Arts diary: Plenty to look at in the Cairngorms, even if the smeuchter is a no-show

Published on Wednesday 21 October 2009 18:59

SKI resorts don't usually offer much for the art lover – they tend to be functional, bland-looking places designed to make the process of getting up and down snow-covered hills as quick and as painless as possible.

At Cairngorm Mountain near Aviemore, however, things are a little different.

For the past few years, the management there have been running something called the Cairngorms Art Initiative, aimed at "enhancing the visitor experience and understanding of the Cairngorms landscape through an engagement with visual art" – and tomorrow night the latest phase of the scheme is due to be officially unveiled.

Anyone who regularly uses the funicular railway at Cairngorm will already be familiar with the monumental print and text works by Arthur Watson and Andy Rice which adorn the hangar-like interior of the base station.

Snow Words: Hollow of the Snow is a large woodcut of a snow-covered mountainside encircled by a ring of words for types of snow and ice in Scots, Gaelic and the cant of lowland travellers. "Sneepa," "Skifter," "Feuchter" and "Smeuchter" are particular favourites of mine.

Hidden Corries: Drawing Dangerously, meanwhile, mixes the poetry of climbers' route names with screenprinted images of the rock faces they describe.

As of tomorrow, these works will be joined by a few more. Situated at the entrance to the Cairngorm car park, A Northern Viewpoint by Watson and Professor Will Maclean blends in with the local watercourses. Water from three streams flows under bronze plates bearing quotes from James MacPherson's Ossianic poetry, before cascading down natural stone buttresses. The piece also incorporates a soundscape by Stanley Robertson, the "master storyteller of the travelling people".

A little to the south is Mountain to Sea – Beyond Site, a video projection and camera obscura by Mel Woods and Lei Cox.

Housed in The Dark Room, a new building designed by Perthshire architect Fergus Purdie, the work presents the viewer with two sets of images: a constantly changing view of the surrounding mountains produced by a constantly rotating lens, and a selection of video footage recorded by Woods and Cox during four seasonal journeys made over the course of a year from Cairngorm to the coast, following the four points of the compass.

Plenty of good reasons to visit Cairngorm this winter, then, even if the bumper ski season hinted at by this month's early snowfalls doesn't materialise.

Snap up street art

BASED in the West End of Glasgow, Recoat is Scotland's only dedicated street-art gallery and its owners have just made me a very happy hack by opening an online shop.

To pick up original artwork by future icons like Elph, Lyken, Kirsty Whiten and Will Barras – at prices that shouldn't upset your bank manager – visit www.recoatdesign.com

Slight scaling back

IS IT too early to be looking forward to next year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival? Nope. Unperturbed by the brouhaha surrounding his decision to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sequel, Irish author Eoin Colfer is now hard at work on his next project: "a musical with two guys" entitled Lords of Love, which he hopes to premiere at the 2010 Fringe.

Best known for his Artemis Fowl children's books, Colfer says Lords of Love is actually his second musical project.

"The first musical we wrote was about an Irish legend and there were about 500 people in it and we blew up a city in the middle and there were magic dragons. Everyone liked the music but they said it would cost 14 million to put on, so this one is a swing musical – just two guys in a bar."

He describes it as: "Imagine Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis never really made it, and now they're 50 and 55 and they're trying to do a reunion tour."

"It's not going to make any money," he adds. So what better place for it than the Fringe, where nobody makes any money anyway?