Arts diary with Tim Cornwell: Summer snow and other signs of a hot art scene…

Published on Thursday 25 June 2009 00:13

LAST Sunday just outside Edinburgh it was blowing a summer snowstorm at Jupiter Artland, the 80-acre estate now open to the public and boasting major works by Anthony Gormley, Charles Jencks and Andy Goldsworthy, to name but a few.

The conceptual artist Peter Liversidge has shown at spaces such as Tate Liverpool, with his quirky proposals for places and exhibitions; in Jupiter Artland's case they numbered 134. He turned one of them, for a summer snowstorm, into reality with a company that dressed the area in artificial snow and then used about ten snow machines to blow it into the air.

There was further proof, on the weekend of the summer solstice, of the vivid variety and vibrancy of the Scottish arts offering. Little Sparta, Ian Hamilton Finlay's intricately interwoven sculpture garden in the Pentlands, unveiled the late artist's last addition to his life's work – a medieval walled garden and circular pond surrounded by the carved names of the clouds it reflects.

On Orkney, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra joined the line-up for the St Magnus Festival; there were record crowds at the burgeoning Melrose Book Festival in the Borders; and indie bands converged for the Garden Party at Kelburn Castle, which two years ago brought Brazilian street artists to paint one side of the coastal keep with brilliant colours.

Highs and lows

THE charity Art in Healthcare, which puts pictures in hospitals and treatment centres across Scotland, is offering a bus tour to Little Sparta this weekend.

The day trip will include a lecture on location by Bill Hare, curator of the University of Edinburgh fine art collection and an authority on post-war Scottish art. For the 30 tickets, try 0131-555 7638.

Alternatively, if your appetite is for low schlock rather than high art, not to be outdone by the season of Roger Corman horror flicks at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Glasgow Film Theatre is screening a selection of classic Italian cinematic bloodbaths.They include The House by the Cemetery by the late, great Lucio Fulci, where an undead doctor runs amok in a New England mansion, and Macabre, with a cheerful tale of a young woman who keeps her lover's head in the fridge by day and her bed by night.

Crossing boundaries

CELLIST Su-a Lee has performed in the Arctic, in an Indian temple and above waterfalls. On Monday night she took her skills to the Fleming Collection of Scottish art in London. Well known here for her dynamic playing with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and McFall's Chamber, Su-a played a haunting Indian raga on her cello and then switched to the saw, as an incense work by artist Alan Kilpatrick, Tipping the Scales of Justice, slowly smouldered behind her.

It was an extraordinary cross- art-form evening celebrating Inspired II, an exhibition where leading figures of Scottish art picked paintings from the hundreds of works in the Fleming Collection and wrote about or responded to them. The Scotsman was a media partner.

Su-a, recently returned from an Indian tour with the SCO, had picked Kilpatrick's picture Where the Brahmaputra Meets the Clyde. His work has been widely inspired by his childhood in India and subsequent research trips there.

The line-up included Edwyn Collins, singing in his gravelly voice to acoustic guitar; the composer and flautist Eddie McGuire; and the eerie electro-classical sound of the London band Little Sparta, who take their name from the garden. A big thank-you to them all.