Stanley Cursiter, Geo at Yesnaby and Brough of Bigging, 1924
© Estate of Stanley Cursiter. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2021
In 1988 the Stromness poet George Mackay Brown wrote the introduction to a book marking the first 10 years of the Pier Arts Centre. The essay – Orkney and the Artist – notes the significant role that art and artists have played in Orkney life and culture over the last few centuries.
Featuring work by Stanley Cursiter, Robert Rendall, Sylvia Wishart, Gunnie Moberg, Ian MacInnes and others, Orkney and the Artist aims to emphasise George Mackay Brown’s belief that art is critical to the health and well-being of any society.
The exhibition also includes the The Scottish Bestiary, 1986, on loan from from Orkney Arts, Museums and Heritage Collection. The publisher Charles Booth-Clibborn, founder of the Paragon Press, was a student at the University of Edinburgh when he conceived the idea of The Scottish Bestiary, a collection of illustrations of animals that are used to illustrate or accompany stories with a moral or cautionary tone. Booth-Clibborn initially asked several Scottish writers to contribute to the bestiary and George Mackay Brown enthusiastically responded, producing nineteen texts representing animals, both real and imagined, including lobster, wildcat, fieldmouse and stoor-worm.
To help underline this message a changing sequence of exhibitions by contemporary Orkney artists will be on show throughout the summer and autumn months. New work by Stuart Sim, Saoirse Higgins, Ingrid Budge, Jack Whitwell, Boyd & Grogan and Sigurd Smith will offer a glimpse of the breadth and quality of work being produced on the islands today.
This exhibition joins the celebrations of the centenary of Brown’s birth by highlighting the many friendships and associations that the poet made with artists and other creative people in Orkney and beyond.
Orkney and the Artist, by permission of the Literary Estate of George Mackay Brown