Janine Smith, third year BA Fine Art student at Orkney College UHI, reflects on her experience curating an exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre.
Margaret Tait A Portrait of Ga, 1952 © the estate of the artist
I have enjoyed working with the Pier Arts Centre to curate an exhibition as part of my professional practice module on the BA Fine Art course at Orkney College. The process has taught us about marketing, research and interpretation, the theme and atmosphere we wanted to create for the gallery and how to install the art work in the space.
Working with Anna, one of the activities I enjoyed the most was looking at the Pier Arts Centre’s collection and discovering the pieces we were drawn to, finding out what interested us about them. We realised we both liked some of the smaller pieces in the collection. We felt they had an intimacy, and the detail in their small scale had the strength to make the viewer look closer. The idea of whispers emerged and we wanted to create a quiet space with these smaller art works communicating in some way.
I have enjoyed looking at some Margaret Tait films and reading some of her poetry. We chose to put her film, A Portrait of Ga, in the exhibition and I really enjoyed seeing this short, intimate film of her mother, being installed as a small projection to fit in with the scale of the paintings and drawings we had chosen. Margaret Tait’s intense looking and observing the everyday, through filming people and places she was very familiar with, creates an intense intimacy and warmth. The sound and movement in the space adds to the atmosphere and the idea of whispers, each frame is composed like a painting, moving and changing the scenes through the muted landscape colours, to hints and splashes of a vivid red.
The experience has been very inspiring, learning about artists I have always admired and gaining a better understanding of their work, learning some personal details of friendships and interactions that shaped their own practice leading to their individual style and art work. Sylvia Wishart wrote about how her friend Bryce Wilson drew a bird emblem, amongst other things, on her window, and how this led her to look at the images on the glass as well as the imagery through the window creating an ambiguity of space. This bird emblem can be seen in the Sylvia Wishart drawing in the exhibition. All these layers and details add to the connections within the pieces in the exhibition conveying the atmosphere of whispers, the art work quietly revealing their stories the closer you look.