Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Centenary Exhibition

by Mark Todhunter, April 2025

Earlier this year, to coincide with the centenary of the artist’s birth, Sotheran’s published a catalogue dedicated to the printed materials - cards, books, broadsides, notices and more - of the prolific Scottish artist, poet and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay. The objects themselves were presented as an exhibition at Cassius&Co., Ian Hamilton Finlay: The Printed Works, and the catalogue included an essay by Finlay collector, friend of Sotheran’s and fellow gardener Mark Todhunter.

In the centennial year of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s birth, I realise that I have been following his work for exactly half that period, beginning when I was still a schoolboy. In 1975, a feature in the Daily Telegraph Weekend Magazine was devoted to the garden created by Finlay and his wife Sue – then called Stonypath, and renamed Little Sparta in 1980. The sculpture Nuclear Sail, installed in 1972, was the main image, viewed across the water of Lochan Eck. The ambivalence in the name of the work was striking, as it linked the image of sailing craft with the implied destructive power of a modern submarine. The inscription set below, however, was also of interest for me, as an example of crisp, classical serif text that seemed to confirm the authority of the sculpture. Other inscriptions featured in the article reinforced this seriousness, especially:

To a keen graphic design student, the texts were of great visual power, but it was their setting in the garden context that proved inspirational, and I have been a professional gardener all my working life. Studying Finlay’s work over the years, I soon realised that Little Sparta may be his greatest creation, but it is the result of decades of poetic development, firmly based on printed works.

This collection includes books, cards, prints and ephemera, beginning with the very first Finlay production The Sea-Bed and Other Stories (1958, cat. no. 1.1), which collects short prose pieces prev-iously published as newspaper articles. Themes that recur throughout his life’s work are introduced – fishing folk, fishing boats in the guise of ponies, etc. The woodcut dust jackets reveal the handcrafted aspect that became important in future printed pieces, as the colour blocks vary in tone from copy to copy.

The Dancers Inherit the Party (1st ed. 1960, cat. no. 1.2) introduces the verse form, drawing on Finlay’s experience labouring in the Orkneys in the 1950s. The brevity of the poems is notable, as well as the incorporation of dialect. In a letter to Seamus Cooney (18th October 1967) he wrote: ‘Even my attempt to be “traditional” was a way of being concrete, part of a plainness I wanted.’ Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd (1st ed. 1961, cat. no. 1.3) exploited the Glaswegian dialect and accent to comic effect, although it alienated Finlay from more traditional Scottish poets and was the start of a long standing antipathy between him and the Scottish art establishment in general.

The Wild Hawthorn Press was founded in Edinburgh that year, with Jessie McGuffie, and enabled him to control the design and the quality of the printed works that followed. The Press published other poets’ work, as books, as well as poem-prints – a format Finlay pioneered and which enhanced the impact of concrete poetry as he developed his works in that way. Rapel (1963, cat. no. 1.6) was the first concrete collection, printed in coloured inks as well as black, and replacing conventional syntax with clusters and geometric patterns. These combine word and image in poems that assume the reader is knowledgeable about art history, with homages to Malevich and Juan Gris amongst the ten loose leaves in buff folder.

The Wild Hawthorn Press also published the broadsheet Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. (1962–1968, cat. nos. 2.1–2.25). A full run of 25 issues is an important part of this collection, and was ‘a forum for the verbal and the visual, the traditional and the modernistic, the creative and the theoretical’ ( Yves Abrioux in Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer). The first visual poem appears in no. 5, and later editions are dedicated to particular artists, guest edited ordevoted to a particular topic. P.O.T.H. was a nexus for new forms of poetry in Scotland and established contacts for Finlay, especially in America where his works were often published in small poetry magazines and his reputation was considerably stronger than in his own country.

The Canal Stripe Series 3, Canal Stripe Series 4, Ocean Stripe Series 2 and Ocean Stripe Series 3 (cat. nos. 1.7, 1.8, 1.11 and 1.12) were all published by the Press in Edinburgh, and termed ‘kinetic booklet/ poems’, as turning the pages enacted the poetry. The Canal Stripe booklets are limited variations, as if constrained by the banks of the canal. In an unpublished letter to Simon Cutts (1st November 1967), Finlay wrote: ‘little fields, long horizons, where the sound is so wholly plain, as to almost cease to exist.’

The Ocean Stripe booklets are more complicated pieces of printing, combining overprinting and pure punctuation to suggest the wake of a boat at sea in Series 2. Series 3 is a triumph, with delicate, semi-transparent paper bearing the words ‘arc’ and ‘ark’, and primary coloured light card denoting the rainbow that is ‘the bow in the sky’. The minimal design of these works, the crisp sans serif typeface and their small scale are enduringly satisfying, and make collecting them a real pleasure.

1965 was also the date of another ambitious work, Earthship (cat. no. 3.5). The paper sculpture consists of curved white cards, stapled in a line, and printed with a large bold typeface, which form words along the length of the sculpture: ‘finfunnel eyeholdbowsternstarnumber rootbranch sail sap screw’. Earthship was posted in a specially designed and printed box, and is very limited in number, usually said to be 50. More card sets were printed than boxes, so there were possibly some examples sent out in ordinary boxes. The scalloped shapes of the cards recur in the postcard Sails/Waves 1 (1971, cat. no. 3.15), one of the first designs produced with graphic designer and calligrapher Ron Costley. This ‘design for wall ceramic’ was itself created in stainless steel and concrete in Finlay’s first major European landscape project at the Max Planck Institute in 1976. The sculpture can be displayed in a number of configurations, including standing in a vertical plane which recalls the standing poem Pear / Appear, Standing Poem 2 and Standing Poem 3 (1963–1965, cat. nos. 3.1, 3.3 and 3.4).

In 1965 Finlay moved to Gledfield Farmhouse, Ardgay, Ross-shire, with his new partner Sue Swan, later Sue Finlay. Here, he was able to construct poems in wood and cork, and place them within the landscape around the house. The poem Acrobats, eventually published as a poem-print in 1968, was made of cork letters stuck to a white barn wall, in the exhilarating diamond pattern. It is the perfect example of a concrete poem, where the letters of the word are the ‘acrobats’ and the reader’s eye must partake of the exercise, too.

Little Fields Long Horizons was also created in wood, with metal letters attached. Eventually, the definitive version, in drystone, would be built at Little Sparta. Finlay was drawn to the idea that his poems, with their concrete forms physically expressed, could be incorporated into landscape, and especially architecture. He had said that: ‘The poem I see as the centre of order and calm and abiding values – the opposite of an idea of “confessional poetry”.’ An architectural context could express those values perfectly. Sue Finlay wrote to Seamus Cooney in October 1965: ‘many of his poems are intended to be on a much larger scale and he has been constructing here in the garden and in the house freestanding and wall poems, with wood and concrete and cork letters. He wants to co-operate with an architect in even larger projects – such as poems sand-blasted into large panes of glass – to stand in gardens and walls.’ Although he had begun to make physical poems at Gledfield, the move to Stonypath, outside Edinburgh, in autumn 1966, gave Ian and Sue the physical space, if not the economic security, to expand the placement of poems in the landscape. The correspondence between Finlay and his friends and collaborators paints a frequently grim and dispiriting picture of lost opportunities and broken promises.

But those tumultuous years of 1966 and 1967 did not prevent some beautiful printed works being created, such as the booklet Autumn Poem (1966 cat. no. 1.14), which exploits the column poem format of the poem print Ajar. The phrases ‘the earth turn-ing o-ver’ and ‘turn-ing o-ver the earth’ are printed on transparent paper over Audrey Walker’s photos of freshly dug soil, and have the rhythm of a work-song.

Tea-leaves and fishes (1966, cat. no. 1.16) is another exquisite booklet, with different thickness and colours of papers and inks. The serif typeface makes a reappearance, and the poems look back at the typewriter art of Telegrams from My Windmill (1964, cat. no. 1.9) and forward to the Stonypath pond notice:

PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BOATS

The Salamander Press produced both of these booklets, and Stonechats (1967, cat. no. 1.17) which collected a number of poems that were later inscribed and installed at Stonypath, including one-word poems:

ONE (ORANGE) ARM OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST WINDMILL

autumn

Finlay said that a literal one-word poem would make no sense at all, but it could communicate if it was placed in a garden setting that provided the context: ‘The pure concrete poem (is) not for reading, but for contemplation.’

The one-word poem, of which the last edition of P.O.T.H. is a collection, is reflected in An Improved 17 Classical Dictionary (1981, cat. no. 1.37), where the object word is ‘explained’ by drawing upon wholly unexpected references. The aphorisms of these types of works such as Detached Sentences on Weather (1986) and Detached Sentences on the Pebble (in the Unnatural Pebbles catalogue 1981, cat. no. 1.34) were frequently used by Finlay in the ’80s and ’90s. The wide range of references they encompass are a challenge to the reader’s understanding of culture, and is a constant in his work.

The very high quality of the later exhibition catalogues, such as Talismans and Signifiers (1984, cat. no. 1.44), and Nature Over Again after Poussin (1980, cat. no. 6.5) make them a joy to reread. The essays and commentaries that have been a feature of Finlay’s catalogues since An Illustrated Essay by Stephen Bann (1972) are an integral part of the work, too. His poems should induce a process of exploration and meditation on their references, as in the Heroic Emblems collection, with Ron Costley (1977), and his frequent creation of sundial designs and inscriptions. Three Sundials (1974, cat. no. 1.29) probably designed with Michael Harvey, is another sumptuous and delicately printed collection. The Jampot Covers (sundials) (1977, cat. no. 5.9) are no less considered in design, and are a perfect example of Finlay’s enjoyment of the diminutive and humble – a literal cottage industry.

Writing to graphic designer Ian Gardner in March 1975, he wrote; ‘It is quite hard to tell what is a key work, and there are few works, however humble, which don’t have keys. The world always demands “major” works, but you know that everything, down to the humblest “witty” card, may be a “key” part of one’s general Aspiration.’ (Chapman magazine ’78/9).

Mark Todhunter

April 2025