MOVEMENT THROUGH LIGHT AND SPACE
The new exhibition which opens on Friday is called MOVEMENT THROUGH LIGHT AND SPACE, is the perfect complement to Timespan’s renaissance.
As the gallery renews a commitment to deliver its vision for the arts in the community, here we have a brilliant canter through photography, sculpture and music that is not to be missed.
Liz Treacher is a fine art photographer based in Skelbo. She is a member of Visual Arts Sutherland and shows her work at Browns Fine Art Gallery, Tain and has a permanent exhibition of her work in Glasgow. Brought up in Elgin, Liz studied at UC London where she became immersed in film-making and eventually photography.
Norman Gibson is well known to Sutherland. A sculptor and designer based in Brora, he was educated in Scotland and England and has had a successful academic career on both sides of the border. Norman has exhibited widely in the UK and has contributed to many public and private collections here and abroad.
Lucie Treacher is a young composer, singer-songwriter and pupil at Dornoch Academy. Although only 13, she has already attracted a lot of interest in her talent for singing and playing the guitar, piano and violin. She records and produces her own compositions and performs regularly in venues throughout the Highlands.
A looped sound-track by Lucie Treacher provides a strong, fast paced musical backdrop when you enter Timespan’s gallery foyer. It was composed as the accompaniment for Liz Treacher’s high contrast photographs of urban pavement pounding activity through sun lit illuminations. The music works really well with the images which are not quite agitated, but a percentage up from brisk. Stunning high energy may best describe them.
The photographs could be placed in any big city environment (except London’s hideous Oxford Street) and have a 1950’s, almost Cartier Bresson feel to them. Totally beautiful. Remarkable too, when reminded that to capture these images would have taken not just skill, imagination and flair but the patience of Job. The right light at the right time of day just after a good rainfall on a busy street with enough variety in High Street footwear to tell a thousand stories. There is a lot to see in these photographs and much to fuel the imagination. Where are these people coming from and going? They are faceless but strangely, this doesn’t make them any less vulnerable to curiosity.
This isn’t a bespoke collaboration – the sculptures of course, predate the music (some even predate the musician), but there is something absolutely magical about this combination. The music feeds through the headphones creating an immediate immersion, and it has to be said, an implicit directive to concentrate for the duration on the piece on the art in front of you.
Each composition is a sense reflection of Lucie’s feelings when she thought long and hard about the sculptures and they are a wonderful mixture of funny, perceptive, sad and moving. Part instrumental, part song and part dripping tap, a wail here and there and a simply stunning whoosh of summer waves, whatever you read into it, this is music created by a very talented musician who (because we know she is only 13) has probably an astoundingly successful future ahead of her.
Norman’s sculptures with their detailed intricate shapes, textures and colours reflect his interest in landscape, archaeology and spatial memory. They are dense and complicated but fascinating too, so not intimidating. Taking the collection as a whole there is the sense of nature struggling to morph into low tech industry only to be rewarded with a hi-tech accolade. A sort of grandee Malevich meets genius Heath Robinson.
Most pieces are constructions in wood with fragments of land and seascapes. There some painted surfaces, lots of movement - some implied, some real and some transient as with the light and shadow.
You’ll see something different each time you look at this work and it will be a joy to those familiar with his Norman’s brilliance to have to opportunity to revist it. Although everything he creates conveys precision, nothing is left to chance, it does not deny spontaneity. The sculptures are jam packed with ideas – but those that survived scrutiny are meticulously executed.
Sheila Robertson, who lives in Ullapool where she is part of An Talla Solais art centre, is Timespan’s artist of the month. Her work is on display in the downstairs foyer and café and is a welcome return as Sheila has exhibited very successfully with Timespan in the past. Those familiar with her paintings, will see quite a different portfolio however. We are used to huge canvases and bold colours from Sheila but this current display is softer, gentler and the images much smaller. But very dramatic as well. They are definitely worth a special visit, just to see. And buy of course!
Published on Wednesday 19 March 2008 by David Mason