'Ian Hamilton Finlay - War and Pieces of a Garden' Exhibition Preview

You are warmly invited to join us for the preview of Ian Hamilton Finlay - War and Pieces of a Garden, which opens in the Garnethill Gallery at 5pm on Thursday 30th October.

The exhibition Ian Hamilton Finlay - War and Pieces of a Garden marks the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006). Finlay is internationally recognised as a poet, writer, visual artist and gardener. He is best known for his garden Little Sparta, which Finlay viewed as a contemporary version of the classical Greek Arcadian idyll, set in on windswept Pentland Hills in the village of Dunsyre, in Southern Scotland. Finlay’s work takes many forms and many themes recur within them, including the Sea, the Classical world, 20th-century warfare and the French Revolution, which served as a metaphor for Finlay’s moral position in relation to the world around him. Many of the works in the exhibition are drawn from the GSA Library Special Collections, which holds many works by Finlay, published through Wild Hawthorn Press. Alongside these, the exhibition includes several private loans, including prints and photographs from Finlay’s friends and collaborators.

Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, in 1925, a fact which he would later describe as ‘ridiculous, not in character at all’. His father was a bootlegger, smuggling rum to the USA during prohibition, and the young Finlay was sent back home to Scotland, aged six, to Larchfield, a boarding school in Helensburgh, where the 24 year old poet WH Auden had recently joined the staff. Larchfield was followed by Dollar Academy, and following a brief stint at The Glasgow School of Art he found work as a shepherd and labourer in Perthshire and Orkney. Finlay started to write plays and poems in the 1950s and by the mid-1960s had emerged as one of the leaders of the concrete poetry movement. Over the next 40 years he became one of Scotland's most distinguished artists: a poet, philosopher and gardener whose work was frequently exhibited in the great museums of the world, despite Finlay himself rarely leaving the home in the Pentland Hills where he lived from 1966 until his death in 2006. He is probably best known for Little Sparta, the classical garden he built with his wife Sue in the midst of a bleak Scottish moor. Little Sparta is often, and deservedly, referred to as Scotland’s greatest 20th-century work of art and represents a fusion of so many of Finlay’s artistic ideas and principally his concern with man's relationship to nature. With the assistance of his many collaborators, Finlay translated his proposals into myriad different materials. From sculptures in stone and glass and neon, to postcards, prints and booklets, they are united in diversity by their place in Finlay's fundamentally poetic view of the world.
Image: ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay , Little Sparta’ Silver Gelatin Print (2004) © Robin Gillanders, courtesy of the artist.

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