Menorticle; It's An Art Vibe

Having driven up over the border to Hawick, I spent a week there parked in the council-provided "aire". Level standing, dump-station, bins, fresh water... and it's free! Thank you to the town council for their understanding that this encourages people in vans to stay and spend their moolah in the various businesses. Supermarkets, of course, but also museums, special interest shops, and some excellent restaurants. 

After that respite period, it was on to Edinburgh to spend another static week. This was time spent with my sister, as is the pattern now. Most of the time was just chilling, but we did make one outing to the gallery. 

Andy Goldsworthy is a renowned 'nature artist'. He sculpts/paints/photographs/films with plants, rocks, water... himself... both in and with nature. Profound and astounding, his work requires of the observer to be themselves a part of nature. Quite often, the works are interactive. It will not surprise you at all that I have reserved a few of my photos for the Menonday Art Vibe series, and there will be a Views page dedicated to a few more in November. This post is purely to whet your appetite, pique your interest, and tantalise your brain cells.

Andy's oeuvre consists almost entirely of temporary structures. There are a few items which will stand for a long time, those which involve stone. Mostly, though, everything is left to the elements and gets, eventually, reabsorbed. I find magnificence in this, much as the creation of the most intricate mandalas by meditators, which are swept away once complete. Everything - everything - is temporary. It is incumbent upon us to see the beauty in everything, the usefulness of everything, and that our very presence changes what is before us, beneath us, beside us. Take the Oak Passage in the image above. You will learn more about it when it turns up in Art Vibe proper, but as a pointer, know that the branches were all retrieved from fallen oaks (mostly after a major storm last winter). As we walk around and through the central avenue of the structure, we are invited to consider the mighty trees and how their wood has been a staple of construction for the human race for millennia... not least the very floor of the gallery. On the end wall, bracken stems have been split and splayed, pinned to the wall with tiny wooden splinters to create a snake-like maze that is mesmerising. Mac1 sat and sketched the oaks - and me with the Rolls-later as we perambulated...

Immediately on entering the gallery, we were faced with an installation. Wool Runner is a gathering of many 'blown' fleeces, which is when the sheep start to lose their wool before shearing has begun. Many of the flyaways get hooked on wire fencing and bushes, so they are easily gathered. Andy was inspired to create this piece to honour the original stair covering (removed many years back), which would have been woven from wool. The markings are what the farmers would have organised to separate flocks, and to mark which ewes were served by the ram, and also to determine which ewes had twins and which triplets. Every farm has its own colour coding.

Whilst we were all enjoying this exhibition under the roof of the National Gallery of Scotland, Andy's works are almost entirely created outdoors. A lot of his film and photographic work involves himself, or at least his hands, becoming the art: Hedge Walking (he literally crawled through hedges), Brambles (his hands crushing brambles looking like blood), and his Shadow series (lying down on dry ground and rising once the rain shower has passed) are some examples. The use of all the materials around him in any environment is his skill. He will spend hours creating decoration on tree trunks and stumps, or rocks, using leaves and water in such a way as to look like gilding, silvering, quite literally painting with nature. 

Another of his things is to bring a mass of twigs, or reeds or vines together to create pattern. In the gallery, one room is dedicated to Skylight.

Reeds are embedded in each other and suspended like a waterfall from the very high ceiling under a cupola. The artist had hoped that the gallery would have had the glass cleaned for the exhibition, so that the light effects would be more pronounced. They did not, and this is a great shame. I was fortunate to be present in the enclosure when there was a brief burst of pure sunlight, emphasising the fall of the rushes, but mostly it was a bit dull. That said, the effect of this surrounding curtain of natural material, with the faint odour of the riverside still emanating, was cocooning and comforting. I would have quite liked to have lain down and stayed there a while!

Red Wall is made entirely from the material gathered from the Lowther Hills in Dumfriesshire (where the artist has lived for three decades). This is the stuff that was originally - and still by some - used by farmers to colour their sheep for market... remember those Suffolk Lambs I showed you recently? There was some process to creating this work, though. In the words of the artist, "...clay-rich earth was dried, crushed, mixed with water, passed through a sieve, dried once more, then reconstituted into a workable material, cracking as it dried. The earth is vivid red because of its iron content. Our blood is red because of its iron content. It's a reminder that we are bound to the earth."

Being the ever-aware bloke he is, Tables, seen here behind Mac1, are, quite literally, the tabletops from the production work of the material as mentioned above. Andy had a team of helpers for the earth preparation. "It was important that the people working on the table weren't aware that the canvas might become a work in its own right. Its integrity as an artwork lies in it being a by-product of the process, not its purpose."

All rather fun! I do encourage you to explore the various photo galleries on Andy's home page, as linked above, and, next time you are out in nature, try to see leaves and mud differently!