LITTLE SPARTA: PORTRAIT OF A GARDEN

In the 18th century, paintings found their fulfilment as actual landscapes; in the 20th century actual landscapes find a fulfilment in photographs.

Ian Hamilton Finlay

For Finlay, photography was the indispensable tool for discerning the presence of the ideal within the actual.

Stephen Bann

Since 1993, Robin Gillanders has made photographs at Little Sparta, the garden of artist/poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, at Stonypath near Biggar, which, with his wife Sue, he began designing in 1966. Finlay and Gillanders gradually formed a close friendship and they undertook several collaborative works up until the poet’s death in 2006. 

Finlay worked with numerous collaborators: illustrators, designers, stone and wood cutters, typesetters, dry stone dikers, and photographers, all experts in their field, and artists in their own right.

Finlay was part of an international movement known as Concrete Poetry, which explores the symbiotic relationship between image and text – how the meanings of even simple, single word-poems in print can change depending on selected typeface, colour, background colour, and scale. And in the landscape, where the poem is positioned – carved into stone, or wood, often on such traditional garden structures as benches and sundials, or for example, placed on a tree. A concrete poem cannot be read aloud for full effect; it requires the visual reference as well as the linguistic.

The work here is mainly a selection from an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland in 1998. More recent work, including work made since 2006 is also presented.