page and their Anglicised equivalents on the other.

Visual artist Catriona Murray and writer Janis Mackay, whose residency was in the Strath of Kildonan, collaborated on a project which involved as many local people as possible. Mackay produced a number of poems which are full of the spirit of the place, while Murray’s images also reflected a deep sense of living in the Strath during the winter months.

One of Mackay’s poems reads: “It was Imbolic, Candlemas, feast of Bridget and Bride./ The quick time when sap starts to rise./ By the Craggie burn we drank coffee./ The way the small river played,/ miles from road, ancient trees,/ this deed of walking, and maybe Saint Bride/conspired to shape a place and time so perfect/we witnessed the earth’s faith/ that this, this and this/keeps on returning.”

It’s difficult to place a true value on such sentiments and indeed on the importance such artistic interventions can have on a landscape, a people and a community. The fact that art serves a purpose well beyond ‘entertainment’, ‘leisure’, ‘culture’, ‘heritage’ and all the other terminology so favoured by bureaucrats and institutions is beyond doubt.

Artistic presence in such communities is not new, however, as the words of poets Rob Donn and Ewan Robertson, ‘bard of the Clearances,’ so strongly testify. It can only be hoped that the ‘suits’ in Inverness and elsewhere who make funding decisions which facilitate such work will realise that art is a vital element of human existence and assumes an even greater importance in the economically fragile and culturally undernourished areas where these residencies took place.

The persistence, optimism and vision of those who allowed such work to be done (co-ordinators, hosts, gallery workers, the artists themselves, et al) is to be warmly applauded.

(Timespan Gallery has a rolling programme of current exhibiitons until October)

© Giles Sutherland, 2007

Links

• Timespan Gallery

Over Land, Under Sea by Wendy Sutherland.

NOW IN ITS third year, the Visual Arts Sutherland Open Studio Trail, which runs until the end of June, is an ideal way of meeting artists and seeing their work in situ. This is a popular and successful idea with similar models in other parts of the country where distance and dispersal make it essential to create a focal point.

Timespan in Helmsdale are therefore hosting an exhibition of around 30 VASu members to mark the Studio Trail, and the result, as might be expected, is a varied show, both in terms of artistic media and merit.

The work ranges from painting and etching to sculpture, textiles and ceramics. Printmakers Ian Westacott and Sue Jane Taylor (both of whom are based in Dornoch) show examples of work which demonstrate professionalism and a high degree of skill.

Westacott’s unframed double etching ‘Charmstone’ is typical of this talented Australian’s oeuvre, with fine, precise, sensitive lines which bring out the inherent mystery of this ancient object. His partner, Taylor, is well known as a documenter of Scotland’s oil industry, and her conté and charcoal drawing ‘RAT –John Ellis Piper Field’ reveals an abundant talent and ability to capture the human figure at work.

Meg Telfer’s collagraph ‘Survivor, Birsay’ shows an intriguing form in an abstracted landscape and seascape composition, and is a well-wrought, technically robust work which typifies Telfer’s on-going love affair with places on the edge of life and experience.

As such, her works are also internal landscapes of the mind. Ishbel Macdonald’s monoprint ‘Whooper Swan’ has a similar compositional boldness to Telfer’s, and it too speaks of isolation and that unique genus loci which is so much part of the experience of northern Scotland.

Indeed, it is worth noting how many of these artists use their experience of place as an integral part of their art. Another example of this approach is Mark Edwards’ technically assured oil ‘The White House’, which reveals his background as an illustrator but also confirms his status as an accomplished artist.

The image of the isolated Highland dwelling is symbolic of the weight of history which one inevitably feels in this part of the world. Wendy Sutherland also communicates loss, history and a feeling of human frailty in her subtle and thoughtful landscape ‘Over Land, Under Sea’

Jacqueline Walters large, suspended textile form brought to mind the work of the great Polish textile artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, but rather than politics and the weight of history, Walters work speaks of gentler things such a landscape and nature.

This show, therefore, serves as a useful complement to the VASu Open Studio project and is well worth seeing.

© Giles Sutherland, 2006

Links

• Visual Arts Sutherland
• Timespan

Blue Skye', 'Ying Yang', 'Red Sky' by Brodie Nairn. © Giles Sutherland

THE TITLE OF the current exhibition at Timespan, ‘Point of Balance’, is highly apposite, and carries both a literal and metaphorical meaning. Each of the participating artists – Fin Macrae, Wendy Sutherland and Brodie Nairn – work in different media – photography, painting and glass respectively.

Although their practices vary widely, each complements the other both in subject matter and medium. ‘Point of balance’ describes both the inter-relationship between the separate groups of art-works within the gallery-space and the aesthetic objectives the artists have set out to achieve. Both approaches succeed marvellously: visually this is a beautifully conceived show; and is vibrant and exciting as an intellectual and conceptual exercise.

Brodie Nairn’s highly crafted glass objects such as ‘Black & White Tear’ or ‘Deep Black With White Cane I’ reveal the approach of a consummate craftsman and a committed artist (a description which can also be applied equally to both Sutherland and Macrae).

Nairn’s abstract forms speak of surface texture and internal complexity. The series of three works ‘Blue Skye’, ‘Ying Yang’ and ‘Red Sky’ , delicately poised on graceful perspex pedestals, invite a tactile response. They are sensuous and sensual, compellingly suggestive of topography and the female form, recalling Willem de Kooning’s statement ‘Landscape is the woman and woman is in the landscape’.

Point of Balance amply demonstrates the quality and breadth of visual art currently being produced by younger artists in Highland Scotland

Sutherland’s work also extends to printmaking, and her photographically derived series ‘Hemprigg Wood I-VI’ shows great accomplishment in this medium.

Separately and as a whole, ‘Point of Balance’ amply demonstrates the quality and breadth of visual art currently being produced by younger artists in Highland Scotland. This alone is a reason for great optimism; additionally however the achievement of this show is that it is symptomatic of a wider renaissance of the visual arts, borne of energy and commitment to place, culture and landscape.

© Giles Sutherland, 2005

Related Links

• Timespan website
• Brodie Nairn website
• Fin Macrae website
• Wendy Sutherland website

THE HISTORY OF artistic collaboration is long and illustrious and the current partnership between the Australian printmakers Ian Westacott and Raymond Arnold proves that the tradition continues to thrive. Both artists trained in Melbourne in the 1970s and have remained friends and collaborators since that time.

The pair are skilled practitioners of the craft of etching and whereas Westacott’s work includes detailed studies of buildings, trees and townscapes, Arnold has over the past few years focussed on ornamental French armoury in a series of work he has calls Armours à l’épreuve.

Mt Field Snow Gums (2003)

The pair are exceptional artists in thrall to their methods and materials and both confess to a deep fascination with the often complex techniques involved in the etching process.

Westacott is currently based in Dornoch, where he runs an open print studio (Studio 19 Cataibh) with his wife, the artist Sue Jane Taylor. For a number of years Arnold has visited Westacott at his home and objects, buildings and landscape in the surrounding area – as well as places as far-flung as Paris and Tasmania – have formed the subject matter of the Australians’ intense and enduring collaborative efforts.

It’s almost as if the two have combined their individual identities to make a new creative force.

In ‘Ardross Novar Estate Guardians’ (1998) the artists’ attention has alighted on two ornamental stone mastiffs atop the entrance pillars to a large estate. Westacott’s view is taken from the front while Arnold’s is from the rear; the resulting plates have been overlaid and the end-product is a visually arresting image which takes time to decode.

The skill and attention to craft of these artists is palpable but so is their ability to co-ordinate their efforts so that each distinct image is almost identical in scale and drawing style. It’s almost as if the two have combined their individual identities to make a new creative force.

The technique has been employed again in the similarly intricate ‘Victorian Fountain, Dornoch’ (1997), the only difference being that the perspectival stance employed by both is the same. The result is a work which is not only beautifully crafted and visually enchanting but which appears to have been made by one artist, not two. The overlaying of images has created a subtle ‘ghost’ effect, such is the technical accuracy of the artists’ attention to scale and etching technique.

There are a wealth of equally compelling images here in this beautifully designed and presented show – not least ‘Mt Field Snow Gums’ (2003) – the only collaborative work completed ‘remotely’ via photographs. The exhibition has now ended in Helmsdale, but tours to Victoria, Australia (Australian Galleries, Collingwood, 8-31 July), a fact which underlines the international quality of this exemplary work.

© Giles Sutherland, 2005

Victoria Reeves, the Treasurer of Timespan in Helmsdale, reports on their current exhibition of work by JOHN BELLANY.

JOHN BELLANY’S exhibition at the Timespan Gallery in Helmsdale is full of life and new, exciting work – the most recent painting was finished just a week before the show opened last week.  For fans of Bellany or those who would like to be introduced to the work of this extraordinary artist, this exhibition is essential viewing.

John Bellany CBE, RA, is not only one of Britain’s finest living artists he is also up there with the best of Scotland’s cultural ambassadors.  He travels the world – laughing all the while – exploding with optimism. Painting is a need, he says – an inner fulfilment and an essential and joyful part of his day. 

Bellany is walking around the Timesan Gallery enthusing.  He loves being back in Helmsdale and Timespan in particular.  He is delighted with the way his work has been hung and is thrilled to be reunited with paintings he had not known were to be part of the exhibition.

Every picture tells a story, but Bellany is not in a hurry to explain.   He wants viewers to make up their own minds, and  read into his work whatever they want.  The exception is one of the watercolours of his wife, ‘Woman of Canisp’.  It was painted, he said, the previous Sunday after she had fallen and cut her head.  

The picture exudes a proportionate sympathy – perhaps it was a distraction for both of them from a minor accident that could have been more serious. Helen gazes out with bandaged head, looking a bit sorry for herself: rather like a child  fighting to maintain a performance that will reward her with pity and attention. The drama is transient. The picture is touching and lovely.

Bellany is the  son and grandson of fishermen and boat builders rooted deeply in the Calvanist tradition of fire, brimstone and pessimism.  Those familiar with his early work  will know of his strong religious feelings:  his concern and despair with human cruelty, the sacred and the profane.  There was a time when all Bellany’s art seemed to have been brushed with a persistent sense of foreboding – as if all life was just a step away from the precipice. 

“Bellany now feels free to explore innocence, joy, humour and colour in a way he could not before.”

If this gloomy predisposition caused the illness for which the only recommended cure was a liver transplant, it was recovering from the same operation in 1988 (by no means a certainty) that delivered the new, changed and conspicuously happy John Bellany. He had hardly emerged from the anaesthetic before demanding pen and paper. Immediately he was drawing.

“I watched myself get well as my pictures were pinned up on the walls surrounding my hospital bed.” It was then that he started craving colour, which became the new oxygen of his survival.

Bellany now feels free to explore innocence, joy, humour and colour in a way he could not before. The Timespan exhibition is  fantastically light and colourful. While sometimes challenging, it is never stressful, with the exception of ‘The Storm Eyemouth’, which recalls the horrendous disaster of 1892 when a whole fleet of fishing boats – each with five or six men aboard  – were all lost in a freak coastal hurricane.  “The story of Eyemouth was my bedtime reading when I was 8 years old” says Bellany. “It shaped me.”

‘The Storm Eyemouth’ is a tremendous work. It is large, hangs unframed, and follows you around the gallery from its central vantage point. It tells a tragic story of loss and the collapse of a community, but the colour and brightness of the brush strokes seem also to offer a hint of hope and survival.

To reinforce this theme, on the next wall are stunning  oils of ‘Frazerborough’, ‘Crail’, ‘Port Seaton’ and ‘Nice’ harbours. Benign, full of interest and beauty, there are no people in these pictures and no ambiguity. Just a gorgeous view on a sunny day, soaked with the colour of dreams.

“John Bellany’s powerful work has inspired a new pride in Scottish artists.”

The colour continues. ‘Leaving Nice’ is a large sweep of an oil painting. It shows a building defining a fork in the road with the Diversion sign pointing the same way as Monaco. There are other passing references to gambling  in ‘Rose & Crown’ and  seediness in the delicious ‘Dieppe’. These  prints are excellent value for those wishing to own a Bellany but not able to afford the price of his oils or watercolours.   

The new portraits, particularly the ‘Diva’ series and the breathtaking ‘Early Evening Harbour’ are soft and kind, though the eyes of the women are still confrontational.  The stunning ‘North Sea Maiden Triptych’ (ink wash) and ‘Feathered Hat’ (pen and ink) are totally haunting.

John Bellany’s powerful work has inspired a new pride in Scottish artists.  His paintings are in the collections of major museums and art galleries throughout the world, including the National Galleries of Scotland, The Tate, The Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Now his work has come  back to Helmsdale. This is a must-see exhibition. Leave plenty of time and think about it at your leisure afterwards over a cup of coffee in the River Café overlooking the Timespan garden.

© Victoria Reeves, 2004

The John Bellany exhibition is at Timespan, Shore Street, Helmsdale (01431 821 327), until 11 September (opening hours 10am–5pm Monday – Saturday, 12.30pm – 5pm Sundays

THE SUTHERLAND-ICELAND show will be the introductory part of a larger project. The aim of the project is to try to identify and create links between Sutherland and Iceland, and to try to proclaim the beauty of both. Although I now paint Iceland too I have painted Sutherland all my life. It is my native county – I grew up in Tongue and Helmsdale.

I have always been fascinated by Iceland, which I finally visited last year. The show will comprise ten collage-paintings (five of Sutherland and five of Iceland) and more than 100 photographs of the landscapes of Iceland. In about two years time I will show a larger collection of Sutherland-Iceland collage-paintings at Lancaster University, and sometime after that I will have a major show of them at Timespan. I then hope to take this show to Reykjavik.

My collages are made using a technique I’ve developed which enables the composition of a piece to be completed before glueing is done and yet, after the glueing, is retained with precision (I am currently writing a feature article describing this technique for International Artists Magazine). The collages at the August show will not be for sale, but copies of a print of ‘A Gale in Strath Fleet’ will be for sale in aid of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund. I am giving a talk at Timespan early in the month on how Sutherland and Icelandic landscapes have affected my work.

When I was at college – at art school in London – I wrote my thesis on life in Sutherland, my native county. To convey the remoteness of it I said that Sutherland is “half way between London and Iceland”. From that time, I wanted to visit Iceland, because it is more remote and more northerly than Sutherland – a land beyond Sutherland. I wanted to see a landscape I thought might be like that of “Sutherland, exaggerated”.

I finally managed to go in 2002 and found that much of the country is indeed similar to Sutherland, with its isolated land masses and odd shapes rising out of low land and the lack of tall vegetation to obscure vistas of those masses. The vegetation, mostly, looks just like that of the Scottish Highlands and there are fjords similar to our sea lochs. As most of the landscape is generally mightier in scale, it can indeed be said to be like an exaggerated version of Sutherland.

The lingual connections which derive from the Viking ones are intriguing. Icelandic is very similar to Old Norse. The Icelandic word dalur means valley (Helmsdale); tunga means tongue of land (Tongue). They too have a Vik, on a bay, as is our Wick in Caithness. As it was the Vikings who called Sutherland ‘Suthrland’, the Southern Land, I looked for a Suthrland on the maps of Iceland. I found none, but the southern town of Selfoss has many businesses named as “Sudurland Furniture”, “Sudurland Motors”, “Sudurland Video,” etc.

The painted corrugated iron buildings of Iceland are like those which in the twentieth century were fairly common in Sutherland, especially at Syre and Elfin. However, the volcanos, glaciers, icecaps and geothermal areas ensure that there is also a great deal in Iceland that is very different from Scotland, and the mountains have more serrations and pinnacles.

Hitherto, all my work – abstracted landscape paintings and collages – has been based on Sutherland, and much of it will continue to be. However, before my trip I felt I also wanted to do work based on Iceland, for the same reasons I wanted to visit it. I expected the country to have a certain atmosphere; it was not disappointing. It is mainly this atmosphere I hope to evoke in my abstracted landscapes of Iceland.

I shall use colours which are prevalent there. I hope to convey the starkness of the landscape offset by the (frequently occurring) mist. I will particularly enjoy working from the icebergs of Jokulsarlon, the red hills of Jokulsargljufur, the green lake of Asbyrgi, the black lava fields of Krafla, the fumeroles of Hverarond and the beach at Hraunhafnartangi. This beach is a couple of miles from the Arctic Circle. The atmosphere there can be described precisely as being like that of the north coast of Sutherland – exaggerated! It was ultra bleak and the solitude was quite frightening.

I am glad to show in Timespan as it is located in my home village and in the county which has inspired my work, and the gallery space is exceptionally good.
The exhibition of Ann Davidson’s Iceland-Sutherland work is at Timespan Art Gallery, Helmsdale, Sutherland, from 2 – 29 August 2003. The exhibition will run alongside a show of Scottish Crafts by other artists.

© Ann Davidson, 2003

Related links

• Ann Davidson
• Timespan