Latest news with #IanHamiltonFinlay
The Herald Scotland
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Global celebration of gardens unveiled in Scotland
The exhibition, which opens to the public on Saturday, will look at places of sanctuary and cutting-edge garden creations around the world. Read more: Garden Futures: Designing with Nature, which runs until 25 January, will also explore how gardens have inspired fashion, artists, video games and advertising campaigns. The Maggie's cancer care centre in Dundee, seaweed gardens in Oban, Little Sparta, the garden created by artist Ian Hamilton Finlay and landscape designer Charles Jencks' Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, are showcased in the exhibition. The Maggie's cancer care centre in Dundee is featured in a new exhibition at the city's V&A design museum, which is celebrating garden creations around the world. (Image: V&A Dundee) The show also features Dior menswear inspired by the Charleston garden in Sussex, the former home of artist Derek Jarman in Kent, self-watering plant pots created by Scottish designers Andrew Flynn and Martin Keane, and a new tapestry commissioned for the exhibition from Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. V&A Dundee director Leonie Bell said: 'Gardens are both everyday and extraordinary – they mean something different to everyone. A new tapestry was commissioned by V&A Dundee from Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh for its new exhibition Garden Futures: Designing With Nature. (Image: Phil Wilkinson) "These designed spaces reflect the times we live in and express our relationship with nature. Some are productive spaces for work, rest and play, while others represent profound spiritual, cultural and political ideas. "This vibrant exhibition blooms with design stories of gardens from Scotland and around the world, unearthing different approaches to creating the 'perfect' garden. "It looks back to early earthly ideas of paradise and considers how gardening can cultivate a greener, fairer and more joyful future for humans and nature alike. "Whether you're a seasoned gardener or you've never grown anything in your life, the exhibition offers a thought-provoking experience, providing moments of sanctuary and creative inspiration within its stunning design."
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ian Hamilton Finlay review – under the classical veneer, this artist was an idiot
We all respect a classicist. So it's hard not to be impressed by Ian Hamilton Finlay's learned citing of the Aeneid, Book X, on a stone column in this exhibition marking the centenary of his birth. The poet, artist and creator of Little Sparta – his renowned art garden – revived the neo-classical style at a time when artists were more likely to quote Warhol than Virgil. He appeals to anyone who's sick of illiterate pop culture – a defiantly archaic figure who made no apology for his erudition. Unfortunately, under the marble veneer, Finlay was an idiot. He flirted – more than flirted, claim some critics – with Nazi imagery, apparently fascinated by Panzer tanks and the SS logo. His fans insist it was all very nuanced but the Little Sparta website acknowledges 'letters in which Finlay had made 'anti-semitic' remarks'. (Their quote marks on antisemitic, not mine.) There are no Nazi images in this exhibition but Finlay's interest in extremism and violence is unleashed in a series of bizarre and brutal conceptual artworks about the French Revolution. Marshall McLuhan's maxim 'the medium is the message' is incised on a panel of black slate. At first this looks like a witty transmutation of pop communication theory into engraved stone, but then you see the drawn outline of a guillotine blade: the 'medium' Finlay's celebrating is the slaughter of the Terror during the French Revolution, when first monarchs and aristocrats, then revolutionaries themselves, were decapitated in a bloody production line. This is even more emphatic in a gnarled wooden reproduction of the block where a victim's neck was held in place for the descending blade. It is inscribed 'Le Revolution est un bloc' ('The Revolution is a bloc') – a quote from the politician Georges Clemenceau in 1891, meaning the French Revolution had to be taken as a whole. Finlay, in a visual pun, changes its meaning: the Revolution requires bloodshed, he enthusiastically declares. To the block with them all. What adolescent stuff. Candles on stools commemorate characters from the French Revolution including Robespierre, architect of the Terror. Marble reliefs pay homage to the revolutionary neo-classical artist Jacques-Louis David and his propaganda masterpiece The Death of Marat, a portrait of the revolutionary leader assassinated in his bath. You may agree with Finlay that the Terror was a necessary purging, or an inevitable backlash, to reactionary attacks on the Revolution. The meaning of the French Revolution is still passionately debated, its history still being written. At least Finlay cares about history, a defender might say. So no, I'm not offended by his love of the guillotine. I am just saddened by the shallowness of an artist who, in his latter years, fumed in his garden about the need to wipe out the filthy aristocratic pigs instead of making art with any kind of universal human content. Superficiality is Finlay's real sin. Artfully concealed behind the apparent weightiness of classical plinths and columns, his take on life lacks seriousness or depth. Someone who makes 'provocative' Nazi references without apparently knowing what he meant by them is a fool not an intellectual. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion These Jacobin artworks were made in the wake of a controversy about his interest in the Third Reich. In the late 1980s Finlay was commissioned to create a sculpture garden at Versailles for the bicentenary of the French Revolution, but stories in the French press about his use of the SS logo, his correspondence with Hitler's architect Albert Speer and the revelation of his apparently antisemitic remarks in letters led to him losing this prestigious job. These artworks about the French Revolution were created in the 1990s in the wake of this humiliation. Perhaps his daft celebration of the guillotine is a longing for revenge. It certainly proves Versailles dodged a bullet, for these works are as crass as they are dry. They are not the art of a deep thinker or true poet. Why does he get in these knots of pseudo-erudition instead of addressing profound themes? Looking at his classical works you might be reminded of the French artist Nicolas Poussin. But in Poussin's most famous painting, Et in Arcadia Ego, shepherds puzzle over an inscription on a stone monument that translates as 'I too am in Arcadia', or maybe 'I was also in Arcadia'. Latin is a richly terse language, the interpretation varies, but however you read it, this refers to death. There is death, even in Arcadia. It is universal. Finlay completely lacks the sobriety and truth of Poussin. We all die, by the guillotine or some other way. Rhetorically raving about the glories of Jacobin violence is the opposite of the melancholy insights of great art. On this evidence, Finlay's works won't last another century. Ian Hamilton Finlay: Fragments is at Victoria Miro Gallery, London, until 24 May.
The Herald Scotland
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
10 exhibitions to see in Glasgow and Edinburgh in May
After first showcasing her work with &Gallery last year in their inaugural open call, Katharine Le Hardy is back with a new body of work for her solo exhibition. Her latest pieces examine the ways in which landscapes can communicate a narrative and induce feelings of nostalgia and escapism in the viewer. Using personal photos, memories, and found imagery as sources of inspiration, the artist has created a world that is part-imagined and part-remembered, born from reality and yet fantastical in appearance. Fragments 3 May-14 June. Entry free. Ingleby Gallery, 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6NX. Portrait of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Image: Norman McBeath RSA) Marking the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay's birth, Fragments is part of a series of exhibitions by Ingleby Gallery. It focuses on a group of significant sculptural installations in stone dating from the 1980s and 1990s that have been adapted in a typically Finlay-esque manner to suggest a poetic metaphor. Work on Paper - Andrew Mackenzie 3 May-20 June. Entry free. Leith School of Art, 25 N Jct Street, Edinburgh, EH6 6HW. Focusing on works on paper, this exhibition brings together a new large-scale drawing in soft pastel and gouache with lithography, etching, oil on card, watercolour, and preparatory charcoal drawings. The barn drawings and paintings in this exhibition touch on our relationship with the land that sustains us to present an unsettling yet beautiful atmosphere. In the Folds 3-31 May. Entry free. Glasgow Women's Library, 23 Landressy Street, Glasgow, G40 1BP. Combining papercrafting, writing, and activism, this project examines Alexandra Compton's life as a queer, working-class, chronically ill woman. The artist handwrites newspaper headlines alongside her own writings onto origami paper before folding them into paper cranes to interrogate who gets to be 'in the fold' within society, art, and literature and asks viewers what they can see on the cranes. Unearthed: The Power of Gardening 3 May-10 August. Entry free. The Mitchell Library and Theatre, North Street, Glasgow, G3 7DN. This display at The Mitchell Library explores the transformative, enriching, and sometimes radical power of gardening. It reveals how gardening can bring people together, empower communities, and shape our relationship with the natural world. As well as a specially designed travelling exhibition created by the British Library, the display also reflects collections in the Mitchell Library. Dear Green Place Exhibition 3-31 May. Entry free. Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, Kelly Gallery, Douglas Street, G2 4ET. The Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, Scotland's second oldest artist society, is celebrating Glasgow 850, the Blythswood Festival and RGI's Kelly Gallery's 60th birthday with this exhibition. The artists have put together a varied show with Glasgow-related sculpture and prints. Glasgow Women's Art Collective Exhibition of Paintings 9-11 May. Entry free. New Glasgow Society, 1307 Argyle Street, Glasgow, G3 8TL. Glasgow Women's Art Collective are bringing their individual works into one space this month to display a diverse range of artworks that reflect the individuality of each artist. The collective is a group of women artists living around the West Coast of Scotland and who are bringing their works together for this latest exhibition. Impression & Expression 3-4 May. Entry free. Coburg House Art Studios, 15 Coburg Street, Leith, EH6 6ET. Impression image (Image: Sara Beevers)Five Coburg House artists are exploring the boundaries of painting and printmaking as a means to reveal the interplay between gesture and process to highlight the expressive power of mark-making in its many forms. This exhibition is more than a showcase of techniques, it is a dialogue between artists and materials. Each work stands alone yet together they form a dynamic, visual conversation. Lamington Heritage Exhibition 4 May-15 June. Entry free. Biggar & Upper Clydesdale Museum, 156 Biggar High Street, Biggar, ML12 6DH. In May 1965 Lamington was one of the first villages to be designated a conservation area and was subsequently granted 'outstanding' status in recognition of its architecture and historic interest. This exhibition explores the history surrounding Lamington from early times through the regeneration of the village until the death of the third Lord Lamington in 1951 and all the way up to the present day. Bless by Mariuccia 8 May-9 June Entry free. The Briggait, 141 Bridgegate, G1 5HZ. Artist Mariia Nechaliuk's artwork is grounded in the exploration of human beings and their relationships with religion, inspired by her own life and childhood experiences. Through her works she explores how people communicate with religion and how they believe in their own ways, not to convince viewers of any particular perspective but merely to offer a space where each person can interpret the work through their own lens regardless of their beliefs.
Spectator
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The polarising poet, sculptor and ‘avant-gardener' who maintained a private militia
Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, 'avant-gardener' and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability. These were opinions you voiced at your peril: anyone who dared ridicule, misrepresent or merely misunderstand Finlay in print ran the risk of being 'visited' by his heavies, the so-called 'Saint-Just Vigilantes' – 'a band of impressionable Scots art yobs … sent to terrorise others and defend his honour', according to the critic Waldemar Januszczak, one of many naysayers who upset the artist. (And yes: he was among those who received a knock on the door.) It's not entirely clear whether the self-styled 'vigilantes' did anything more menacing than vandalise an office (that of The Spectator's sister magazine, Apollo, when the late Brian Sewell published a vicious hatchet job in its pages in 1989); nor as to whether the otherwise agoraphobic Finlay himself was interested in anything other than the notoriety such stunts might generate. If so, he might well have shot himself in the practically shod foot: the habitual adjectives ascribed to him whenever his name appears in the press seem to be 'prickly', 'difficult', and most of all, 'cantankerous'. Small wonder. Finlay actively cultivated enemies where it suited him and fell out with almost everyone: with his best man, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, over some perceived slight or other; with the French government, for cancelling a planned commission; and, most famously – we'll come back to this – the Great Satan that was Strathclyde council.
The Independent
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Ian Hamilton Finlay: The groundbreaking artist and poet who created ‘Little Sparta'
To mark the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay later this year, the poet and artist is the subject of 'Fragments', a new expansive book and exhibition from Victoria Miro. Below, you can find The Independent's original tribute to one of Scotland's greatest artists following his death in 2006 Ian Hamilton Finlay, poet and artist: born Nassau, Bahamas 28 October 1925; CBE 2002; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Edinburgh 27 March 2006. In Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden at "Little Sparta", in Lanarkshire, there's a small upright stone, like a milestone or a gravestone, standing by a path. Inscribed on it are two lines of words: MAN / A PASSERBY. In the abstract it means, presumably: humans come into the world, and vanish from the world, but the world was there long before them and will be there long after. Humans only pass through, pass by. But by setting these words on a stone by a path, the work fixes its general mortal reflection on to you, the viewer, as you experience it. You stand in front of it for a time. Then you pass by. It feels like disappearing. Our greatest living artist is dead: his work survives him. It continues in the world, and that shouldn't be forgotten, even while his embattled career is being remembered. Obituaries and biographies too often equate the work with the working life. It's something that stops when the artist stops. But the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay is a wonder of its time, and I would think for a long time to come. What should be more and more impressive is the magnitude of it: the diversity of its forms, the abundance of its invention, its sheer range of experience and perspective. It doesn't plough a single furrow, a theme, a look, a procedure. It is comprehensive in a way we have learnt to expect art not to be. And, while there are many things that are puzzling about Finlay's art, that low expectation may cause needless difficulty. Finlay's manifold creations include postcards, prints, poems, books, inscriptions, embroideries, neons, gallery sculptures, permanent installations and landscapings around Europe, and - above all - his philosophical/poetic garden in southern Scotland. Trying to encompass its vision, no brief sentences beginning "it's about . . ." will do. It engages with - among other things - agriculture, architecture, warfare, the home, love, gardening, friendship, revolution, music, the organic world, the sky, the sea, classical mythology and philosophy, romanticism, modern art. It practises a sustained and interlocking meditation of these themes, and continually gives hints of an embracing world-view. Or, trying to catch its tone, you must realise that this is an art with many tones. It has the breadth of response that a mature art should have. It straddles the grand and the severe, praise, wonder, militant ferocity, elegy, idyll, wit, sweetness, daft jokes. It is a world. In today's loose art-speak, Finlay was a conceptual artist. He always called himself a poet. He began as a poet. All his mature visual work has an essential verbal component. All of it was made in collaboration with executing artists and craftsmen, who were themselves - very rare in contemporary art - always publicly credited. Finlay was born in 1925 in the Bahamas - father a rum-runner - but his childhood was mostly in Scotland. He spent his youth as art student (briefly), serviceman, Orcadian shepherd, advertising copywriter. In the late Fifties he began to publish poems and short stories. In the early Sixties he was a leading member of the international Concrete Poetry movement - a poetry of few words, where typography and layout are crucial elements, and whose imperatives were for him moral: "a model of order, even if set in a space of doubt". He founded the Wild Hawthorn Press in Edinburgh, for his own and others' publications, and the verbal-visual periodical Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. He made and exhibited toys. There were some early battles with cultural institutions. He invented the one-word poem (but it may have a title, of indefinite length). "The Clouds Anchor / swallow." In 1966 Finlay and his second wife, Sue, moved to Stonypath, a group of farm buildings in a bare spot in the Pentland Hills. Here they began to garden, reclaiming, shaping and cultivating the land, planting trees, digging ponds, installing sculptures and inscriptions. This was the beginning of the work for which Finlay is most recognised, and the subject of his best-known epigram: "Some gardens are described as retreats, when they are really attacks." (He is, among other things, one of the great modern aphorists. Here's another, in a completely different register: "Scotland's birthright: the scone of stone.") Early works in the garden included Nuclear Sail, a black marble monolith that was a sub's conning tower-cum-tombstone, which rose menacingly at the end of a big pond. There was also a group of maples and hornbeams with an inscribed stone plaque before it: BRING BACK THE BIRCH. A great clump of high grass was "signed" with Albrecht Dürer's monogram carved in stone, recreating for real the artist's famous drawing The Great Piece of Turf. Lurking under bushes were stone tortoises, marked like Panzer tanks. Art and nature and ocean and war were set in dialogue - a body of work and a body of ideas mysteriously growing in tandem, a revolutionary idea of what a garden might be. The work and the struggle expanded. The 1970s and 1980s were the years of Finlay's most high-pressure invention and high-profile battles. He produced piercing visual/verbal metaphors with amazing fecundity. He discovered classicism, and from it developed a quasi-religious doctrine, usually defined as against contemporary values. His most explicitly argumentative and combative works were a series of publications and exhibitions that engaged in open culture-critique: a campaign against meaninglessness, in which classical and neo-classical values were mobilised and renewed in opposition to modern liberal utilitarian secularism. Footnotes to an Essay (1977), Heroic Emblems (1977), Poussin Over Again After Nature (1979), Unnatural Pebbles (1981), Talismans and Signifiers (1984), The Third Reich Revisited (1984): each of these was "an attempt to raise (in a necessarily roundabout way) the questions which our culture does not want to put in idea form". The questions concerned the place of power and violence in the world, the relationship of spirituality to nature and to politics; the work was dedicated to redeeming these concerns from the infecting taint of Nazism. Finlay pointed to the way liberal society is utterly blank about what value to attach to the military force that underpins its existence, the way it has no doctrine of nature except as a (diminishing) resource. There were also swipes at meaninglessness in modern art, including the delightful Detached Sentences on Pebbles, where the Kettle's Yard cult of artless-natural-form-as-highest- beauty is subjected to deep mockery. "The modern PEBBLE is proposed as a sculpture, as it were, of a PEBBLE." A prominent (and to some, puzzling) theme of this period is the French Revolution. Finlay once explained its origins simply. His first public installations had been constructed to such low standards that he had thought, "We need a revolution. So I looked to see what revolutions there had been." The (classically inspired) French Revolution, especially the Jacobin phase, became for Finlay the exemplary historical event. Its episodes, personalities and ideas provided the terms in which he framed his conflict with the contemporary world. It also embodied his tragic conception of politics, where idealism and catastrophe are inextricable. The 1980s were the decade of public battles. Finlay had a knack for warfare. His career was marked by feuds, withdrawn publications, cancelled exhibitions. At Stonypath, a barn was converted into a neo-classical "Garden Temple", dedicated "To Apollo His Muses His Missiles His Music". It was the cause of a long and bitter dispute with the local authority as to its rateable status, Strathclyde Region designating it an art gallery, Finlay a religious building. Finlay recruited a band of supporters, named (after the most fanatical Jacobin) "The Saint Just Vigilantes". In 1983 they repelled the Sheriff Officer's attempted raid on Stonypath, to impound works in lieu of rates. This was the First Battle of Little Sparta, as it was now renamed. The next raid succeeded, though. There were other Battles, including one against a National Trust guide to "follies" in which the garden was presented as an eccentric whimsy. Each fight generated enormous propaganda, and was conducted with a mixture of fury, witty mischief and profound reflection. A worse was to come at the end of the Eighties, when a commission to make a work in Paris, marking the bicentennial of the French Revolution, was opposed by a French art-world campaign that accused Finlay of being a Nazi. He had made a sculpture where the lightning-flash insignia of the SS was used to signify - the shock was deliberate - the utterly amoral violence of the natural world. After much litigation, the project was never undertaken. To speak, as one can't avoid doing, of Finlay's doctrines and disputes shouldn't deflect attention from the substance of this work, its marvellous and somewhat elusive power. No other artist working in the conceptual mode has understood so well its essential devices of association and juxtaposition. (No modern artist full stop has understood so well the emotional force of typography.) In its unceasing connection-making, Finlay's work reaches across huge distances, arranges the most far-flung and breathtaking unions, the most abrupt confrontations, the most homely similes. The machine gun as a flute (the air-vents, the finger-stops); the swallow as the sky's anchor (see its shape!); ploughed fields as "the fluted land", fluted like the grooves of a classical column; the floats of a fishing-net as lemons; the wake of a boat as stitching; a Malevich Red Square as the slant blade of a guillotine; a bird-table as an aircraft carrier; a sun-dial as a sail. The mental sweep is transporting, between war and peace, land and sea, wild nature and human cultivation, remote antiquity and the present day, home and the infinite. Or between the forms of art and the human heart - as in this definition of "arch" (creative definition being another of Finlay's favourite genres): "An Architectural Term. A Material Curve Sustained by Gravity As Rapture by Grief". The most startling effect is the way Finlay can, in the same breath so to speak, convey a severe high-mindedness and sheer fondness for the things of life; as he said, A lot of my work is to do with straightforward affection, (liking, appreciation), and it always amazes me how little affection for ANYTHING there is in art today. His great work is the garden. It continued to be extended, almost up to the artist's death. It will still be open to visitors in the summer months. What's most striking is the care and fragility of it, the way it's not a great act of moulding, but a series of small piecemeal acts of arranging and placing. It exemplifies one of Finlay's watchwords: piety. The works are set in an environment that is only partly a human construct, in growing and encroaching nature, in changing wind, light and weather, and it respects that distinction, through scale and restraint. This conduct of art as an act of observance, not an act of mastery, gives the work its grace. It reflects the fundamental axis of Finlay's vision: the encounter between the human and what is not the human. His art is an affirmation of our inhabitation, cultivation and working of the world; and, at the same time, an emphatic statement of human limits. It looks to where those limits are met, in wild green world, the boundless sea, the convulsions of nature and human destructiveness, death. Human life - man, a passer-by - is understood in relation to what is beyond it, a realm that is often characterised as the divine, the gods, to be honoured and propitiated. The perspective is pagan, classical, tragic. For years Finlay never left the bounds of his isolated territory. He had a kind of "agoraphobia". He saw friends and visitors. The work and the campaigns were conducted by post. The exhibitions were organised first by his wife, and later - after their separation - by his assistant Pia Maria Simig. He only left to go to hospital. But when he suffered the first in a series of strokes, around the turn of the century, this home-boundness strangely cleared. In his last years he went to his openings, went to restaurants, visited friends, went abroad. Already-conceived projects continued to be executed. He never originated another work. "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up . . . Let us go to the next best: - There is nobody." Finlay is dead, and those words from William Gerard Hamilton's tribute, on the death of Samuel Johnson, are what I want to say too. In the art of the last 50 years, there's been nothing like it.
