Jake Harvey RSA, is widely known and admired for works such as the MacDairmid Memorial near Langholm, and his contribution to An Turas on Tiree, Western isles. He was born in Kelso in the Scottish Borders where he still lives and works. In his own words:
‘My creative stimulus comes from many sources but frequently evolves from drawing things seen and imagined, from lived encounters with the landscape and, in the reductive process of carving, from embracing the tangential ways of making that evolve. … sculptures carved in basalt, granite, marble and porphyry relates to a material and a way of working it. In a broader context it links to my aim to create simple sculptural forms; works of distilled essence that invite deliberation from the viewer; sculptures made by a process of paring down and refining in terms of both form and concept.’
This film illustrates Jake’s approaches to his work. It feature the landscape around Yetholm which he describes as having been the recurring fundamental influences on his work, a spell in India researching and sourcing stone, his working methods in his workshop/studio and the origins of his creative thinking which range from geology to poetry and from landscape to artistic theory. His forms are often in resistant material that he works with sensitivity to expose their colour, texture and formal properties. These simple abstract forms are carefully positioned in the landscape or have bases specially devised for them. Jake studied at Edinburgh College of Art between 1966 and 1972, and later became Head of the School of Sculpture there for eleven years and is now Emeritus Professor of Sculpture.
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In 2022 FEUVA made this documentary film about Alan Johnston’s exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney.
Andrew Parkinson, the Pier’s Curator, explains Alan’s inspirations – the Orkney landscape and its archaeological sites.
Alan Johnston was born in Scotland in 1945; he studied at the Edinburgh College of Art between 1967 and 1970. Latterly he was Professor at the College where he obtained a reputation for instilling in his students a sense of the boundless possibilities of art as well as paving the way for Scottish artists such as Douglas Gordon and Callum Innes to find a place on the international stage.
Alan has been at the forefront of contemporary art in Scotland since the 1960s, and has exhibited his fine abstract art in galleries across the world, most frequently in Germany, The Netherlands and especially Japan.
Alan Johnston in his own words:
My work explores spatial contexts and relations through drawing and architectural construction, reflecting on the spatial and tactual implications in architecture where perceptual notions are rendered as common factors in sight and touch. This field is closely related to the work of Patrick Geddes, Philosophical Generalism, and Gesamtkunstwerk. This is a comparative context, which has its roots in the practice of art, architecture and visual thinking in the West and the East, and relates to concepts and practices such as Wabi Sabi. I engage in collaborative initiatives in art and architecture with Professor Shinichi Ogawa, Tokyo, and Neil Gillespie, Edinburgh.
The film was made in May 2022. It records the exhibition at the Pier Gallery which brings together a group of paintings from the 1980s with a series of new works, and a drawing made directly on the gallery wall.
The screening will be followed by a panel discussion including Alan Johnston, the Curator of the Pier Arts Centre Andrew Parkinson, and FEUVA Trustee and filmmaker Margaret Stewart.
