Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edinburgh review: 'very personal'

Installation view of Ian Hamilton Finlay at Modern Two, Edinburgh | Neil Hanna

Ian Hamilton Finlay, National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two, Edinburgh ★★★★★

2025 is the centenary of artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, and the National Galleries of Scotland are marking his centenary with an exhibition of artworks and documents. The labels accompanying the show are a good introduction, not only to the work but also to the man himself, for though his work is deliberately impersonal in execution and was usually created with a skilled collaborator, it is also very personal.

Finlay began his career studying painting at Glasgow School of Art. His contemporary at GSA, the late Cordelia Oliver, always referred to him sneeringly as Ian Finlay as he was then known, implying that to use both his forenames was a piece of snobbery. In fact, he just needed to distinguish himself from Ian Finlay, then director of the Royal Scottish Museum.

Finlay’s career as a painter was short, however. He had at least one exhibition and got at least one review. It was not at all encouraging, and may have helped push him away from painting towards poetry. He had some success writing, but in the early 1960s he moved towards concrete poetry, where the form and the image the words make are as important as the words themselves; together they constitute a work of art that is also a poem. He wrote at the time: “I feel I have come to the end of poems that are about, and I want to do poems that just are.”

Wave Rock, by Ian Hamilton Finlay | © The estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Two good examples from the 60s here are Wave Rock and Ring Net Dove. In the first the word “wave” on the left is repeated over and over but gradually breaks up as it moves towards the word “rock”, repeated many times on the right, and stacked up to form a solid mass. Where the two words meet, there is a jumble of letters, as the wave breaks on the rock.

Finlay loved puns and double meanings and Ring Net Dove is an evocative visual pun. The three words are engraved on a slab of white marble. “Ring” and “Dove” are large and stained black. “Net” between them is smaller and unstained. So, in just three words, the meaning shifts between ring net fishing, a method developed by the Highlanders displaced by the clearances, and the bird, the ring dove, and perhaps too the idea of netting doves or pigeons.

Detail from Star Steer, by Ian Hamilton Finlay | © Courtesy of the estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay

The reference to fishing here is typical. Finlay always loved boats and this informs some of his most beautiful works. In Star Steer, for instance, the word “star” printed in silver on grey is repeated down the page in a long, slightly irregular wavy column, like starlight sparkling on water, but at the foot of the column, with the same two initial letters, “star” becomes “steer” as sailors at night steer by the stars. Equally beautiful is Evening will come/They will sew the blue sail. The words are printed in white on blue and so evoke the blue sail of evening drawing across the sky, but also the fishermen returned safely to shore mending their sails before setting out again next day, reflecting poetically on the timelessness of fishing and its elemental nature. Similar ideas lie behind numerous works made out of fishing boats, their poetic names, their registration numbers and the language of sailing and the sea.

Homage to Modern Art, a screen print made with Jim Nicholson in 1972, is a beautiful image of a Thames barge with tall brown sails. Their warmth and gentle contours should set the tone for the whole print, but this is disrupted by a geometric triangle in harsh blue and yellow and distinctly reminiscent of the fashionable Op-Art of the seventies. Finlay remarked that the work of these artists seemed to him to be cold and superior. They “never seem to look at any part of the world and seem to be moved by it.” Finlay himself was the opposite, particularly after he and his wife Sue moved to an isolated house at Stonypath, high in the Lanarkshire hills. Suffering from agoraphobia, Finlay remained there for most of the rest of his life. Latterly, however, a stroke mysteriously relieved the affliction. I was startled one day to meet him in Marks & Spencer. He loved it, he said.

At Stonypath, he and Sue planted trees for shelter and dammed streams to make ponds and a loch which they called Loch Eck after their son, Alec. Around this core they developed a garden which was gradually filled with concrete poetry. At the top of the garden, an inscription in stones reads “The present order is the disorder of the future, Saint Just.” From this high viewpoint this message reflects on the garden below, created against the odds, as a metaphor for the whole struggle for order in human life. One of Finlay’s aphorisms was a garden is a process not a state. Saint Just was a French revolutionary and Finlay used revolutionary imagery as a metaphor for the Jacobin ruthlessness that gardeners must show, not swords into ploughshares exactly, more guillotines into secateurs. He had no illusions about the constant threat of our propensity for violence and adopted Poussin’s inscription “Et in Arcadia Ego,” death in Arcadia, to an image of a Panzer tank among trees, a sinister, lurking threat. Images of aircraft carriers and warships in several works here make the same point, but in the garden the aircraft carriers are also bird tables.

This warlike imagery found new focus when Finlay entered a dispute with Strathclyde Council. A building used as a gallery was decreed to be commercial and thus rateable, but Finlay maintained Stonypath was a temple and so exempt. On the model of the French Revolution, a Committee of Public Safety was formed, or at least imagined. A black poster of a guillotine here is inscribed “The Medium is the Message” and “Death to Strathclyde Council.” The whole affair became a piece of brilliant theatre and a poster and image war excoriating not only Strathclyde, but the Scottish Arts Council and the National Gallery of Modern Art for their failure to come to the defence of art assailed by bureaucracy. Stonypath was renamed Little Sparta as it was at war with Edinburgh as Athens. Classical inscriptions declare Death to the Arts Council in Latin and there is much else in that vein. By a delightful quirk of fate, one work with an inscription in stone was mistakenly returned by the Arts Council. Gleefully Finlay sent it back with all the names of the Council officials and members inscribed on it. Headed “A bas les Lollygarchs,” it ends “Robespierre rules OK.” The dog it was that died, however. The dispute still unresolved, Strathclyde was abolished.

Nature over again after Poussin | Ian Hamilton Finlay

Little Sparta is a unique and world famous landscape garden and fittingly the second room in the exhibition is devoted to Nature over again after Poussin, 11 photographs of the garden. Aligning it with the classical landscape tradition, each scene includes a stone inscribed with the monogram of one of the great landscape artists. In an ironic conjunction, however, this gallery opens onto Eduardo Paolozzi’s studio. I don’t know what Paolozzi thought about Finlay, but I once got letter from the latter complaining that Edinburgh was getting too full of Pale-Ozzis. We are lucky to have had both of these great men.

Until 26 May

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