including:
Ian Hamilton Finlay and Orkney
A Centenary Celebration

Endings and Beginnings
The Pier Arts Centre Collection – Recent Acquisitions

Ian Hamilton Finlay and Orkney -A Centenary Celebration

The Scottish poet, artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) lived in a number of rural locations around Scotland. In 1966 he moved permanently to Stonypath in the Pentland Hills which became, in time, the world-renowned garden Little Sparta. For a few months in 1959 Finlay lived and worked in the Sourin district of Rousay, and although he only returned to Orkney once more, the island and its maritime setting continued to be threaded through many of his sculptural and published works.

Ian Hamilton Finlay and Orkney brings together a selection of early poems and publications alongside prints from the 1960s produced in collaboration with fellow artists, such as John Furnival and Alistair Cant. The exhibition also includes a photograph by one of Finlay’s long-term collaborators, photographer Robin Gillanders, of the monumental sculpture Gods of the Earth/Gods of the Sea. Created in collaboration with stone-carver Nicholas Sloan, the sculpture was installed, under Finlay’s guidance, at a location near Blossom Quarry in Rousay in 2005, shortly before the artist’s death.

Endings and Beginnings

The Pier Arts Centre Collection – Recent Acquisitions

Over the last twenty years, the Pier Arts Centre Collection has grown more than two-fold, made possible by the generosity, passion and vision of patrons and their families, along with the ambition of staff, friends and its supporters.

The works presented in this new collection display are amongst some of the works of art which have joined Margaret Gardiner’s core collection of modern masters. Visually, there are connections to be made with key collection works by artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and John Wells – and fundamentally, these works are rooted deeply in the connectivity between the processes and structures of nature and human experience.

The Collection, though small in scale, encompasses paintings and sculptures of exceptional quality by the key artists who were instrumental in importing and extending the ideas of the European avant-garde to Britain. 

Much of the Collection has been digitised and is available to view on the Pier Arts Centre’s page on ArtUK website

Since Margaret Gardiner made her founding gift “…to the people of Orkney” in 1979, of 67 works of art, the Pier Arts Centre Collection has grown steadily over the years through generous gifts, bequests and carefully researched acquisitions.

Contemporary additions provide new insight into the core collection and create an active dialogue between twentieth and twenty-first century works, offering fresh perspectives and insights into the historic core (and vice versa), helping the collection as a whole, to evolve and develop in enjoyable and stimulating ways.
 
The Collection now contains just over 200 works, with this exhibition offering an opportunity to view a broad selection of acquisitions, illustrating the generative power of Margaret Gardiner’s unfolding gift and reflecting her desire that generations of Orcadians should “…mould and develop it as they wish.”

More information about the Collection can be found on the Collection page.