Ian Hamilton Finlay
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Image:Finlay Star.jpg Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 - 27 March, 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.
Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, but was educated in Scotland. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated to the Orkney Islands. In 1942 he joined the British Army.
At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems. He published books including The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958) and The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960), and some of his work was broadcast by the BBC.
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 wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press. Eventually he began to inscribe his poems into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment.
This kind of environmental poetry features in his garden "Little Sparta" in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, where he lived. The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and temple-like buildings as well as plants. In December 2004, a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be "the nation's greatest work of art"; Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945". There is a Little Sparta Trust that plans to preserve it for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Trustees include Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Gallery.
Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985.
Bibliography
- Abrioux, Yves: Ian Hamilton Finlay. A Visual Primer. London 1992
- Zdenek, Felix/ Simig, Pia: Ian Hamilton Finlay. Works in Europe 1972-1995. Ostfildern 1995
- Finlay, Ian Hamilton: The Dancers Inherit the Party and Glasgow Beasts, An' a Burd. Polygon 2004 ISBN 1904598137
- Weilacher, Udo: "Poetry in Nature Unredeemed - Ian Hamilton Finlay" (Interview) in: Weilacher, Udo: Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art. Basel Berlin Boston 1999 ISBN 3764361190
- Querelle d'artistes sur fond de bicentenaire - Les douteuses provocations de M. Finlay - Article publié le 13 Mai 1989 Par PLENEL EDWY Source : http://www.lemonde.fr
External links
- Little Sparta Trust
- An interview with Finlay, conducted by Nagy Rashwan (includes images of his work)
- Finlay's page at the Tate Gallery (includes images of his work)Template:Scotland-bio-stub