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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Sentences
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Verdict: Word impact
Art Exhibition - (Free)
29 July to 23 Oct 05 - 10:00-17:30
Buses - 23, 27 from Hanover Square
Sentences is literal - 30 or so sentences written on the walls of 6 rooms and a hallway in the stately home of Scotland's Kew Gardens.
They're in typefaces from Times to Gill, this very Courier, serifs, sans-serifs; in grey, blue, pink, and the colour negative opposites of red and green. There's lower case, upper case, the two mixed, italic. There are sentences in lines, and blocks; at eye height and above, and at the bottom of door frames; in a passage, in rooms with windows to be looked out of in between. There are gnomic usings 'Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks'. And musings about gnomes 'The garden gnome is of the Gothic and not the Hellenic tradition'.
Sentences range from the impishly tart 'Stupidity reduces language to words', to the portentious 'The dull necessity of weeding arises, because every healthy plant is a racist and imperialist; every daisy (even) wishes to establish for itself an Empire on which the sun never sits'.
Inverleith House, now a dedicated art gallery, was built in 1774. It's a modestly-sized house with elegant rooms and cornices. The window-panes seem close to the Golden Section, and everywhere there is a sense of careful proportion - from the room dimensions to the layout of type on the walls. The gallery has white walls and ceiling, and a light timber floor, so there is nothing to clash with the writing. Views out are to the Royal Botanic Gardens, a public park and plant research establishment.
Curator Paul Nesbitt explains that gardens are very important to the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. The artist's garden Little Sparta 'the garden recently voted the country's most popular artwork' according to the gallery, 'has been the artist's work in progress for nearly 40 years'. The exhibition is site-specific to the gallery. One of the windows looks out to the distant hills beyond Edinburgh, toward's the artist's Little Sparta. So there is, as the curator points out, a physical connection.
Paul Nesbitt: 'Ian Hamilton Fraser is known as a concrete poet - where the meaning of the poem is made tangible by the arrangement of the letters or characters on the page or wall.'
'Oh dear', he adds, 'does that sound pretentious?'
In other hands, perhaps. But there's a frisky quality to the words that makes light what could in other hands be dough. The letters are hand-painted on the wall with graceful precision by Les Edge. There are poems laid out unusually - La Plume Est Dans Le Jardin, Lark/Blue, Clouds/Rain. There's a chain of the word 'daisy' in a range of styles wittily evoking the flower. There are aphorisms about friendship. The curator describes the artist, who is 80 - a birthday this show celebrates - as 'a moral philosopher rather than a poet'.
But one with a sense of humour.
Credits:
The exhibition is written by - Ian Hamilton Finlay. Devised by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Pia Maria Simig. Words hand-painted by - Les Edge. Curator, Inverleith House - Paul Nesbitt.
END
John Park
reviewed Monday 8 August 05 / Inverleith House / Royal Botanic Gardens / Edinburgh
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
