Poet, sculptor, printmaker, gardener, designer… Ian Hamilton Finlay defied categorisation. His artwork backyard in Lanarkshire, 25 miles south-west of Edinburgh, is arguably Scotland’s hottest piece of latest artwork. He was certainly one of Britain’s pioneering “concrete” poets; a lot of his verse is carved into stone, or wooden or linocut. He made toys, created books, printed playing cards, designed screenprints.
Finlay died in 2006, however the Nationwide Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh is staging an exhibition to mark the centenary of certainly one of its genuinely maverick sons. “There’s 50-odd years of sophisticated, attention-grabbing, intellectually stimulating work,” says Patrick Elliot, the chief curator of Fashionable and up to date artwork at Nationwide Galleries of Scotland. “And what’s so attention-grabbing is that the small works—the tiny little prints and postcards and so forth—are simply as significant as these large sculptural initiatives that he might afford to do afterward.”
The Nationwide Gallery’s present, which, Elliot says, comes out of its personal “very spectacular holdings” is in actual fact simply the beginning of a flurry of exercise. Victoria Miro gallery, which represents Finlay’s property, is staging a present beginning in April, and has designated Could as “Ian Hamilton Finlay Month”, when eight exhibitions can be working concurrently, together with in New York, Mallorca and Vienna. Fragments, a guide edited by Pia Simig, certainly one of Finlay’s key collaborators, will even be printed.
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s engraved marble Ring Web Dove (1976) Photograph: Antonia Reeve, © Property of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Finlay, in reality, is an artist whose eclectic work was complemented, and to an extent eclipsed, by his unpredictable and infrequently confrontational character. He has gone down in legend for a stand-off with Strathclyde council officers in 1983 over his refusal to pay enterprise charges for a barn on his celebrated Stonypath backyard, aka Little Sparta; therefore the message “Dying to Strathclyde Area”, which adorns a few of his prints.
He had livid rows with the Scottish Arts Council, and the present will embrace some fantastically lettered posters studying “Mors Concilio Artium” (loss of life to the Arts Council). Finlay developed a status as a recluse however, Elliot says, that was as a consequence of agoraphobia, a situation he was identified with within the early Nineteen Sixties. “I believe individuals anticipated him to be fairly troublesome, however they had been at all times shocked when he turned out to be well mannered and sort and inquisitive and .”
Et in Arcadia Ego (1976) by Ian Hamilton Finlay (with John Andrew) © The property of Ian Hamilton Finlay © Property of John Andrew.
Finlay’s agoraphobia, Elliot says, was “central” to his work. “He couldn’t simply get out and organise exhibits, so he did exhibits in his again backyard, actually. He’s inverting the same old exhibition course of.” And Finlay’s controversial curiosity in navy imagery—he misplaced a fee in France within the mid-Eighties over his occasional deployment of SS symbols—“comes out of his battles”, Elliot says. “He wasn’t into Nazism or something. I shouldn’t suppose he loved having these fights—he was very principled and was solely troublesome if he wanted to be.
“The important thing factor about his work is that it’s very humorous; it’s a really Scottish, wry sense of humour,” Elliot says. “However he couldn’t simply defend himself as a result of he couldn’t get on the market to take action.”
• Ian Hamilton Finlay, Nationwide Galleries of Scotland Fashionable Two, Edinburgh, 8 March-26 Could
