Art in 2020

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art, art exhibits, but is it art

Normally, at this point in January I would be writing about the previous year’s documentaries. However this year I find I have nothing to say about them. It’s not that I didn’t see any great documentaries this year – Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, Honeyland, Scheme Birds and Ghost Fleet were all worthy of note – rather that no wider themes emerged this year, if they existed as part of a larger conversation within documentary making then I have no idea what it was saying. Perhaps I’m just looking for meaning where there is none, or perhaps I need to look in other directions for a while. To that end I’m going to focus my attention elsewhere on the blog this year.

A few years ago – nearly a decade ago now, and isn’t that a scary thought – I set myself the challenge of writing about ten art exhibitions here on the blog. It was a really fun challenge and made me see a lot more art than I would have otherwise. Then, as now, the biggest challenge was that I can’t write about every art exhibition I see, because it’s only when I really love or really dislike art that I feel moved to write about it. (For example, I saw some art – ‘Proximities’ by Rod Purcell – yesterday at Upstairs that made me smile and that I really quite enjoyed – more than enjoyed, if I’d had enough disposal cash in my budget I’d have been tempted to buy a print – but it wasn’t art that left me with lots to say for good or ill.) Perhaps that’s actually the correct term for it, moved, did it move me or not, if I’m going to write about art it’s less about personal preference or taste more that the work changed my perspective on something either positively or negatively. I can’t force the response, as a dozen half-written abandoned reviews of perfectly decent art exhibitions ruefully remind me, the best I can hope for in those circumstances is that the mediocrity might annoy me into verbosity.

(The art I hang on my own walls is mostly canvas prints of photos I’ve taken on my travels, collages of art postcards that friends and relatives have sent me, and in an odd exception, a favourite web comic creator’s take on an art deco classic. I’ve seen some amazing, inspiring art over the last decade that has moved and engaged me, changed my perspective and challenged my unconscious prejudices but most of it I wouldn’t give house space to, even if I could afford it.)

I’m generally of the opinion of that very few ‘artistic’ experiences are ever wasted. Beyond my love of ‘bad movies’ and how much I’ve learned from things that provoked the reaction of ‘that was brilliant and I never want to watch it again’, there’s something about the accretion of ideas over time that build up in your brain and provide context for the other art you consume. An exhibition that on it’s own I had nothing to say about, may prove later to contribute ideas or stand in contrast to something else I see later. Sometimes art exists in conversation with another piece of art – whether as explicitly as the Monarch exhibition a couple of years ago or more subtly/abstractly – or as part of a wider movement. I suppose that’s why I like to try to see art wherever I go, whether the grubby immediacy of street art and murals, the colloquial pleasures of an unexpected exhibition of watercolours or landscape photography in a rural library stairwell, or an attention grabbing installation by a big name artist.

All this is a long way round to say that I’ve set myself a target this month to do something ‘arty’ each month this year – whether seeing an art exhibition, some theatre, attending a concert or a dance performance – and writing about them, getting some perspective on, and hopefully finding some inspiration from, taking the long view on the arts here in the Highlands and beyond.

Performance & Participation: art @Tate Modern

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art, art exhibits, but is it art

I had plans for the blog this month. I was looking forward to writing some of my leftover prompts from Nablopomo. But life, as it does, intervened and among other things I found myself working in London for a week and didn’t get near a computer – unless you count using an iPad to wrestle a portable autocue into submission – all week. However, I did find myself with a couple of mornings free and with my colleague’s admonishment to ‘do something fun’ – I think he was more expecting me to hit Oxford Street – I headed out to see some art.

Last time I was in London I made my first trip to the Tate, so it seemed appropriate that this time I should head off to the Tate Modern. I can’t really talk about the Tate Modern without talking about the building that houses it. Much as the structure and nature of the Victorian era buildings that house Tate Britain and museums like it inform the nature of the experience, the collection and reveal the times in which they were built, the repurposing of the old Bankside power station speaks volumes about the times and priorities that shaped it’s creation and collection. The building itself seems to exist both as a work of art in it’s own right – modernist almost to the point of brutalism in architectural style – and in dialogue with the wider art world, a physical embodiment of the question of what should a museum be and look like, along with wider questions about what is art?

After all the controversy about the new viewing balcony spoiling the view/privacy for the surrounding luxury flats, I had no choice but to take the lift right to the top and see what all the fuss is about. (You can in fact see right into people’s living rooms, but the flats are equally overlooked but neighbouring blocks of flats, as quite frankly, are most high-rise flats in London.) The view in the other three directions, however, is quite stunning. The birds eye view gives you a sense of scale about the place that you don’t really get from ground level, demonstrating how vast the place is while at the same time how unexpectedly close to each other significant buildings really are.

One of my favourite exhibitions was the Living Cities gallery, in particular Kada Attia’s rendering of the ancient city of Ghardaïa in cooked couscous of all mediums and Naoya Hatakeyama’s light-box depictions of Tokyo’s night lights.

All the exhibits that I saw seemed to take on an element of foregrounding the relationship between viewer and artist. However, in Perfomer and Participant, this theme was made explicit. I particularly enjoyed the Krasinski room, less for the art itself – which is fairly simple – but because you could still interact with it, the each viewer’s experience was entirely unique and I took great pleasure on my return wander through, in watching how other visitors interacted with it. Whereas Lala Rukh’s Rupak was a strangely compelling, almost to the point of hypnotic experience a rare example of video art that completely captured me and held me hostage for the duration.

I feel that I would have got greater pleasure from the works of both Paul Neagu and Lygia Clark & Hélio Oiticica if I could have interacted with their works as originally intended. There was something decidedly odd about looking at art in glass boxes that was explicitly created to be interacted with, being at once told that the point of it was to interact with it, while at the same time being prevented from doing so. It makes sense, why you’re not allowed to touch these objects anymore, as they’re projects that the artist has finished and is no longer replacing/repairing or in some cases the artist has died and this is what remains of their work. Nonetheless it felt somewhat that the audience was being teased with the ghost of a time when this art had somehow more and less value at once.

I feel like I’ve been hearing about the Turbine Hall for the entirety of my adult life, and some quick research shows me that I’m entirely correct, as Tate Modern opened in 2000, the year I turned sixteen. When I was there, it was housing Kara Walker’s Hyundai Commission work, which I must say the pictures do not begin to do justice to the sheer scale of it. It is definitely a piece of art that takes advantage of the space available to it. (The first time I saw Kara Walker’s work was in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the best part of a decade ago, her stark silhouettes sprang to mind the moment I saw this fountain, her style remains so distinctive.) There was something slightly surreal to see the fountain surrounded by parents with buggies and toddlers carefully balancing their way along the parapet of it, but as that appears to have been part of the point of the work of art, that it exists in conversation with public fountains such as the Victoria Memorial, and should be interacted with in the same way.

Accross Land and Sea @CircusArtspace

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art, art exhibits, nablopomo

In order to talk about this exhibit, I need to first talk about the space it took place in. CiRCus_Artspace is an artist collective based in the WASP studios within the Inverness Creative Academy. (Or, if you’re a certain age, the old Midmills College building.) Their stated purpose is to make contemporary art available to a wide Highland audience while also supporting recent graduate artists from the area. I’ve been in the space a few times now – and I’m always taken by the light in the space, both natural and artificial – but this was the first time I’d actually seen it with art on display. Being a largely crowd-funded endeavour, the exhibitions tend to have fairly short durations and necessarily limited opening hours – this is in fact the third exhibition that they’ve held in the space, and it was the first I’ve made it along to see. (I was particularly disappointed to miss the soundscape on the preview evening.)

The exhibition itself was a coming together of three artists from across the Highlands and Islands who share an interest in traditional crafts and craft materials and are inspired by their surrounding landscapes and communities.

I was particularly taken by Vivian Ross-Smith’s work, which felt very much like a conversation between the contrasting ephemerality and practicality of traditional crafts and artistic practice. There’s definitely something about the work ‘Network’, made from preserved haddock skins and Shetland wool that has lots to say about both the bonds and fragility of rural communities – particularly island communities such as the one Ross-Smith grew up in on Fair Isle.

I was also somewhat charmed by Patricia Shone’s time-based pieces that dominated the space and seemed to both compel and confuse visitors to the exhibition. In this case, time-based means that they were dried clay pieces that were either filled with water so that they would collapse over time or designed to dry out and self-destruct in the opposite direction.

Across Land and Sea ran at Inverness Creative Academy from October 11th – 20th 2019.

Natural Selection @InvMAG

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art, art exhibits

Natural Selection is an utterly charming exhibition exploring nest building and egg collecting. It’s the result of a five-year collaboration between artist Andy Holden and his father, ornithologist and broadcaster Peter Holden. (One of those forgotten faces from the Children’s television of my own childhood, whose re-appearance gave me a definite case of the warm and fuzzies.)

The first part of the exhibition that I encountered was a piece I didn’t initially realise was part of the exhibit, some particularly lovely examples of woodturning. This turned out to be a piece called Silent Spring – presumably after Rachael Carson’s landmark book that kicked off so much of the modern environmental movement – in which sonograms of various birds calls had been rendered into turned wood objects. Like waveforms made three dimensional, they’re somehow both intensely familiar yet utterly alien. Which is a good starting point for describing so much of this exhibition and about our encounters with birds in general.

The human-sized recreation of a Bowerbird’s bower dominates the entire space, a stunning and compelling construction. I empathised greatly with the small children who were also visiting at the same as I was, and had to be repeatedly restrained from venturing onto the surrounding woodchips. I also wished to run through the tunnel of the bower, or at least sit under its canopy and look up in admiration at its construction.

It was the section on nest building; in particular the parts focusing on Bower Birds and their bowers, that most caught my attention. There are very few species other than humans that build structures for purposes other than shelter – and even fewer of those could be said to have a purely aesthetic purpose. In fact, there is some evidence that Bower Birds have some concept of art in the way that humans would recognise it. They appear to have a particular affinity for the colour blue and there’s something both stunning and sad about the examples of elegantly constructed bowers, decorated with exquisite care with bright blue bottle caps and straws. A painful juxtaposition with the information that it’s thought that Bower Birds evolved this propensity for such complex courtship rituals – for art itself – due to living on isolated islands where food was plentiful and predators scarce.

The use of the tri-screen video presentation somehow draws together all the elements of the exhibition, from the gorgeous porcelain replica egg collection, to the 19th century naturalist drawings, through the human-sized bower, to the experimental video art. Combining the old-fashioned – with both its charms and its horrors – and the modern technological tricks that make the whole thing possible.

The combination of our father and son team gives the whole procedure a feel of the kind of slightly experimental science and nature programmes you sometimes stumbled upon accidentally, late in the evening on BBC 2 in the 90s. The kind of thing you probably wouldn’t tune in for on purpose based on the listing, but if you stumbled across it you’d find yourself utterly compelled by, and end up learning a bunch of interesting facts you’d enthuse about to anyone else you met for months afterwards.

Natural Selection is at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery until 11th January 2020.

At the Foot of the Stone: Art films @EdenCourt

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art exhibits, art films, but is it art, inverness, short films

At the Foot of the Stone is the first of what promises to be a bi-monthly series of screenings of short art films and visual arts pieces presented by Lux Scotland at Eden Court in Inverness. (Lux Scotland is a visual arts agency focusing on the archiving, development and support of visual and moving image art in Scotland. They’re currently attempting to engage with the subject outside of the usual centres in the Central Belt.) Forthcoming screenings will have different curators and – while I enjoyed Lux Scotland director Nicole Yip’s talk about their work and the selections she’d made – I’m looking forward to seeing how different a perspective we get from screenings curated by artists and curators living and working in the Highlands.

Almost all the films in this collection seemed caught between styles and genres, and more importantly from my perspective, between being purely abstract or being tied to a narrative. (For me, Midgie Noise from Video Artefacts worked best – it was the shortest and the film I could most have wished for a longer running time – because it was a purely abstract work, not trying to be anything else. It could therefore be enjoyed for what it was aesthetically, a brief but beautiful and mesmerising moment.) With the longer films – BRIDGIT and to a lesser extent April whose last gorgeous couple of minutes caused me to forgive instantly any confusion I’d suffered before – it took a while to establish whether, and how, the images and the voiceover related to each other. Did they exist in harmony with or in contradiction to, each other? Was the relationship purely abstract or was there some deeper symbolic or metaphorical meaning that I was missing. Patterns and rhythms certainly emerged but mostly they worked better when I stopped trying to assign meaning and narrative and just let them flow over me.

Other than April and Plum the films didn’t seem to resolve at the end. There was no narrative conclusion, leaving me somewhat bereft, struggling to assign meaning and message to the works. Was that the intent? Is that fundamentally the point of the art film, to leave you to draw your own conclusions rather than lead you to any one answer or message? I found this particularly frustrating with Sorry not Sorry as the film which seemed to have the most interesting things to say of the collection, but left me feeling that it had an insight that was just about to emerge, but the film ended before it could break the surface.

The films themselves are bound together by the thread of the artists all having been awarded The Margaret Tait Award – and it is perhaps her role as a writer and poet, rather than her pioneering film-work that best sheds light on all of these films. Her concept of visual art as essentially a visual, moving-image poem is particularly helpful – to me at least – in understanding these films. They owe much less to short stories, and the narrative quirks and charms of those, and rather more to poetry. They are experiments in form and expression, and while there may well be an overarching narrative, that’s not necessarily the point of the exercise. Instead they explore and manipulate their own central ideas, turning them around to look at them from different perspectives, tearing apart or playing with them, as the artist sees fit.

Art in Inverness

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art, art exhibits

One of the best things about many Scottish urban spaces, is the way the surrounding landscape forces its way into the urban skyline at unexpected moments. There are few more breath-taking moments for me in autumn, than rounding a corner, as the light is fading and being surprised by some gap in the skyline revealing the play of light shade on a distant hill. Even in the centre of a city as densely populated and built up as Glasgow, you can still walk down Buchanan Street on a clear day and look up at the right moment to find you can see all the way to the Cathkin Braes. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Highlands, where the lines between urban and rural are so blurred that it is easy to lose track of where they lie. Indeed, a fair amount of the art I’ve seen since living up here – at least from locally based artists – has explored that mutability to a greater or lesser extent and effect.

Art is everywhere here. When I first moved up to Inverness, despite favourable first impressions, I did wonder how much art – let alone interesting art – I was likely to find on anything like a regular basis. Most of the really interesting art I’d seen in over a decade of living in and around Stirling had been stuff that I’d stumbled on, mostly by accident. And almost all the art that I’d gone actively looking for in that time had been in Glasgow or Edinburgh, cities I already knew to a certain extent. Indeed, at first I only really saw art in the galleries upstairs in the local museum and the local arts centre, but as time passed, I’ve learned to sniff out the clues. It turns out that once you know what to look for, art can be found all over the place here, bursting out all over.

The on-going grind of the recession has left Inverness, like almost every other town in Scotland, with its share of mournful looking empty retail units. However, over at the Victorian Market, they seem to have come up with an idea that feels like it ought to have been an obvious idea. They’re using one of the empty units as an exhibition space. It’s currently displaying art from UHI students, which I hope continues, given that while the college itself is rather a charming piece of architecture, it’s apparently rather lacking in spaces in which to make and display art. We can only hope that this results in rather more innovative and experimental takes on producing and displaying art from the resident art students. In the interim, I’ve certainly been enjoying finding odd bits of art and craft-based sculpture in unexpected corners of the market and in unlikely shop windows.

Social media has been a great boon in my search for new art. I’ve spent a fair amount of time, working on identifying a collection of good local sources that promote art locally and nationally. But its definitely one of those situations where the more you find out, the more you find there is to find. Or often in my case, the more I find I’ve just missed.

Something that I often narrowly miss, are the exhibitions at Upstairs. Between 2pm and 4pm on week day afternoons, an architecture firm on Academy Street opens their doors to art lovers. Small exhibitions by local artists are the order of the day and there’s something delightfully transgressive about the whole experience. Although the gallery has managed the rare trick of being open at precisely the time-frame when I’m least likely to be free to enjoy some art, on those occasions that I’ve managed to make it along to see the art, I’ve both greatly enjoyed the art – the current exhibition of constructed photography by Michael Gallacher is well worth a visit – and the feeling that I’ve snuck in somewhere I’m not supposed to be.

The building itself is a bit of a hidden gem, with a lovely tiled entranceway, and nicely understated glasswork on the stairwell windows. And the advantage of the gallery space being in an Architecture firm, if you’re me anyway, is that even if the art turns out to not be your taste, they’ve got some fascinating little architectural models of their own on display that you can enjoy while you’re there.

This month, even the more conventional location of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery’s upstairs art gallery had rather an eccentric exhibition. A Curious Turn is a visiting exhibition from The Craft Council, on the history and resurgence of automata as both a craft and art form. It’s very rare that I see art exhibitions that feel like they’ve been carefully crafted into a work of art themselves. The exhibition is full of delightful details from the hand-cranked exhibition sign, to the little mule that draws himself, to the odd assortment of cogs, cranks and accoutrements that let younger visitors build their very own automata. (When I visited someone had put together the kind of macabre assemblage that only small children and art students are capable of creating.) My own favourite part of the exhibition was that almost all the automata on display were operable, if their handles were too small and fiddly for general use, they’d been wired up so that you could make them run in their glass cases with a push of a button.

Monarch of the Glen & #RealLifeMonarch @InvMAG

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art, art exhibits, but is it art, edwin landseer, ross sinclair

The art gallery portion of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery is currently playing host to the National Galleries of Scotland’s travelling exhibition of both Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and Ross Sinclair’s specially commissioned response to it After, After, After…The Monarch of the Glen – Real Life is Dead. Two more different pieces of artwork it would be hard to imagine.

The thing that sticks with me, perhaps the most important thing to take away from the exhibition is that the two pieces have one important thing in common other than the obvious. Both pieces of art are much better in person than, they have a particular presence that causes them to lose something in photographs. The Landseer painting is such a familiar image that its become an almost ubiquitous image of picturesque ‘scotch-ness’, and as such should really have no power at all over anyone who isn’t invested in all the things it has come to represent. Yet, stand in front of it – better yet, stand a little off to the right of it – and there’s something curiously three dimensional about the painting. In the half-lit gallery space, the light and shade of the painting are enhanced and for a moment it seems as if the stag might actually step out of the painting. Away from the bright glare of the usual art gallery setting or the advertising billboard, it becomes just a painting once more, something that it seems possible to project your own meaning onto.

Likewise, Sinclair’s response is a very different beast to stand in front of. Where in photographs, it seems a messy garish sprawl, standing with it in situ, it has a raw and strangely elegant presence. It’s a literal deconstruction of the kind of ‘scotch-ness’ that the Landseer has come to embody. Like a strangely articulate howl of rage and grief or stumbling unexpectedly across some pointedly political graffiti where you’d least expect it. It manages to be both haunting and confrontational, at once questioning and illuminating – both figuratively and literally – the piece that it responds to. Both a demand for remembrance and a indictment of nostalgia. At once both a joy and cringe indeed.

Both pieces will be on display at Inverness Museum and Gallery until 18th November when they will continue on their tour of Scotland.

Mini City/Land of Giants Exhibit @EdenCourt

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architecture, art, art exhibits

Another chunk of the festival of architecture has arrived in Inverness, this time in the form of the Mini City/Land of the Giants exhibition. I stumbled over it by accident at Eden Court the other day, they often have exhibitions tucked away upstairs and I spotted it by chance glancing down into another half-hidden gallery from half-way up the stairs. (One of my favourite things about Eden Court is all the fabulous little nooks and crannies that it has, it’s great fun to go for an exploratory wander and find somewhere to curl up with a book and a cup of tea, but its also really easy to miss something really interesting for approximately the same reasons.) Tucked away in the gallery next to the Bishops House part of Eden Court is a fascinating little exhibition.

The exhibition itself features scale models of buildings, campuses, sites and homes, both built and un-built, most of them local but all of them created by local architects and model makers. (For the purpose of this exhibition ‘local’ means ‘North of Scotland’ which appears to cover, the Highlands, Islands – Hebridean, Northern & Western – Moray, Aberdeenshire – in fact quite far south given the inclusion of Perth Concert Hall.) They were mostly created in the process of designing the buildings and some of those that have made it into full-sized three dimensional space, are accompanied by photos of the finished buildings in situ which adds a pleasing symmetry to the process.

They’re almost all mounted on piles of wooden pallets, which you’d think would look really messy, but actually really enhances the feeling of constructed reality and impermanence of the models themselves. The models – with a few notable exceptions – were created as part of a design process, to demonstrate a design in 3D space, to show a more realistic view of how its features will interact with the wider landscape. Mostly, they were never meant to be seen by more than a handful of people – in some cases, just a few architects and the client. There’s something secret and special about seeing these artefacts, ghosts of buildings as they might have been or might yet be. It feels like a peak behind the curtain of the architectural design process, a drawing back of the veil that enhances rather than undermines the magic.

The Festival of Architecture @InvMAG

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architecture, art exhibits, inverness

The Festival of Architecture made its appearance in Inverness last weekend. The Building Blocks/Scotstyle exhibition(s) at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery is a rather unusual marriage of tow thematically similar but vastly differently executed exhibitions. While they are both part of the same festival they are both very different responses to idea of public engagement with architecture. Scotstyle is the more ‘traditional’ part of the exhibition, a travelling display courtesy of the RIAS (the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland) celebrating the 100 best pieces of Scottish architecture from the century since the RIAS was founded – ten from each decade to give a nice spread to the choices. The buildings of choice were nominated by members of the public – before being narrowed down by a panel of experts – and it shows in some of the more esoteric choices on the list – some of the loveliest factories I’ve ever laid eyes on made the grade.

(Although arguably, I’d have more faith in the selection process if not for the picture used to illustrate the University of Stirling. It’s not that I disagree with their assessment that the Pathfoot building is an architecturally interesting building or that it is head and shoulders a better-designed and more pleasant building to study in than its companion across the loch Cottrell. But that the picture used is not of Pathfoot – its of the halls of residences and look, I lived in them as a student and much as I enjoyed that time and appreciate how much money the university has poured into refurbishing them in the decade since I graduated, but the buildings themselves are ugly, uninspiring buildings undeserving of any kind of complimentary architecture prizes.)

The other half of the exhibition couldn’t be more different if it tried. Interactivity and engaging children with architecture through technology are its watchword. Mostly it uses Minecraft as its gateway encouraging young visitors to explore virtual reality versions of local architecture and then build their own which can then be displayed in the gallery as part of the exhibition. As much as their part of the exhibition was aimed at – and clearly being thoroughly enjoyed by the much younger visitors, numerous grown up visitors including myself had fun with the best use of QR codes I’ve seen yet. Combining the simple – table tennis bats with QR codes printed on one side – and the complex – Ipads with software that translated the codes into 3D animated versions of local landmarks.

All in all, I’m not sure that the whole exhibition hung together as well as it could have – the two parts were just a bit too disparate – but it was fun and experimental, something a bit different and quirky, and I look forward to future exhibits that develop that experimentation further.

Symphonies, Sound Art and Scandinavians @Tectonicsglas

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art exhibits, city halls, sound art, tectonics

Last weekend saw the return to Glasgow of the Tectonics music festival. A joint venture between Iceland and Scotland, the festival has settled into an annual role with two sibling festivals running in Glasgow (in May) and Reykjavik (in April) with artists and orchestras from both countries coming together to provide a strange and often wonderful mix of electronic and symphonic music.

Despite having attended and enjoyed the Glasgow edition last year, I nearly missed this year’s festival. Most of April was lost in a haze of Gàidhlig assignments, and any post that wasn’t of a vital or time sensitive nature got put to one side in the interim. On Saturday I sat down with intent to go through said abandoned post and deal with anything that needed dealt with. I didn’t get very far, as fairly early in the pile I came across a programme for this year’s Tectonics festival and discovered that it was in fact that weekend. So instead I spent time frantically rearranging my schedule to fit in the Sunday programme of the festival. Definitely worth it though.

I think this year’s selection was a little more esoteric than last year, either that or Sundays are reserved for the more Avant-garde side of the festival because there were a couple of acts that were…very Avant-garde (including an act that felt like I could have stumbled on them in one of the odder venues at the Fringe) and I seem to remember picking Saturday over Sunday to attend last year for that reason. Nothing quite blew me away the way the transcendent beauty of Guth na eòin/Voice of the birds by Hanna Tuulikki did last year but then the only live experience I had that improved on that in the entirety of 2013 was Skunk Anansie and I’d wanted to see them live since I was 12…

There were some definite highlights to this year’s festival. The always excellent BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, were on form, making their instruments do strange and wonderful things. At the other end of the scale S.L.Á.T.U.R. (pleasingly, slàtur is apparently the Icelandic equivalent of haggis) a Reykjavik-based collective, composing and creating experimental music with both electronic and analogue (very analogue, during one piece they all played instruments that looked as though they had been made from long, square cardboard tubes) instruments, and performing them with an innovative and entertaining form of animated notation that proved most interesting and amusing. Also it made the audience participation in the last song rather easier to follow and stay in time for. (I was a foot. That’s all I will say on the matter)

Despite their Scandinavian charms, it was the Sound Art performance that stole the show for me. Sarah Kenchington’s installation Sounds from the Farmyard was open all day for concertgoers to play with and on, and it was fabulous. Kenchington creates instruments out of every day and found objects, alongside deconstructed conventional musical instruments, and she brought a selection of her creations from the last ten years for the audience to play with. My personal favourites were a contraption where you rolled large metal ball bearings into a giant metal maze where the motion swung the balls on ever changing paths and chimed bells made out of wine glasses. Also a much smaller contraption seemingly made from some kind of metal tom-tom and a metal slinky, which made a brilliant noise that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a 1950s sci-fi film. On both days of the festival she managed to gather together a collection of musicians and enthusiastic amateurs to perform all the instruments in something like harmony, that managed to show case the charms of each of the instruments. By all rights it should have been the most discordant and weird of the performances, the performers were almost all strangers to each other, they had no real rehearsal time and there didn’t appear to be a central score, yet somehow they created something not only strange and wonderful, but completely musical as well.