Installed in all Bonhoga exhibition spaces will be textiles by selected international artists and jewellers working in textile materials, mainly from Finland, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands and Britain. The extremes of scale in the exhibits, and their placement in the gallery spaces, will focus the viewer on the vast potential of textiles: the way textile techniques and materials can be used to express ideas beyond the usual scope of functional textiles in loom width, or garment structure.

There are surprising examples of woven, stitched, printed, knitted or embroidered objects and wall pieces. Some textiles are in the form of expressive three-dimensional drawings in wire and fibres, others tell stories or are large in scale but made up of small elements. There are curious, moving, funny or precious objects: all deserve closer attention: powerful ideas can be expressed through small textiles.

“Portage: textiles, extremes of scale. “ is the third in the “Portage” series of contemporary craft exhibitions supported by funding awarded to Shetland Arts by the Scottish Arts Council (now Creative Scotland) to research the work of artists and designers in northern Europe and to curate new and easily transported exhibitions especially for Shetland.  Like the first two Portage exhibitions; ‘Crossing Points’ and ‘Ring Symbols’;  ‘Textiles, extremes of scale’ brings new influences to inspire the public, textile makers and craftmakers, and connects with viewers through interpretive gallery texts, a catalogue, workshops and gallery tours. The exhibition was curated by Hazel Hughson, Shetland Arts’ Development Officer- crafts, within the project definition of ‘Portage’- ‘moving objects or influence across land between sea routes, or making changes in elevation from one plane to another, bringing objects or new influence.’

For “Portage; textiles, extremes of scale. “  Bonhoga Gallery is linked to the Town Centre of Lerwick by a digital projection, sent by email from Finland to Shetland as the largest scale exhibit.  ‘Bedtime Stories’ expresses a shared message, the language of worldwide chatting, inspired by a woven textile structure and created for Shetland by Finnish textile artist, Outi Martikainen as a covering for a building. Among the smallest in scale are brooches of silk cocoons by Jo Pond and wrapped sculptural jewellery by Tanvi Kant.

The film work in Bonhoga stairwell, Sorting it Out, by Norwegian artists Anne Knutsen & Karen Lidal uses real time to represent a maker’s hands bringing order to the chaos of the material she works with. In this way, the whole exhibition offers scope for unravelling and organising the concepts of scale, boundary and portage into something individual to each viewer.  The exhibition runs for longer than usual at Bonhoga Gallery. It can be seen for six weeks until mid November.

Joyce has been working towards this exhibition of new paintings for the past year. Her work in the show was in part supported by a Visual Artist Award – Shetland Arts in partnership with Scottish Arts Council, which is a bursary award scheme for Shetland based visual artists funded by Shetland Arts, Scottish Arts Council and Economic Development Unit, Shetland Islands Council.

Joyce is one of 9 Shetland visual artists to be successful in applying for and receiving a Visual Artist Award from Shetland Arts during the past 18 months. Deadlines for the Award are advertised in the local media and on Shetland Arts’ website, so watch this space!

For more information about Joyce’s exhibition, please see www.vailafineart.co.uk. The exhibition closes on 30 April 2010.

Images from the exhibition can be seen on Flickr.

The gallery walls display a range of disciplines – paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and paper cuts; textiles and mixed media work, all in unframed A5 format, by over 25 local artists, allowing a rare opportunity to buy a piece of Shetland art that you can then mount and frame in your own style.  This is also a great chance to send Shetland artwork through the post as Christmas gifts without the worry of broken glass and damaged frames.  Work from emerging artists Jono Sandilands, Chloe Garrick and Samantha Jack hangs alongside pieces by Gail Harvey, Peter Davis and Mike Finnie.

You can never have too many handbags!  This year you buy an indulgent handbag printed on a fabric shopper and you get a great bag that can help ‘save the planet’.  These bags make a charming gift or why not a pre-Christmas treat for you.

The passion for badges that is sweeping the nation is reflected by Megan Price’s jigsaw pieces while initial badges from Showpony can be used to label and decorate your Christmas parcels.

There is some fine wood-turning by Bert Marsh: exquisite bowls in birch, maple and rosewood.  Also in wood, but in a different genre, is a range of humorous automata by Neil Hardy – known as Neil Hardy’s fabulous animals.  Stunning modern glass and ceramics in a variety of styles, appear alongside contemporary work that features nostalgic 1950s graphics contrasting with the simplicity of Sue Candy’s blue and white square pieces.

Painted silk scarves by Pamela Rawlinson and knitted silk and printed wool scarves by Joanne Edden.  can add colour to a Christmas outfit or warmth when sledging or building that snowman.  Wearable art somehow never seems such an indulgence.

And finally, the Bonhoga Christmas exhibition would not be complete without the usual wonderful array of jewellery.  Acrylic, aluminium, wire with pearls and gemstones, Perspex, glass, silver and resin feature in pieces elaborate and ornamental, minimalist and quirky.  The jewellery is innovative, exciting, and covetable and just what you need to treat yourself as well or wrap up pretty and place beneath the tree.  The art deco era influences Lorraine Gibby’s work while Shauna Sturrock’s pieces have a contemporary, yet Victorian, feel.  Sarah Keay, a former resident at The Booth who worked with secondary school pupils in Shetland, has produced a bright, colourful range of ‘funky’ jewellery for Christmas.  Sarah’s work is becoming very collectable and this will be a good opportunity for jewellery collectors to acquire a piece while prices are still affordable.

So, be you in benevolent or decadent mood, come to Bonhoga and be enchanted by our tempting array of Christmas treats – then reward yourself with home bakes and a marshmallow laden hot chocolate in the Mill Cafe.

The exhibition runs until 23 December and, as usual, with the Christmas show, work can be removed before the exhibition ends so that parcels can be wrapped and posted.  Bonhoga Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10.30 – 4.30 and on Sundays from noon until 4.30.

‘The work in this year’s show is very eclectic and the judges had a difficult job making their choices’ said Mary Smith, Curator. She continued, ‘ It is so good to see so many entries and I am looking forward to working with the prize winners to develop the next Open Quintet show in the spring of 2010.’

The prize for best craft exhibit, presented by Shetland Arts & Crafts went to Ruth Fisher for her ‘Shag’. Millgaet Media’s photography prize was awarded to Dave Donaldson for ‘Landlocked’, while Hilary Seatter won John Goudies’s prize for best print. Peter Biehl’s fine drawing of ponies received the Vaila Fine Arts prize for best painting and drawing.
The best newcomer award went to Ross Fulton for his painting ‘Pallets’.
The prize winners will take part in a joint exhibition in 2010.

The Open is on show at Bonhoga Gallery until 4 October. The gallery is open Tuesday – Saturday 10.30 am to 4.30 pm and on Sunday from 12 noon – 4.30 pm.

Earlier this year Andrew received a Visual Artist Award from Shetland Arts, enabling him to purchase the necessary equipment to develop his work into printmaking. The resulting set of nine screen prints is bold, imaginative and wildly expressive; characterful portrayals of mysterious characters and narratives that invite the viewer to create their own stories for each set of three prints.

The show illustrates the importance of the Visual Artist Award, funded by Shetland Arts, The Scottish Arts Council and SIC Economic Development Unit, which offers up to £1000 for the development of an artist’s work. The scheme, ‘Visual Artist Awards: Shetland Arts in partnership with Scottish Arts Council’, is part of a national funding scheme for visual artists.

Clair Aldington, who co-ordinates the Visual Artist Award in her capacity of Visual Arts Development Officer, said, ‘Andrew’s imagination and creative innovation shone out of his application for funding to develop his work, and the panel were unanimous in their decision to make this award. The resulting work is strong and powerful, and shows off his incredible illustrative style.’

View Andrew’s prints on Shetland Arts’ Flickr site.

Alongside Andrew’s work at Islesburgh will be original artwork by visiting cartoonist, writer and broadcaster Steven Appleby known for his work in Saturday’s Guardian newspaper, and a series of natural history photographs by visiting poet, essayist, musician and photographer Gerry Cambridge.

Shetland Arts’ Bonhoga Gallery will shortly be opening the annual exhibition of work by artists and craft-makers from across Shetland. The Shetland Open is showing at Bonhoga Gallery, Weisdale Mill from Thursday 3rd September until Sunday 4th October 2009.

The Open is a non-selective exhibition of work by amateur, professional and student artists and craft-makers who are Shetland by birth, education or residency. Each exhibitor, aged 18 or over, is allowed to exhibit one piece of work up to 1mx1m in size.

The show has been running annually for 14 of the last 15 years and attracts work from a huge range of people throughout the Isles, in many different styles. This year the work is as varied as ever, featuring wearable craft items, digital and metalwork, as well as the more conventional disciplines of painting, photography, printmaking, embroidery and applied arts.

There will be awards made by the following sponsors:
Vaila Fine Art, John Goudie, Millgaet Media, Shetland Arts and Crafts and Baker Tilly.

After the success of this year’s Quintet show, in which last year’s five winners were given the opportunity to stage a group show of work at Bonhoga, Shetland Arts hopes to repeat this formula by matching each prize with a further £100 towards the group show for 2010. Exhibition Curator Mary Smith welcomed this development opportunity, “this is an ideal way to encourage and further the development of Shetland’s artists and craft-makers and provide them with a platform to show their work in a professional capacity if they so choose. We had a great response to the Quintet show this May and a number of works were sold”.

The Open is always a popular show with locals and visitors alike – the work is eclectic and shows what a variety of talent Shetland has to offer.

All the work in the exhibition is for sale, giving an opportunity for collectors to purchase a piece by their favourite Shetland artist or spot a bargain by one of the younger artists or makers on the local scene.

The preview of the Shetland Open is on Wednesday 3rd September at 7.30pm this year, to avoid a clash with the WordPlay and ScreenPlay events of the following days. Everyone is invited to come along to celebrate the opening of the show.

The Bonhoga Gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10.30-4.30 and on Sunday from 12pm-4.30.

Shetland Arts is taking part in Homecoming Scotland 2009′s celebrations with Creative Connections Shetland, a programme of summer schools, concerts, events and a residency in August, beginning with the new exhibition, ‘Diaspora’, at Bonhoga Gallery, Weisdale Mill.  The show runs from 1 – 31 August with a preview on 31 July at 7.30pm.  Most of the artists will be attending the preview and an invitation is extended to everyone to come and meet them, perhaps renewing old acquaintances.

Diaspora refers to the movement of any population sharing common ethnic identity forced to leave, or who voluntarily left their settled territory, and became residents in areas often far remote from the former.  Taking this as the title and theme for the show Shetland Arts invited four artists who left Shetland to live elsewhere, and four artists who have settled in Shetland to show their work resulting in an eclectic mix.

Robert Ollason was born in Shetland, and after graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1961, and teaching art and design in Edinburgh and Shetland, he followed a lifelong passion for the large animals of Africa and went on to spend five happy and inspired years in Kenya.  On his return to the UK he took up the post of Head of Education at Edinburgh Zoo where, for the next 27 years he continued to be surrounded by exotic animals and to travel extensively in East and Southern Africa, leading wildlife tours.  Robert’s work captures on paper ‘the various kinds of stripes and also the spots, blotches and other markings and textures on certain animals’ coats.’  He continues, ‘I enjoy attempting to express an animal’s form through its pattern’.  A number of his animal studies are included in this exhibition.

Still influenced by the same Nordic, maritime sources today as he was when a student at ECA in the early seventies Alex Malcolmson, who has spent the last 30 years running a very successful gallery based in land-locked Yorkshire, lives far away from the sea which inspires his work.  ‘Indeed at a distance the focus on some kind of island identity seems to make me sharper,’ says the artist whose work, over the past ten years or so, has been creating box constructions made mainly from wood, carved and painted, sometimes incorporating found objects.  His influences include Joseph Cornell, ship dioramas and other marine folk art and for ‘Diaspora’ he has taken folk, naïve and primitive art; the kind of objects made for use and ornament, often by unnamed makers, as the main source of the work.

Another ECA graduate Lillian Tait studied art and design alongside Alex Malcolmson and 15 years ago she left Shetland again to study art therapy.  This has been a major influence on her work and the reason she began to paint again.  ‘I indulge myself; paintings of Jesus in Gethsemane or, as in the case of the angels, painting for the sheet joy of the process.  Or even painting my younger self transported to another country … if I feel so inclined! ‘Lillian believes that her exile has little to do with the style or subject matter of her paintings and that if she ever returned to Shetland she would continue to paint whatever she fancied.  A number of her angel works are included in the exhibition so those who knew Lillian in her youth can decide whether they resemble her ‘younger self’.

The fourth artist to move away is Katherine Laidlay who has lived in Dundee for the past 16 years, and although she sees beauty in the city’s, famous bridges and striking skyline, she has stayed in Dundee for the people.  ‘I still have the same appreciation for those around me, and the importance of friendship still exists, says Katherine.  The characters whom she has known since a student, and more recently through her work in the community, has influenced her and in turn her work which is mainly figurative, sometimes expressing a mood, an emotion, sometimes a visual response to a question or thought.  Her preferred medium is charcoal allowing the exploration of exaggerated contrasts.  In her recent work she has been concentrating on her perception of home which can be taken literally but more and more her realisation is that home is more about sense – a sense of belonging and of comfort.

Shetland based artist, Peter Davis, moved to the isles in 1991 following a decade living in Orkney, so the northern isles influences, its colours, climate and remoteness was already prevalent in his work.  ‘What I found particular to Shetland was a much more elemental landscape, pared down to essentials,’ said Peter who was born in the north east of England at the edge of the sea. ‘The inorganic processes of nature such as crystallization, desiccation, and fluidity are mirrored in the action of a medium like watercolour.  It is one of the most natural of the painting media and one I worked with for more than 30 years.  It is not an easy medium and there are many variables involved in making a watercolour,’ comments the artist whose paintings are contemplative and soothing while drawing the viewer into the depths of their space.

In the summer of 1973 Gail Harvey, a student at Glasgow School of Art, spent her summer in Shetland working in a fish factory and the Queens Hotel, Lerwick.  She often escaped into the Shetland countryside and loved the landscape and the people, reminding her of childhood summers off the west coast of Scotland.  In 1988 Gail returned and is still residing in Shetland and painting its landscape.  Her work which features the islands in all weathers and seasons is much sought after, and she has earned her living as a well respected painter for many years. She says, ‘Twenty one years later my life and painting have gone through changes.  The way I see the landscape is affected by this.  It reveals itself in new ways, and will go on changing with time.’  This exhibition will be rare opportunity for visitors to Bonhoga to see, and buy, work by this successful artist.

Ruth Brownlee’s artist statement quotes ‘My work explores interpretations of the visual drama of Shetland, capturing the changing moods and atmosphere of its seas and coastlines.’  She trained at ECA and moved to Shetland in 1998 to concentrate on painting. She has won many prestigious awards and exhibits extensively throughout the UK and at international art fairs. Ruth has developed a strong and distinctive style that captures Shetland, the play of light and shade over the land and sea and the force of the elements.

The youngest and newest resident artist is Kristi Cumming.  She is actually a retuning Shetlander who left when she was in primary 2 and has returned to live permanently three years ago.  She said that growing up in Shetland, the exposure to vast expanses of sea and sky, have remained lasting influences in the work she produces today. Her paintings are trying to capture the experienced emotions of being surrounded by light, water and iridescent colour. Kristi graduated in 1999 from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and has exhibited in various solo and group shows throughout Scotland and Spain.  Her vibrant palette captures Shetland’s land, sea and sky in an imaginative and dramatic style.

‘We are delighted to being showing eight such talented artists at Bonhoga as part of the Scottish Homecoming Celebrations,’ said Curator Mary Smith. ‘The work is very diverse and we are sure that many of the gallery visitors will find it interesting to see work by these artists who in some way think of Shetland as home.’

Bonhoga Gallery is open 10.30 – 4.30 pm Monday to Saturday and noon to 4.30pm on Sundays

Please contact us for further information

Images of Diaspora

Taking place over the weekend of the 11th and 12th July, Vunk Fest will comprise two events “designed to allow people to interact with rock music and art works, as well as providing an opportunity to hear bands that have never before played in Shetland whilst supporting and highlighting the talents of some of our local musicians and artists.”

The first event, a rock concert at Norscot Angling club (6pm to 1am), will feature bands covering a wide range of the rock spectrum including Glasgow’s Attica Rage (the final gig of the European tour), Stolen Order from Inverness, Newcastle’s A Thousand Lies, Dirty Ride from Orkney and a host of local Shetland bands including guitar/drum noise terrorists Poison Popcorn, perky pop punkers Hidden Agenda, wrestling loving El Pedro, drunk swagger punks Bacchus and the mighty Ten Tonne Dozer.

The second event, at the Pier head in Voe (12.30pm to 7pm), is a free exhibition of music related art works. Exhibitors from Orkney and Shetland include lithographer and graphic designer Jono Sandilands, photographer Tom O’Brien, image manipulator and distorter of realities Tirval Scott (Poison Popcorn with his other hat on) and photographer Karen Bruce. The exhibition will also features images captured during the previous evenings gig. Throughout the event there will be acoustic music by Shetland songstrel Jordan Ogg, Poison Popcorn and others from the previous night’s concert.

Tickets for the event are available from the Shetland Box Office, Islesburgh Community Centre – 01595 745 555

Island Sound flyer

Media release:

Video/sound projections and photographic work capturing natural phenomena of an island landscape

To coincide with the upcoming Festival of Nature, Shetland Arts is privileged to be exhibiting the work of Alison Hayes at Bonhoga, in a show called Island Sound.

Alison Hayes’ work explores the un-manipulated experience of wildness in the natural world. Her video/sound works aim to immerse the viewer into the mesmerising beauty of what lies around them whilst offering up an awareness of the power and danger inherent in the natural order of nature. The essence of these works are real yet raw. Shot at dawn, dusk and night time in remote island locations they remain in their unedited format.

It is essential that the works are viewed in nature’s time, unfolding at a pace which transports the viewer into another realm for them to witness something occurring which is instinctively familiar but outwith our human grasp. Six films will run on loop in the exhibition at Bonhoga while other works will be shown throughout the rest of the building.

For more information on Alison’s work visit www.alison.hayes.net

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