“The sea and waves have some mercy, but the rocks have no mercy at all.”.
An exhibition of digital prints in the museum on Great Bernera. John Hodkinson and Rhea Banker, an artist from New York. Rhea’s work can be seen on her site (click here). We have textures, history and the island as common ground. The exhibition sold out, and the money raised from this has gone to benefit the museum.
My contributions to the exhibition use empty pages from old documents in the museum, together with handwritten samples from the notebook of John McLeod who collected the local lore of weather and fishing, which was beginning to be lost. I have added images which I have taken on the island, so it is takes the form of a museum curated show.
Exhibition Statement
Despite it's appearance of being robust, gnarled and knobbly it is really a bit of a wreckling of a word when it tries to convey the richness and wonder of things seen closely. Or to put it another way, the depths which a surface can possess, if looked at hard enough.
There is time, erosion, the process and passage of nature, the markings of days, years, aons. There is growth, organic and geological. There are the traces left by lives etched into the surfaces of the land. Ancient and modern. Scale, large and minute.
Then there is the world of metaphor and allusion, when the minds inescapable need to make connections meets the seemingly random jottings of nature and history on the tabula rasa of mute substance. In archaeology we need to guard against intuitive leaps, seasoning always with a pinch of salt. In art we can celebrate and enjoy them.
As a small boy I remember holding stones, twigs, all kinds of rusting objects which I had found before my eyes, turning and moving them slowly round whilst staring hard into them, learning them, and letting my imagination fly out, telling me all manner of secrets and stories about these small and insignificant things. Insignificant? not to me. I don't suppose for a minute that I was unique in doing that. Nevertheless, this great pleasure has remained with me throughout life. Wherever I am there are wonders beneath my feet.
Whilst out walking, I can't help picking up bits & pieces of evidence of where I've been. This 'stuff' is charged with my memories of where I found it, and comes complete with its own history - which I can only guess. My interest is roused because something about it somehow speaks to me about my own experience. It tells me a kind of story - which I hear in my own way. I like to put these treasured objects and materials together in frames or boxes, sometimes changed & adapted, with the addition of paint, and sometimes unaltered, where the context or juxtaposition itself does the work.
When I do this, it is painting with 'stuff' - invoking the history and character of the materials themselves, letting them tell their own stories which I have recognised because they speak to me of my own experience and vision. In my 'retelling' of these stories, the viewer of course hasn't my memories of where I found them, and looks out upon the world from within their own point of view, so it is up to them to hear these stories in their own way. (But that of course, is another story...)
In recent years, a digital camera has also become a kind of digital notebook, and I must have thousands of specimens in my collection. These in turn are fodder for the creative imagination. I have been coming to Great Bernera at least annually for many years now and there is therefore a large section of images from the island, and the images in this exhibition are from the digital notebook.
The 'pages' from the digital notebook are native to Bernera too, blank papers from old books in the museum collection, and some of the texts are a tribute to the wisdom of George McLeod in preserving memories of the island, which are so easily lost. The images in these words are as wonderful to me as the textures of this precious land.
Tuesday, 1 June 2010