Beauty and Revolution traces Finlay’s artistic development from the 1960s to the 1980s; from the poems that made him Britain’s most internationally acclaimed concrete poet, to the images and texts that marked his engagement with the ideas of the French Revolution. It also presents his famous garden, Little Sparta, through photographs and film.
Visitors to the exhibition will encounter Finlay’s work through prints and paper sculptures, photographs and film; its title Beauty and Revolution reflects the visual wonder of the works on show, which cannot be divorced from Finlay’s engagement with revolutionary ideas.
Finlay’s experiments with language developed first of all through his poetry. In 1961 he co-founded the Wild Hawthorn Press to bring a new international perspective to the Scottish literary scene. His fascination with the visual effect of words in space soon resulted in the creation of a distinctive visual language that is embodied first in his standing and folding poems, and later in poem prints, emblems, medallions and inscriptions. These works range in their themes from the world of the fishing-boat to the heroes of the French Revolution, often incorporating the artist’s characteristically humorous puns on words.
The last room of the exhibition will show original prints by some of the major photographers who have recorded his work, together with the colour film from 1973 that provides the first visual documentation of Little Sparta– his classically inspired garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh.
Finlay first met and began to correspond with Jim Ede, the founder of Kettle’s Yard, in the autumn of 1964. In the same year, a group of Cambridge students had started to exhibit, publish and write about his concrete poetry; one of them was the art historian Stephen Bann, who subsequently built up an extensive collection of Finlay’s works. An internationally recognised authority on Finlay’s art, Professor Bann is the curator of Beauty and Revolution.
This new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard offers a unique opportunity to view Bann’s collection of poems, prints and sculptures alongside Kettle’s Yard’s permanent collection, which Finlay much admired though he himself took a different path. An inscribed stone that was later acquired for the collection is entitled KETTLE’S YARD / CAMBRIDGE / ENGLAND IS THE / LOUVRE OF THE PEBBLE (1995).
Beauty and Revolution: The Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay runs from Saturday 6 December 2014– Sunday 1 March 2015
A new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard celebrating the work of the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) opens this Saturday (6 December).
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