Ian Hamilton Finlay (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.
Contents
Life
Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent.
Finlay attended Dollar Academy in Clackmannanshire. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside (firstly to Gartmore and then to Kirkcudbright).
Finlay attended Glasgow School of Art.
In 1942, Finlay joined the British Army. Throughout his life, Finlay suffered severely from agoraphobia.
Finlay was married twice and had two children, Alec and Ailie.
Finlay died in Edinburgh in 2006. He is buried alone in Abercorn Churchyard in West Lothian, Scotland. The grave lies in the extreme south-east corner of the churchyard. The gravestone refers to his parents and sister.
Poetry
At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd. He then started to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney.
In 1958, Finlay published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories, with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald.
In 1960, Finlay published his first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party, with Migrant Press. A second edition was published in 1962; and the third edition, published by Fulcrum Press in 1969, included a number of new poems.
Dancers was included in its entirety in a New Directions annual a few years later.
In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wider acknowledgement and readership. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press, in his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Finlay reduced the monostich form (single line poems) to one word with his concrete poems in the 1960s. Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton's poetry, and exploring "the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas".
Art
Finlay composed concrete poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment.
This kind of "poem-object" features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh from the mid-1960s. Whilst these sculptures were added to the garden Finlays understanding was that "the work would be the garden itself." The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples.
In December 2004, in a poll conducted by Scotland on Sunday, a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be the most important work of Scottish art. Second and third were the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn. Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945".
The Little Sparta Trust plans to preserve Little Sparta for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Magnus Linklater (Chair), Neil Firth, Richard Ingleby (of Ingleby Gallery), Iain McFadden (Treasurer), Andrew Patrizio, Paul Stirton, Camilla Toulmin, Ann Uppington and Nicky Wilson are trustees. Former trustees include Ian Appleton, Stephen Bann, Stephen Blackmore, Patrick Eyres (of New Arcadian Press), John Leighton, Duncan Macmillan, Victoria Miro, Paul Nesbitt and Jessie Sheeler.
Finlay's work is notable for a number of recurring themes: classical writering (especially Virgil); fishing and the sea; the French Revolution; a continual revisiting of World War II and the memento mori Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego. His 1973 screenprint of a tank camouflaged in a leaf pattern, Arcadia, referring to the Utopian Arcadia of poetry and art (another recurring theme), is described by the Tate as drawing "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank". In the 1982 exhibition The Third Reich Revisited, Nazi iconography featured on architectural drawings by Ian Appleton, with captions by Finlay which could be read as a sardonic critique of Scotland's arts establishment.
Finlay came into conflict with the Strathclyde Regional Council over his liability for rates on a byre in his garden, which the council insisted was being used as commercial premises. Finlay insisted that it was a garden temple. His propaganda campaign against the Council between 1982 and 1985 became known as the Little Spartan War.
Collaborators
Finlay's designs were most often built by others. Finlay respected the expertise of sandblasters, engravers and printers he worked with, having approximately one hundred collaborators including Patrick Caulfield, Richard Demarco, Malcolm Fraser, Christopher Hall, Margot Sandeman. He also worked with a host of lettering artists including Michael Harvey and Nicholas Sloan and Vincent Butler.
Sculptures and gardens
A partial list of Finlay sculptures and gardens. A few photographs are reachable through the external links.
Little Sparta, (with Sue Finlay), Dunsyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland, 1966
Canterbury sundial, Canterbury, England, University of Kent, near Rutherford College, 1972
UNDA wall, Schiff, Windflower, Stuttgart, Germany, Max Planck Institute, 1975
anteboreum, Yorkshire, England, private garden
sundial, Liège, Belgium, University of Liège, 1976
sundial, Bonn, Germany, British Embassy, 1979
Five Columns for the Kröller-Müller, second title: A Fifth Column for the Kröller-Müller, third title: Corot – Saint-Just, tree-column bases named LYCURGUS, ROUSSEAU, ROBESPIERRE, MICHELET, COROT, Otterlo, the Netherlands, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, 1982
sundial, Cherrybank Gardens, Perth, 1984
a basket of lemons, a plough of the Roman sort, two oval plaques, Pistoia, Italy, Villa Celle, 1984
Vienna, Austria, Schweizergarten, 1985
Brittany, France, Domain de Kerguehennec, 1986
Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Van Abbemuseum, 1986
A Remembrance of Annette, with Nicholas Sloan, Münster, Germany, Uberwasser Cemetery, 1987
Books
Finlay, Ian Hamilton (September–October 2004). Ken Cockburn; Lilias Fraser (eds.). The Dancers Inherit the Party and Glasgow Beasts, An' a Burd. Polygon in association with Scottish Poetry Library. ISBN 1-904598-13-7. Original: 1960 Migrant Press, 1961 Wild Hawthorn Press, 1961 Wild Flounder Press, 1969 Fulcrum Press, 1995 or 1996 or 1997 Polygon ISBN 0-7486-6207-3.