The natural world provides inspiration for city art exhibitions

Opening at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery this weekend are two exhibitions inspired by the natural world. 

‘Stromata’ is a collection of works created by acclaimed artist Alex Hamilton in response to the power of nature, drawing from the artist’s engagement with particular historic sites of great natural beauty over the past 40 years. The resulting imagery reflects Hamilton’s deep interest in plants and includes a collection of cyanotypes created in locations from Stroma in the Pentland Firth, Glenfinlas in the Trossachs to Brantwood in the Lake District.

Of special interest is the film and photographic documentation of a recent quest by the artist to find the secret fernery of the renowned 18th century botanist from Caithness, Robert Dick who once wrote, ‘Nature is the best of all books to study from.’

"Stromata" (Greek for "miscellany") or Stromateis, "patchwork," is an apt name for this grouping of works from different periods in a journey from the artist’s starting point at Stroma, and his return to Caithness after a 30 year exploration of plants and landscape.

Alex Hamilton says: “My artistic practice broadly could be described as investigating established systems of knowledge and information. I am particularly interested in plant research with a focus on plant cultivation, breeding and monitoring. I carry out my work systematically, through a careful process of researching, fieldwork aesthetic contemplation and recording to finally presenting my visual evidence, in publications or exhibitions.

“The principal method used in my visual enquires for plant recording is photogram. This technique enables the collection of an image that contains unique data, creating a visual image charged with the elements that existed within the plant at that unique moment in time and space.  I have explored this 19th Century photographic process, its history and technical details, in depth. I am drawn to this technique because of its capacity to create unique images, each made by the plant’s natural materials.”

‘Stromata’ runs from Saturday 13 August until 10th September and to compliment it the last in a series of Craft Spotlight solo exhibitions, entitled “Birdsong” will be on display in the Small Gallery. 

Jen Cantwell is a maker who works in textiles and has a design practice called Sporran Nation. She also works across different media in a more experimental way using traditional handskills combined with unrelated materials and methods. For this Spotlight show she has been working with knitting, sound processing software and mobile phone technology. The work she has made looks at issues of immigration, emigration, identity and belonging.

The exhibition includes a collection of birdboxes. The patterns on the birdboxes are based on the soundfiles of birdsongs and ambient sound recorded in specific locations. The artist worked with sound designer Dave Martin to record a sonic snapshot of each area. The sounds were processed using music software and she worked with the soundwaves, the midi templates and the velocity peaks visually, blowing them up, shrinking them, deconstructing and reconstructing them, using the colours of the midi templates and the velocities. With a nod to the far northern knitters she worked with stranded knitting but adapted the designs for a 24-stitch repeat punchcard knitting machine, as she wanted to use a more industrial, but not automated process  to keep the hand of the maker obvious, a mix of human and machine.

The patterns are site specific, a visual representation of the sounds of the area, a tag, an identifier, like a football strip or a school uniform and they are representative of each place on a minute, mundane and daily level. The idea evolved just after Jen had moved to Moray.

She said: “After a random chat about birds having regional accents I started thinking about accents and language and how language travels and spreads, about regional differences in the spoken word and how that also happens in textiles.  Each area has its own brand of lacemaking, embroidery and knitting, and stitches literally travelled the world on the backs of people with patterns spreading from area to area.”

“The idea of visually branding an area by taking something ambient and completely natural from it, such as birdsong, and analyzing it and turning it into a product using mechanisation and technology, then presenting it as a physical object appealed to me.  To work in this way using online visuals, an audio map via a barcode and a smartphone takes the exhibition out of the gallery and into the virtual world.”