new works by

Claire Barclay

Annie Cattrell

Gareth Fisher

Kenny Hunter

Ross Sinclair

and
Jessica Stockholder

new text by
Duncan McLean

HOUSEWARMING

by Duncan McLean

Canny Man spent the morning collecting driftwood for the stove, and the afternoon making three big pots of chilli con carne. As they were having their final simmer, he wrote out labels in red marker pen and taped them to the potlids. The first label said HOT, the second label said VERY HOT, and the third label said DANGER! DO NOT EAT THIS CHILLI!
That done, Canny Man turned all the lights on, closed the door behind him, and walked round the shore to the village. It was getting dark by this time, but the streetlamp lit up the noticeboard outside the post office, and the redmarker poster he’d pinned there a week before:

COME TO CANNY’S HOOSE!
It’s taken 12 year’s but it’s finally finished Thank God. So ­
“HOUSEWARMING”, SATURDAY 11th,
7pm to whenever.
ALL WELCOME! (Except Alan of Taftsness,
any of the Simonson’s, Mary Grady
and all Faeroe Islander’s.)Canny Man carried on along the empty street to the hotel. He paused outside and took one last look along the curve of the bay to his house out on the point, all windows ablaze, the dark hulk of the caravan lurking off to one side. The whitewashed walls shone with reflected light as they rose from their happing of carefully pointed-up rubble: the shell of the old herring station he’d bought and gutted and grown his new place out of.
Canny Man looked down at his hands, examined the grimy palms and thick fingers. He turned them over and looked at the skinned knuckles and chipped nails. Then he clenched them into fists and walked into the bar.

A couple hours later, Canny Man looked up from his fifth pint and said, Quiet thenight, Peat.
The barman nodded, sighed, and looked around the empty lounge. The World’s Biggest Halibut, stuffed above the mantelpiece, looked back, just as banana-mouthed. Course you ken why it’s quiet? said Peat.
Something good on the telly? said Canny Man. I never look at it myself. Can’t abide sitting doing nothing. He drained his glass, slid it towards Peat for a refill. Anyone that says different can go to hell.
No, said Peat, That’s not it. Every bastard’s away up to your place for the party.
Eh? Oh aye! Canny Man chuckled, checked the clock above the gantry. The housewarming: I forgot about that.
Peat handed over a full pint. How many years has it taken you?
Ninety-nine years, said Canny Man. With time added on for bad behaviour.
Twelve years, said Peat. I mind when you bought that place. Big plans you had. Night after night you’d be in here, drawing on the beer mats, telling us all what you were going to do. Under-floor heating beneath the flags. A door from the bedroom straight to the boathouse. The bothy at the back for nothing but home brew
Ach well, said Canny Man, The best laid plans He looked away, sniffed, then stuck out his chin. At least I got the bastard built, he said. That’s the main thing: it’d still be a rickle of stones and a stink of fish guts if I hadn’t stepped in. He took a big gulp of beer, swilled it around his gob, then swallowed. All my own work too, he said. No one can say The Canny Man doesn’t finish nothing.
Och, no one could ever say that, said Peat. I’ve seen you finish hundreds of things. Pints, mostly. But a good few nips as well. Even a cup of tea once, when you came by the house a few summers ago with Esther.
Canny man set his glass down on the wooden bartop with a crack, and fixed Peat in a glower. Do NOT, he said, Do NOT mention that woman to me. Jesus Christ! Don’t even mention her near to me. She’s gone, thank Christ, and I don’t want reminding. I’m well shot of her and I don’t wish her back. The last thing I need is bastards like you going on and on and ON about her. It’s finished. Good riddance. Esther Broch is nothing to me. So drop it, just drop it. Forget her. Just let her go, eh? Do us all a favour and shut the fuck up about Esther.
Aye, said Peat. Sorry. He turned round to the gantry and filled one nip glass with Glenlivet, another with 100 Pipers. Here Canny, he said, sliding along the Pipers. On the house.

An hour or so later the door battered open and Douglas and Irene Tulloch came walloping in, the pair of them laughing like gite horses, their cheeks red from cold, the smell of spirits, wind and seaweed all about them.
Canny! cried Douglas. What the hell are you doing here?
Ice skating, said Canny Man.
You’re missing yourself, said Irene. The party’s going great. It was a bit slow to start, like, with you not being there and that, but after a while we all just thought, we’ll start without him ­ he can catch up!
Great grub by the way, said Douglas. That chilli’s just the ticket on a night like this. Then he laughed.
Canny man frowned. What? he said.
Douglas was giggling too much to answer.
Irene laughed too, then leant forward. Was it deliberate? she said.
Was what?
The labels.
The labels? said Canny Man. Were the labels deliberate? No. I wrote them out by accident. I was actually trying to do the Record fucking crossword at the time, but I took my eye off the page and ­ WOOPS! ­ before I knew it I’d written out three labels and stuck them to the pan.
He doesn’t ken! cried Douglas, and gave another hoot of laughter.
Fucking WHAT?
You’re a gink, said Irene, shaking her head and grinning. You got the labels mixed up. The mild pot had the DANGEROUS label on it, and the dangerous pot said MILD. Suzy Inkster just about died! Took one spoonful of what she thought was the safe one and went ballistic! You should’ve seen her. Steam coming out her nostrils in three seconds flat, face the colour of a lobster
The names she was calling you, said Douglas. Your lugs should’ve been bizzing.
Canny Man looked at them. They were, he said. But not as much as her arse will be the morn’s morn. And he jumped off his stool amidst the laughter and strolled off to the lavvy, slate-faced.
When he came back from the bog, Douglas was holding open a string bag and Irene was slotting in cans and bottles.
We were just talking, said Peat, About Jimmy Wilson out at Warness. Mind he spent ages doing up the old manse ­ finest place in the South End, so it was ­ till the night afore they were due to move back in, there was an electrical fault in the freezer, and the place burnt to the ground.
He was so pissed off, said Irene, That he moved to Wick. Can you imagine!
Canny Man shrugged. Doesn’t bother me, he said. I haven’t got a freezer.
And there was another bunch on the Mainland, said Douglas. Friends of my brother’s wife. Clam divers. They scrimped and saved every penny, finally managed to pay off their twenty-five year mortgage in seventeen years. Threw a big shindig, burnt the mortgage documents at midnight to celebrate their freedom. Course, they were waving these flaming papers about in the air as they danced, and before they knew it the lampshade had caught fire, and then the curtains, and then the whole bloody house.
I mind that fine, said Peat. They’d put every penny into the mortgage fund ­ they’d never bothered with insurance.
Canny Man rubbed his nose. I’ve no mortgage to burn, he said. Paid the whole damn lot out of my own sweat and blood, and no one can say any different. If they do they’re lying, fuck them.
Hear hear, said Irene.
We must be off, said Douglas. Drams all round afore we go.
Peat obliged, including one for himself.
A toast, cried Irene. To the new Canny house! They all raised their glasses.
Lang may yer lum reek, said Douglas.
Lang hairy bum cheeks, said Canny Man.

Twelve years I’ve been staring at those walls, said Canny Man, after the Tullochs headed off. From rubble to pointing to plaster to paint. I need a few hours away.
Some folk think you’ll never move in, said Peat, polishing the nip glasses. You’ve spent so long on the place that you’ve scunnered yourself with it.
Maybe, said Canny Man. But I’m no tinkler. I’m scunnered of the caravan as well. Scunnered with every fucking place on this island, if you really want to know. Maybe Esther had the right idea after all ­ get right away from the bloody wet turd. Though why she had to go with that Faeroese fish-fucker I’ll never ken. Bastard. That house was mean for the both of us, and where’s she? In some pink-painted glorified garden-shed in Torshaven! I hope it blows away in a gale. Aye, and Jens Peter Penis with it.
Some of the Westray boys were telling me he’s named his new trawler after her, said Peat. Three million quid it cost him. The Girl Esther. It’s got a sauna and everything, and a big double bedroom so the pair of them can go on trips together, sail away anywhere they like.
Canny Man let out a low moan, then slid his elbows across the bar till his chin hit the wood.
Well, said Peat, Anywhere there’s cod.

By half-ten all but the gantry lights were out, and Peat had finished cashing up. Counting the night’s takings had only taken a couple of minutes: apart from Canny Man, no one else had so much as sat down in the place. Apparently the party of the decade was going on at the house out on the point: two or three different folk had said so when they came in for reinforcement carry-outs.
Eventually Canny Man said cheerio, his first word for near an hour, and headed off. Stopping to button his jacket, he heard Peat bolting the door behind him before he was even off the front step. He stood there and listened to the key turning in the lock behind him. Away to his left, round the curve of the bay, he could see his new house, the windows blasting out light, and tiny figures jumping about behind the triple-glazing. Somebody must’ve opened a window or two, cause the sound of music and laughter and dancing-skirls came floating over the water on the cold night air.
He crossed the road, took the short path that lead through the grass down to the shore, and turned along it, the shingle crinching under his feet. Behind him, he heard a car start up then drive off through the village. It was Peat, heading off for the party. It looked like everyone in the whole damn village was up at the house now – apart from the man of the moment, the host, the idiot who’d spent near half his life patching and shoring up the place, rebuilding and roofing, damp-coursing and rewiring, painting and decorating, sweating and bleeding. And all for what? To turn an old ruin intoa dream house? The house of fun? Home?
Maybe he should moved into one of the council semis down by the school. Or bought one of those Norwegian kit houses: like Lego, those things, you could have them up in a weekend
As Canny Man walked on along the beach, the music and laughter coming from his house got louder. There was a gentle breeze blowing from that direction, rubbing his nose right in the sounds of the party. He stopped to listen, and to look at the bright windows, the only lights on the north side of the bay. Then he shifted his gaze to look out over the dark, empty sea beyond the point. Nothing but water all the way. All the way to Faeroe.
He must’ve been closer to the edge than he’d thought, for cold water was starting to seep in through the lace holes on his boots, and the split where the sole was coming away on the right one. But instead of stepping back up the slope, he started to walk on into the bay. Slowly at first, then quicker, he walked straight out, northwards. The water came up to his ankles, then his knees, then his thighs. He stopped. He could feel his balls shrivelling as the North Sea slapped them.
Jesus, he said, standing there. That is cold.
He looked out over the darkness of the sea, his house blazing away in the corner of his eye.
That is cold, he said.

© Duncan McLean 2000

the blue chamber.

Humans on the whole are inquisitive. We look for new experiences, places and people even if that means taking a chance, testing the water or just plunging in and hang the consequences. We also can’t help telling others of what we saw or who we met ­ sharing our adventures, telling the story of a film we’ve just seen, or the plot of a book we’ve just read. The public here too are intrigued for a glimpse into the past and many visit Duff House to experience the lives and surroundings of previous residents. Their visit allows them to wander, examine and snoop into the rooms, where they become confronted by an array of objects and fine art. Perhaps they are unsure of what to expect. Perhaps they linger. Perhaps they quickly go from room to room. “The Blue Chamber” is an exhibition about this human condition: the need for search and research; the need for exploration and possibly risk- sometimes our yearnings and travels end in disaster; sometimes our desires take us beyond our wildest dreams and imaginings.

In the North-east of Scotland there are no contemporary exhibition spaces: the places where we expect to see the work of these artists, we have to use other available and willing locations. Duff House has recently broadened its programme of exhibitions to include a range of exciting contemporary projects, and so encouraging new audiences to experience both the work and the house. The uniqueness of the venue and the essence of showing contemporary artwork in a historical setting creates an exciting and stimulating experience for both the showing artists and the potential viewing audience. It is hoped that the exhibition attracts a broad audience, in terms of both geography and demographics.

The exhibition has had a long preparation period and I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the project, particularly the artists and writer, Claire Barclay, Annie Cattrell, Ross Sinclair, Kenny Hunter, Gareth Fisher, Jessica Stockholder and Duncan McLean, who all entered into it with great spirit, understanding and belief. I also want to thank all the staff at Duff House, particularly Claudia Zeiske, Charles Burnett, Jenny Reid, John Mair, Jo Edwards and Josephine Anthony for their support and assistance.

Iain Irving
Curator

Claire Barclay, Dalziel + Scullion, Jane Fawns Watt, Sandy Grant, Steve Hollingsworth, Angus Hood, Rowan Mace, Eva Rothschild, Jane Strachan and Toby Webster.

A Fast Moving Car related to that moment, particularly when driving when you are looking at something but are thinking about something else.

When you are a child you play with toy cars and imagine that you’re driving. You might travel around the world if you wanted to, all the way to the North Pole before lunchtime, then a quick trip across America and maybe around the Moon by tea. Children are good at seeing other things. When you’re an adult you drive real cars and still imagine you’re somewhere else. Speeding at over seventy you can cover a lot of ground: re-running that film you saw last Friday, remembering that holiday, writing that essay, digging the garden, decorating the bathroom, rehearsing that apology, planning the future, putting together your next exhibition, or just thinking. Adults are also good at seeing other things. A Fast Moving Car was thought of somewhere between Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and my house. I started thinking about art: imagining works I had seen, and works that I’d like to see; imagining what they make me think of. Douglas Coupland once said, driving is like enforced meditation, and I suppose it is. It gives you time to think and contemplate. Driving lets your mind wander. I guess art does that too. Then suddenly, you’re moving lanes, overtaking trucks, and negotiating roundabouts. Driving needs concentration. And I suppose art is like that as well. A Fast Moving Car is a show about other things – the things you can’t see, although you can if you put your mind to it. The artists have made paintings, photographs, neon sculpture, sound pieces and outdoor installations. These are things you might normally see at an art show. You bring the other things.

Iain Irving, Text from, ‘A Fast Moving Car’ press release, November 1997.

Iain Irving : Projects, Greenwards, Aberdeenshire, June 1997

Views from the Crust was a series of new pictures; landscape paintings in oil, which depict in a traditional way, views of the past, present and future: views that might have been seen; views that might never be seen.

Sandy Grant told me that amateur artists will one day paint what he paints. Quite simply, Grant makes beautiful images of scenes. Manhattan is a view of the city from the air. Texas Balloon Race is a balloon race over Texas. Down below perhaps is Fort Worth-Dallas, Houston, or maybe Texas City. And because Texas’ position on the globe is at a right angle to where Scotland is located – where Grant lives now – the balloons don’t fly up but, rather, to the left. For ‘up’ and ‘down’ are relative terms. By being pedantic about the details of points in space Grant points to a world (a universe) much bigger and more timeless.

Grant’s pictures – landscape paintings in oil – depict views of the past, present, and future; views that might have been seen; views that may never be seen. Sol is a picture of an x-ray of the sun.The Ultimate Achievement shows an American flag proudly claiming a lunar wilderness-our home planet is shining in the sky. In (Untitled) Faith a spaceship hovers near to a church – each is as real as the other. A painting of a deserted shore pictures a coastline which looks ordinary enough – there are seagulls and straw beach huts; the sea stretches as far as the eye can see – except over the horizon in a pink sky, there are three suns not one. Charles and John is a painting of a moon’s surface. It looks as though the place is uninhabited. But looking closer and more carefully, I can see tracks in the dust.

Caught up in the details of our lives it is easy to forget to look at and see and sense the breathtaking immensity of our situation; and faced with immensity and all its details, our worries and our ultimate achievements can seem quite tiny. “Small,” “large,” “here,” “there,” “normal,” and “strange” are relative terms too. In a post- modem world we come to terms with the skyline between recognition of infinity aligned with the need for a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think it was Einstein who said that when you ask simple questions and start getting answers, you’re beginning to hear God think. Grant paints simple pictures and perhaps also begins to hear people think. For some day people will go on lunar watercolour painting trips to capture the views from the Taurus Mountains or render exactly the light and shade of the Clavius crater.

Judith Findlay, text from, ‘Flash Art’, ‘Ouvertures : Sandy Grant’, page 105, November/December 1997.

Iain Irving : Projects, Greenwards, Aberdeenshire, September/October 1997

Real Life vs. Nature involved the construction of indoor and outdoor wooden structures. Indoors the structure is too small to get into and is in a confined space meanwhile the outdoor structure is high on tall legs and can be climbed into to get a great view of the surrounding countryside.

I’m in a farmhouse in Aberdeenshire. Greenwards By Hatton, Peterhead, to be specific. Lured here – it’s a two-hour drive from my parents, place – by a paragraph and a photo in The List. ‘What’s On in Glasgow and Edinburgh’, indeed.

But the room I’,m standing in is a white cube all right, and the single piece of work installed is of the sort that I’d only associate with an urban contemporary art space. A wooden shed that’s too small to enter, raised on legs, with four pencil-shaped wooden posts penetrating and protruding from its sides; a cassette player held aloft – by rope tied to the pencil posts – playing traditional Scottish music backwards; the words ‘I’, and ‘MESSIAH AM JAlLER’, marked on adjacent gallery walls.

On the room’s window ledge is documentation relating to the gallery. A copy of Flash Art reviews an earlier show here at Iain Irving Projects. The review is written by Judith Findlay, Iain’s partner in this remote rural spot, but there is no mention of these facts in the review. ‘By all accounts there are some interesting things happening in…err… Greenwards By Hatton,’ says a reader in Milan or Paris or Berlin. Diaries are extracted, windows found and an intention pencilled in. In one sense the review is a joke that only a few art insiders will appreciate. Quite funny, though.

Iain enters and we chat. He is open and friendly, as I’d expected – it was his telephone manner that finally persuaded me to make this morning’s long drive. In his view, the journey to the space is an important element of the experience here. And his next show would seem to acknowledge this: ‘A Fast Moving Car’ relates to that moment, particularly when driving, when you are looking at something but are thinking about something completely different, says a leaflet handed to me.

The card for Dalziel and Scullion’s recent show here is on the window ledge. A photo taken from the driving seat of a car; a deer in the middle of the road, mesmerised by the headlights. Iain tells me that in setting up the picture, Louise and Matthew were stopped by a policeman who assumed they were poaching. It was pointed out that the deer was stuffed and that they were taking photographs for their work. But the policeman couldn’t reconcile his notions of art practice to what was happening and went ahead with the arrest.

The card for the present show is also on display. Ross Sinclair, trousers rolled up to the knees, standing in the shallows looking out to sea. He isn’t wearing a shirt so the REAL LIFE tattoo across the top of his back is to the fore. The artist faces a lighthouse. Peterhead? I ask lain. But the photo was taken a few miles further along the coast, at Rattray Head. If I’d come all the way from Milan or Prague or Berlin I might travel this extra distance – it would be interesting to see the full context in which this photo was taken. But as it is I won’t be driving any further.

Anyway, there’s more to see here. And when lain hands me a mug of coffee, I take it with me into the hedged garden.

Another Ross Sinclair hut on stilts. But this one is bigger, higher, and there’s a ladder leading up inside it. I step up and am soon sitting comfortably, back resting against a wooden panel, feet and elbows on handy ledges. The view is wide open to me, divided – by wooden poles supporting the pitched roof – into left, right and straight ahead sections.

Wide blue sky with rolling clouds over wide, rolling farmland. A few fields of green pasture, but mostly the land is arable. The large field straight ahead has been harvested recently and is studded with great rolls of straw. One large field to the right and in the distance has been ploughed again already; another far away to the left hasn’t been harvested yet, its light brown crop rippling in the breeze that l’m protected from by the wooden backboard, a breeze from the west.

It’s great here, I love it. There’s plenty to stimulate me without recourse to the nearly full bottle of whisky that’s balanced on a shelf under the eaves. Someone (the artist?) has written ‘drink me’ on the label, so I reach out for the bottle, unscrew the top and sniff the contents. The real thing. But I’ve got a coffee and a car and this view for Christ’s sake, so I return the bottle untasted.

Hard down to my right is the farm proper, run by a farmer lain was telling me about. He’s friendly enough, but is at a loss to understand why people travel all this way for a transaction that doesn’t seem to involve money changing hands. He is there now, standing in the farmyard beside a grain tower which is making a noise. Is he drying oats? I donI ignore him. That’s to say I look to my left for a solid minute. But when I glance down to the right again he’s still there, looking this way. Perhaps he thinks I’m a poacher or, more likely, a rustler: spying out the land in preparation for a night sortie; working out how to get three rolls of straw, two cows and a horse into my aunt’s Fiesta. Perhaps he wants me to tell him where his combine harvester is. That hulking great red thing? It’s by the gate in what newly done field, mate. Where you fucking well left it…

But I must cast off my brutish urban instincts. This is a tranquil place and lain’s told me the farmer is all right. He puts root vegetables in the middle of the rolls of straw (how does he do that?). These are cooked over the winter by the release of heat from the stalks of oats, so that when the animals get into the centre of their winter feeding they get a bonus, a special treat, a taste sensation.

In the narrow grass field directly in front of me, two cows and a horse are feeding on a relatively new roll of straw. All three are munching away to the one apparent end, but for all I know are at cross-purposes – the cows hoping for roast parsnips, the horse looking forward to potatoes baked in their jackets.

I lean back and rest my shoulder blades against the wooden backrest. REAL LIFE, certainly. But it doesn’t have to be real life versus nature. I must cast off my cynical urban perspective and open myself to the reality all around me.

In the distance, in the centre of my view, is the main road running north – south. Vehicles move from right to left (the way I came) before disappearing behind a roll of hill. Vehicles move from left to right (my way home) before disappearing likewise.

My way home. I suppose I’d better be going. No, not yet I’m still hoping to melt into the view…

Duncan McLaren, text extract from, ‘Personal Delivery’ by Duncan McLaren, pages 176 – 180, Quartet Books 1998.

Iain Irving : Projects. Greenwards, Aberdeenshire, August 1997

Great Wall/ Black Hole was an installation that depicted the Great Wall of China as a 1:500 line drawing and a Black Hole (Earth) as a 1:1 painting. The drawing of the wall is virtually impossible to create at any scale yet the hole is easy and yet could contain all of the matter, every single particle of our earth and us.

..the Esk road slips seamlessly into the North Esk road toward Aberdeen. It’s late morning and grey cloud cover in from the west is still in the sky. Pale shafts of light cut a path down to the tussled sea as one would lay out a hand of cards. The meniscus of the horizon is taut in the distance, a deep-curved thick band of payne’s grey. A seagull dips over the coastline and through the columns of light – shimmers on and off over the face of rock searching for food… a half mile from Gourdoun. The tide is in.

I’m looking at a work of Eva Rothschild’s on the private view card that tells me about the exhibition ‘Great Wall/ Black Hole’ – these words are sprayed over a ubiquitous image of a blue and white wave crashing onto the shallow gradient of a beach. In the other Polaroid that makes up the diptych, at an angle to the picture plane and continuing the perspective of this wave is the statement, “nothing behind me exists”. Gustave Courbet’s painting Le bord de la mer a Palavas immediately comes to mind, as does an image of James Stewart and Kim Novak embracing in front of a turbulent sea in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In Courbet’s painting he depicts himself standing on a rock looking out over a dark sweep of water towards the horizon. He gestures with his left arm, and exclaims into space. I see him motionless, at a distance, a silhouette with his back to me, a dark angel in a realm of light: an artist painting an image of himself facing out to sea – just as he, while he was working on the painting, would have had his back to the rest of the world. As with the act of making love, so too with making art: beyond the immediate focus of one’s attention, nothing else (behind me) exists.

Rothschild’s diptych is a renegotiation of a known image – the sea, horizon, waves – a renegotiation which induces a subtle moment of destabilisation that resides in the act of recognising it as something other than just another (private view) card informing the viewer as to when an exhibition begins and ends. (The diptych is not in the exhibition proper, but for many, it is all they will see of Rothschild’s show at lain Irving Projects. The printed matter which he and the artist send out is, particularly in view of Irving’s location, crucial to our perception of the exhibition.)

In the gallery itself are two drawings, Great Wall and Black Hole, schematic representations of the Great Wall of China and planet earth were it to fold in on itself. Scale, the means by which the world is determined and measured, is something to be uncertain of in here, a thing which is cold and vertinginous. Earth, the Black Hole on the wall of the gallery is only eighteen millimetres in diameter, while the ink lines of Great Wall- the only manmade structure visible from space – cover a significantly larger area, like an unearthly musical stave.

The light emanating into the world from Courbet’s painting illuminates the melancholy and horror I know to occur here. It also illuminates a much wider contemporary struggle, between a desire for solitude and consolidation on the one hand and the need for society, discussion and cooperation on the other. These two drawings by Rothschild similarly invite us to rethink our position in the space of our world and to rethink our (the) point of view: “nothing behind me exists”.

The Great Wall drawing stretches over two white walls of the gallery space mimicking the thick band of Payne’s grey on the real horizon outside behind Gourdoun.

Kevin Henderson, text from AN, ‘Soundings, Eva Rothschild, Great Wall/Black Hole’, page 25, November 1997.

Iain Irving : Projects, Greenwards, Aberdeenshire, April/May 1997

Goes Ah was an installation of 3 light and sound boxes showing images from a car trip coupled with snatches of conversation and music.

Somebody once said or wrote somewhere that the best sight on earth is the sky above your head. And on that part of earth known as the north east of Scotland – and specifically here I’m referring to that strip from Newburgh Bar, the Sands of Forvie and Hackley Bay; to Collieston, to Hatton and Cruden Bay; to Buchan Ness and Peterhead; to St Fergus, Rattray Head, Crimond air field and St Combs; Fraserburgh and around the tip of Kinnaird Head; then to Pennan and MacDuff; that strip where Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion live and make work; where Iain Irving lives and operates from too – you can see a lot of sky. It’s because this place is rural not urban. It’s because it is so flat and spacious, and, in a way, so minimal. Things that protrude above the horizon – a church spire, a wind sock for a private airfield, a light house, radar, a silo, or some sort of installation of advanced technology, for farming, fishing, communications, energy or defence – are like signals of social, natural, cultural, political and economic lives. There is too, a certain quality of light – a different light to that of other places: a clearer, crisper, ‘truer’, light. It helps you see things clearly. And because this strip of land is coastal the best sight on earth is also the sea.

Long roads feature here too. For driving in a fast moving car is a necessity. It is normal to cover many, many miles. Great distances are travelled to achieve something quite ordinary – to visit a friend, to go to the pub, to do a bit of business, to buy a pint of milk, to get a stamp and post a letter, to see some art. But you get used to it. For distance is a mind-set and ‘near’ and ‘far’ are relative terms. If you’re used to travelling, places seem nearer. Besides, as well as cars we have phones, faxes and e-mail, not to mention trains and planes – the world is a small place. And driving like the sky allows you space – to think about nothing and think about something. It helps you see things clearly. It depends on what you focus: the interior of the car, the music or voice of the radio, the glass of the window, or the scene – the land, the sea or the sky – beyond, or something else entirely like a memory, a thought, a sound or conversation. Its a form of meditation. And sometimes you can travel without going anywhere.

So Dalziel + Scullion have collaborated with Iain Irving projects to produce ‘Goes Ah’. And perhaps ‘Goes Ah’ is a form of meditation too. It describes and identifies something of the north east of Scotland, even as the north east of Scotland describes and identifies it. ‘Goes Ah’ also indicates another place more universal – more global – not rooted in geography but rooted instead in our thoughts and feelings. ‘Goes Ah’ is an installation of light and sound – images from a car trip coupled with snatches of conversations. You might focus on what you hear, then realise you haven’t seen what you’ve looked at for at least five minutes. Then tuning in to the scene before you, the sound you hear might change what you see. Like a journey new scenes, and sounds, come and go and wipe out what came previously. Thoughts come to mind. Memories surface. They’re mulled over, pondered on, shuffled around, re-classified and forgotten again until next time. Suddenly you encounter something which stays with you forever. The best sight on earth: ‘Goes Ah’.

Judith Findlay

text from limited-run publication for ‘Dalziel + Scullion, Goes Ah’, Iain Irving : Projects, April 1997.

Iain Irving : Projects, Greenwards, Aberdeenshire, September 1996

“Just down there…” involved a series of new works comprising of clusters of small paintings cum photographs which deploy and manipulate images grabbed from ordinary scenes and situations.

Angus Hood’s first solo show is ‘Just Down There…” The phrase is the title of his exhibition; more than that it describes the essence of his show and the location of it too.

Hood’s new work comprises clusters of small paintings cum photographs which deploy and manipulate images grabbed from ordinary scenes and situations. These places and circumstances may be nominal – there might be nothing going on. And yet these small canvases read like a code that needs to be cracked or evidence which connects to a crime. The pictures are juxtaposed with one another in groups. They mix with each other like cuttings on a pin board or messages to clients in the lobby of a seedy hotel. Some of these tiny works are of nothing but colour-a shadow perhaps, or a blue sky. Others are of blurred photographs, of people, of patterns and logos, or of a small swatch or sample of a fabric. Hood’s images are of things you might sometimes see up close and sometimes far away. You might have glimpsed them out of the comer of your eye or in the glare of oncoming lights. Sometimes you might not be sure what you are looking at, what you have seen or what you are trying to remember. Sometimes, like a tune which you can’t forget, an image stays with you forever.

Hood gives us information for ‘Just Down There…” It’s a direction which might describe the location of this show: in a rural gallery “in the middle of nowhere – down a dirt track, turn left round the side of some farm buildings – you can’t miss it (it’s just down there…). It’s a direction which describes Hood’s work: read that sign. follow that lead, find that clue, watch out for that red herring – dare to stray from what you think is your path and dare to trust in a new one. By your actions you might suffer dire consequences. But alternatively you might find something else.

Judith Findlay
text from ‘Flash Art’, ‘Reviews’, ‘Angus Hood’, page 101, January/February 1998.