Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer

by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Yves Abrioux, Stephen Bann (Introduction)

Poet, gardener, and moralist, Ian Hamilton Finlay is also an artist of international stature whose remarkable originality blurs the traditional genre distinctions between painting, sculpture, and architecture. Ian Hamilton A Visual Primer will be an indispensable source for readers interested in any aspect of his work. Representing Finlay as both a visual artist and a poet, it brings together the widest range of printed texts, photographs, and environmental work yet assembled to provide a comprehensive overview of his achievements.Finlay became known in the 1960s as Britain's foremost concrete poet and promoted this movement through his Wild Hawthorn Press, which he continues to operate. Yet he is best known for his garden at Stonypath in Lanarkshire, Scotland, one of the most celebrated of modern gardens. "Little Sparta," as the garden is now called, is an inland island constantly transformed with Neoclassical specimens relating Finlay's poem structures to a variety of landscape expressions. It uses the simple elements of plants, water, and land forms in which poem structures and emblems are points of focus to provide a visual and aesthetic education for the visitor.In this garden laboratory, Finlay has transformed the poem from something on a printed page to something akin to a work of architecture. The majority of his work (which extends to many media including cards, posters, pamphlets, portfolios, books, and photographs) is carried out in collaboration with craftspeople, artists, photographers, and architects. Like his garden, his works often imply a sharp, uncompromising critique of the contemporary cultural scene.The French critic Yves Abrioux is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Digraphs and has published numerous articles and exhibition catalogs on Ian Hamilton Finlay's work, as well as on contemporary American fiction and literary theory. Stephen Bann is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at the University of Kent.

Genres: Art, Landscape Architecture

328 pages, Hardcover

First published September 9, 1992

About the author

Ian Hamilton Finlay was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. He was educated at Dollar Academy and joined the British Army in 1942.

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories in 1958 with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald.

His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962. 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, in his magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse'.

Later, Finlay began to compose 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.