Arts diary: Calgary Art in Nature

To MULL, at the weekend, to visit an outdoor sculpture garden at Calgary, in the island’s perpetually breezy north-west corner.

Established in 1999, Calgary Art In Nature (Cain) occupies a steep-sided woodland site above the self-catering accommodation and art gallery at Calgary Farmhouse, and is home to an ever-expanding collection of work, all of it funded by visitor donations. A well-marked trail takes you over an old millpond, then up a steep, forested hillside until you reach the wide, tussocky sweep of “Orchid Meadow”, with dramatic views out over of Calgary Bay.

Along the way, you pass 20 or so large-scale sculptures that seem, for the most part, to be in perfect harmony with their surroundings. So much so, in fact, that sometimes, even with the aid of a map, it can take a few moments to figure out what it is you’re supposed to be looking at - where the natural world ends and the art begins.

Sitting serenely in the middle of the millpond, shaded by the branches of an overhanging tree, is Peace Cascade, a tall, rectangular sculpture by Patrick Elder. Cast in aluminium, it’s slightly reflective in spite of its matt finish, and so seems to mirror the changing moods of the weather. (This being Mull, you don’t have to wait long for the weather to change.) The organic markings on its surface echo the shapes of the leaves above, too, and a dark line near its base shows the pond’s high water mark, making it feel even more anchored to its location.

Nearby, at the bottom of a huge natural amphitheatre, Rae Tiernan and Michelle Cowe have made a large mosaic of pottery fragments and bits of flotsam, and behind it a semicircle of woven seat backs. When The Diary visited, autumn leaves had started to collect on the mosaic’s surface, obscuring some of it, yet at the same time enhancing it, adding an extra layer to the pattern.

As you climb the steps leading up towards Orchid Meadow, you pass Graham Kent’s mysterious Stone Domes, which look like the abandoned temples of some ancient, pint-sized civilisation, and you are then confronted by three enormous faces made of twigs and leaves, pictured left, suspended from the trees overhead. These are the Mull Giants – part of a nationwide community project called Giants in the Forest, which has seen similar hanging heads constructed in locations as far afield as Devon and North Wales. From a distance, they blend in with their surroundings and are tricky to make out – it’s only as you approach them that they leap out from the shadows.

Once you’ve left the trees and entered Orchid Meadow, it’s just a short yomp to the top of a little knoll to see Phoenix Rising, another piece by Patrick Elder, pictured right. At first, this slim, elegant bronze, teetering on the top of an equally slim and elegant plinth, doesn’t seem to have much to do with the land around it. Take a few steps back, though, and you can see how it mirrors a distant stand of pine trees on a hill beside Calgary Bay. A little further down the path, meanwhile, a group of oystercatchers, made from steel, flotsam and bits of old fishing nets by Andy Mortley and Lisa McKenna, are a humorous nod to the real oystercatchers scuttling up and down the beach behind.

You could remove all these works from their current locations and hang them in an urban art gallery and they would still be well worth a visit, but part of the fun of visiting Cain is looking at how the artists have responded to the landscape and the challenges it presents.

This is a brilliant enterprise, a must for art-loving visitors to Mull, and a wake-up call for anyone who ever made the mistake of thinking that the only art produced outside Scotland’s major cities consists of hackneyed paintings of white crofts in DayGlo Highland landscapes.

OIL IN THE HEBRIDES

THE impressive, two-storey art gallery adjoining the sculpture garden at Calgary plays host to temporary exhibitions all year round, and The Diary was lucky enough to catch the tail-end of Victoria Bond’s one woman show, Life at Calgary. Born and brought up in Perth, Bond spent many of her childhood holidays on Mull, and after training at ECA and then teaching in London and Brighton she has recently returned to the island after 35 years away.

Now resident at Calgary, she paints the local landscape with the attentive eye of someone who has held it in her imagination for much of her life, nailing the strange, layer-cake look of the hills in this part of the island in her drawing Shadow of the Hill, and, in two evocative oil paintings, Windswept and Windswept II, capturing the way the trees bend and sway in Mull’s characteristically windy

weather.

• For more on the sculpture garden and the gallery’s exhibitions programme, visit www.calgaryartinnature.co.uk. For more on the Giants in the Forest project, visit www.giantsintheforest.com.