Ian Hamilton Finlay

Cabinet exhibition at the Center for Artists’ Publications.

The poetic work of the Scottish artist, poet and writer Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) goes beyond traditional forms. He also realized his poems as outdoor installations in the landscape, such as the large garden “Little Sparta” in the Pentland Hills, where he lived since 1966. He produced an extensive body of concrete poetry, which, like most of his other writings, he published through his own publishing house, Wild Hawthorn Press. The Center for Artists’ Publications provides an overview of his work with Ian Hamilton Finlay’s publications. In cooperation with the international cultural festival Poetry on the Road.

Ian Hamilton Finlay is known as a visual artist, philosopher, landscape gardener, poet, and writer. Thus, above all, work on or with language permeates his entire artistic life. Although he lived in seclusion in the garden kingdom he created, Stonypath / Little Sparta, he is one of the most important artists of his generation.

Ian Hamilton Finlay confronts us in his works with excursions into Western cultural history and with his special view of the everyday, of society. An indomitable advocate, his life’s work champions social ideals.

 

 

The Center for Artists’ Publications presents Ian Hamilton Finlay’s publications as an overview of his work, covering all of his creative periods and areas. Through his publishing company Wild Hawthorn Press and the magazine Poor Old Tired Horse, he has created an artistic body of work that not only demonstrates the poetic and artistic fusion in his work, but also his networking and cooperation with other artists.

With the founding of Wild Hawthorn Press in 1961, he published his first works of concrete poetry in the 1960s, while his later works are often characterized by text-image references and can be attributed more to visual poetry. The exhibition shows a representative selection of the more than a thousand small cards, notebooks, artists’ books, designs, graphics and poems in envelopes produced between 1961 and 1997. He not only published Poster Poems by Franz Mon and Ferdinand Kriwet, but a large part of his publications were created in cooperation with other artists.

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poems range from the poster Poem Circus, to a print Garden Poem, to a one-word poem in an artist’s book or carved in stone as a sculpture in his garden Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, where he lived from 1966. In this vein, he later implemented his poems as outdoor installations in the landscape in other places as well. To this end, he created a series of Proposals specifically, such as Six Proposals for the Improvement of Stockwood Park Nurseries in the Borough of Luton in 1986, six landscape designs consisting of 11 lithographs in portfolios, which he created with Gary Hincks.

In addition to concrete poetry and a preoccupation with gardens and plants, Finlay’s works reflect a passion for the sea and seafaring. Finlay developed the so-called Found Poem, for example, for which he selected boat and ship names from nautical almanacs and drawings and combined them with invented terms. His poetic preoccupation with the boat as a metaphor refers to the boat as a symbol of distance and wanderlust, but also of tranquility, peace, and harmony with nature. One of Finlay’s most famous lines in this context is Evening will come they will sew the blue sail. The fishermen have come home from the sea.

The integration of military elements into his pictorial canon creates another pictorial invention by Ian Hamilton Finlay that gives his oeuvre a distinctive character. In addition to fishing boats and sailboats, warships appear, destroyers and aircraft carriers, as well as airplanes, tanks, SS markings. In Stonypath, aircraft carriers mutate into birdbaths carved in stone, where birds land and take off again like planes. Surrounded by plants, they are camouflaged.

A symbol for the simultaneity of idyll and violence as a principle of nature is Arcadia for Finlay. The clash of the longing for happiness with death in an elegiac landscape is tailor-made for Finlay’s imaginary world. In the graphic Arcadia from 1973 both merge, every detail of the tank is covered with plant ornaments, it is Arcadia itself. The camouflage is perfect. It is we ourselves who have infected good with evil, who sometimes destroy what we love. Finlay awakens a longing for an ideal, a virtue, a desire for something that gives life an overarching meaning.

Finlay’s poetry works on a kind of ‘political aesthetics’ that seeks the possibility of peace and aims to impregnate the world through enigmatic works of visual poetry.

In cooperation with the international literature festival