Bourgeois and Inckle

Untitled: drypoint etching 1999

It's not often that Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) makes it north to the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. This Hayward Touring exhibition (on show from 6 August to 10 September 2016 at the Main Gallery) featured two series of work - her Autobiographical Series (1994) capturing some of her earliest memories, and a set of 11 drypoints from 1999 which are more abstract. Although much of Bourgeois' work is associated with textiles and sculpture, between 1980s and her death she returned to printmaking. 

Freya liked the images of scissors 'giving birth' to small scissors - a wonderful image referring to Bourgeois' seamstress mother. The image which stayed with me was this one, of a tiny female figure balancing on the edges of what look like shards of glass, surrounded by darkness. It is powerful. I love the way Bourgeois is so present in her work, so vital, and seems to transform personal pain into something much more uplifting. 

Untitled: drypoint etching 1999

Alongside the Bourgeois exhibition in the Main Gallery were sculptures and prints by Caroline Inckle, a 2012 graduate of Moray College in Elgin. Her work explores a material relationship with the world, both through images and sculpture. These intriguing 'spears' of pared wood painted in ochre and blue attracted Freya and Kai. I did not feel such a close connection with the sculptural work as with some of the prints, in which landscape seemed to be imbued with the sense of geological time and the creative process.


 

Iceland in action!

In August fellow-Fine Art student Liz Crichton and I helped two Shetland-based artists Roxane Permar and Susan Timmins with their collaborative art project, Northern Exchange – Cold War Histories and Nuclear Futures. Roxane is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Shetland College UHI. Iceland was the latest stage of Roxane and Susan’s Northern Exchange project, which has swapped Cold War stories across the Arctic fringe, including Russia and Alaska.

The project gathered recollections of the Cold War from the communities living close to four Radar Domes at the four corners of Iceland. Since the US military left in 2006, Iceland’s four Radar stations have been run by the Icelandic coastguard for NATO. They remain shrouded in secrecy, tracking potential air, surface and sub-sea military activity. We started at Bolungervik in the Westfjords, and visited Keflavik in the southwest, Höfn in the southeast and Þórshavn/Langanes in the northeast. For the Westfjords stage we were joined by Asta and eight Icelandic trainee teachers, as well as by four Finnish students from the University of Lapland led by artists Elina Härkönen and Timo Jokela. 

It was a great experience. We brought from Scotland the wooden struts, bolts and polypropylene triangles for constructing a small Radar Dome of our own, onto which participants wrote or drew their memories and thoughts in UV-sensitive pen, visible only by the light of a ghostly purple torch. On our long journey we met so many interesting people - from those who as children had attended US base Christmas parties to women who had been 'branded' for being seen with American soldiers, to those who had secured permits for the soldiers to leave the boredom of life on the strictly segregated military bases for short home-stays. Historians and authors also took part.

 

After our three weeks of work our small Dome was symbolically erected at Höfði in Reykjavik, the site of the 1986 Gorbachev-Reagan summit that presaged the unravelling of the Iron Curtain.
Next it is to be part of an exhibition at the international Relate North conference for artists and creative engagement to be hosted in Shetland in November 2016. Its triangles hold the stories of so many participants, from such a diversity places and perspectives. Yet it is the rich yet intangible network of relationships woven with people and places, knowledge gleaned and awareness raised, that is the real and powerful outcome of this journey of creative engagement.