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

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

Too Hot To Handle by potter Elaine Henderson

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

Beach Stones sculpture by Sam Green

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

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

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

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

A lobster creel by Rebecca Marr

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

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

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

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

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

© Catherine Turnbull, 2010

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Waterfront Gallery

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

Pier Arts Centre Christmas Open exhibition (© Ian Stephen)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• Waterfront Gallery
• Ian Stephen

I HAVE BEEN really looking forward to this exhibition for a while now, having had a sneaky preview of some of the work a few weeks ago. It seems like too long a time since we have had the opportunity to see an exhibition of Sheena’s paintings, and so I would urge you to visit the Waterfront Gallery before this exhibition finishes.

Ladder Race I (red) by Sheena Graham-George

There are clearly a large number of people who feel the same way as I do about Sheena’s work, as plenty of pieces had red dots alongside them. Not to worry though, this is a significant exhibition with over 50 works so there are some left waiting to be snapped up.

As you enter the gallery you are faced with what look simply like bright and cheery paintings. Lots of colour, particularly blues in the oil paintings, and tiny watercolours that look like little jewels with no less strength of colour than the larger oils.

You could be forgiven for thinking, on first glance, that these are figurative, almost fantastical paintings with little depth, and, if that is all you want from the paintings, then that’s fine and dandy. But look closer, think about the symbolism Sheena is using, and the works reward your time and effort.

I think that these paintings do exactly what they should. They draw you in because of their detail and beauty, and then they make you think and challenge your own shallowness! I don’t know about how anyone else would read them, and I don’t need to know what was going through Sheena’s mind when she was painting them, but I think they work because they allow you to reflect back to yourself your own concerns and worries (if you have any!). To me they have a dark quality which I relish.

The recurring themes of teetering ladders with tottering people at the top, rocking chairs at the top of buildings or ladders just waiting to rock too far and fall, flying people and birds, and houses cast adrift because they are sitting on boats all tell me that whatever strength you have in either a relationship or in a sense of being rooted somewhere, or even in your own ability to make the leap, well, it just won’t last, even if you are completely oblivious to the imminent dangers.

I told you it was dark – or is that just me?! They could also, I guess, be viewed as people succeeding over adversity, making leaps of faith or being prepared to take crazy risks to get to where they need to, but I don’t see them like that. The paintings ‘Up on the Roof’, ‘House lll’, ‘Ladder Race l (red)’ and ‘House l’ are really good examples of this group of works.

I am lucky enough to own a couple of Sheena’s paintings and depending on my mood when I walk past them I either see quirky surreal pictures, or really quite menacing images. I absolutely love that! I really enjoy the different levels of her paintings, the different readings you can make and the sheer depth of her work.

As the daughter of a birder, I also completely adore the fact that Sheena puts into images just what it is like to be related to one! Her depictions of massively oversized telescopes describe to me the obsessional qualities of this ‘hobby’, the ability of birders to block everything else out when focussed in on a rare bird.

Attempting to catch birds in nets is a metaphor for the desperate lister, and the birder teetering on the top of a set of extremely spindly stilts depicts the lengths a twitcher will go to in order to see a gripper. Again – it could just be me and my own reflecting back at me, but whether your life has been blessed by knowing a birder or not, I think you will get a huge amount out of these works.

I could go on and on – about the way Orkney, and St Margaret’s Hope in particular, have invaded Sheena’s recent paintings to beautiful effect, or about the sheer exceptional technical ability she has with paint, but I won’t. I will simply encourage you once more to get along to the Waterfront and enjoy!

© Clare Gee, 2009

Links

• Waterfront Gallery

Fiona Norris - Pebble 1

THIS EXHIBITION, squirreled away in the long back gallery of a shop full of beautiful buyable prints, knitwear, CDs and take-home-from-your-holiday-stuff, is testimony to the power of friendship, the pull of home and the unexpected directions life takes us in.

The artists are old Orkney friends. Their mothers were friends before them. Fiona went to Grays in Aberdeen and did drawing and painting: Eileen to Edinburgh to do graphics. After nine years as a designer, Eileen found herself travelling the world – Romania. Pakistan, Russia, Quatar. Fiona, after a spell in Glasgow, came home to Orkney.

When Eileen returned too, they resumed their friendship. They say opposites attract – you can’t help thinking this as you look at their work. The contrast is immediately apparent as you enter the space. Norris’ The Shore 1 &2 dominate the end wall. Lowering ochre stones, Henry Moore-like in their spherical weight, feel massive, almost intimidating.

On closer inspection there’s a hint of the tie-dye going on – layers and spots of acrylic scraped back and rubbed “to intensify, like a tinted lens”, she says. Sand Aqua is just a cube of blue, at first glance – then you look deeper and it’s like seeing into the depths of a pool. Detail and texture abound among the vigorous yet delicate dark blues overlaid with chiffony seaweed strands.

Her choice, in the smaller studies, of a block shape to work on – a cube which juts from the wall – is an odd one. The roughness of the canvas isn’t a bar to a real sense she creates of water moving under light, seamed with sand; but a bit of me wants to see these works flat on a table, so that we are really looking in, and down – almost dipping a hand in.

Water’s edge is another delicate yet sensual confusion of lacy blue surf edged by that hot ochre Orkney sand. I’m less taken by Deep Red 1 2 &3, though I know the red seaweed you find here which has inspired this particular ‘tinting of the lens’. She loves spheroids – there are yellow pebbles, orange ones, deep down ones, surface-brushing ones.

Her “momentary glimpses into an underwater world” certainly work; I want her now, after these reflections of the flux of natural forms by the sea, to branch out – she has a clear understanding of the way colour heightens our perception of form. I’m looking forward to a move further up the beach.

In contrast, Bevan’s work (accompanied by words – she’s a writer too) betrays a love of detail and pattern, enhanced perhaps by her travels amongst icons, Russian dolls, Arabic markets. “Facades of buildings have always interested me”, she says – and her drawings have an architectural precision which radiates calm, while at the same time catching the essence of the moment.

In Arabic Boy and Coffee Pots, the lad is caught hefting a lustrous pot whilst directing a calculating gaze at the onlooker – a riot of stripes, diamonds and shadows, it’s charming. Doha Shopfront – a plastic paradise of balls, kids’ chairs, washing baskets – is full of meticulous observation and brilliant colour on a tiny scale.

She’d make a great illustrator – children would love these tiny observations. Already I want to know what happened to her art when the odyssey ended and she came home to Orkney.

The answer’s right here; St Magnus Cathedral Angel is a beautiful piece of drawing. The quality of quiet observation in this delicately realised piece is superb. Lichen on the dyke behind the figure is a subtle reminder of nature taking over; meanwhile the elegant stone wings are tethered to the Orkney landscape, serene and elegant.

We have a new and enticing view of the Italian Chapel, “that iconic place” which means much to her, having been an outsider in many countries. She lets us look up to the painted roof and the bully beef light holders, with their elegant curved shapes and stars.

Slightly skewed, full of rhythm, this is a fine piece – as is the Orkney Stella, where again, her writer’s imagination combines elements of Orkney – the seafaring past, the permanence of stone in St Magnus and the chapel, fish, carved faces, gulls – to create an intricate heraldic celebration. This one demands that you go back again and again.

I’m reminded of Nicola Bayley, a consummate illustrator and lateral thinker. Bevan has the same off-centre way of looking at her world in the best drawings.

Development is clear as we move to studies of Hoy Sound in colour. It’s good to see a move to the larger canvas. As you’d expect, emphasis is on the delicate. Chalky swirls of cloud around glimpses of islands; blinks of the yellow-green spring rain; and a gutsy ultramarine wave in Hoy Sound 111 which gives a tantalising glimpse of what she’s capable of when she thinks big.

These studies are the beginning, I suspect, of what will be a fruitful investigation of homecoming – an exciting response to movement, as compelling as the stillness of the angel. Two friends: two styles: two pairs of open Orkney eyes.

© Morag MacInnes, 2009