Kilmorack Gallery | early years | 1996 - 2003

Kilmorack Gallery

The Early Years | 1996 - 2003

front cover image

Falls of Kilmorack, 1836

Kilmorack Gallery, inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND

art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

Kilmorack Gallery

The Early Years 1996 - 2003

Extract from ‘Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer’

From Chapter One, ‘Opening the Door.’

“We drive in convoy to the church. Black Allan in a small maroon van, tilted to one side, and me in an old, almost ready-to-ditch Ford Sierra. We are like kids on bikes – practical vehicles taking us through a magical world. The old church belongs to Black Allan. I didn’t question why he had it. It is just what Black Allan does. He collects neglected and wonderful things, a magpie of the mysterious. This is his hidden jewel and I am about to be stunned.

‘Note,’ he says with a soft Inverness accent. ‘Orignal lime harling. Ornate hand-forged door furnishings, authentic but worn leaded paint and footworn Caithness flagstone.’

He removes the door chain, makes a show of finding the key, and continues his architectural chirpings.

‘You will have noticed the crows, cawing a warning. This is their place. Humans are not welcome, but the sound, it adds to the atmosphere, do you not think? And you will have noticed the fine fenestration, far thinner than modern windows. It allows more light in, as does the angling of the window shelves.’

I can see the beauty of the building. It is built to be the biggest man-made structure in the community, and I can feel why it was

built here too. The old waterfall is now dammed and the healing spring forgotten, but I can feel an energy that I am too young to understand. Eventually Black Allan opens the door and I can already smell old pine and dust.

‘Please enter and observe the interior.’ I enter.

The church has already been disused for a generation. Once there was standing room only, every Sunday, and outside, on special ecclesiastical occasions, over a thousand gathered to hear the minister’s sermon at the foot of the waterfall. They walked three miles from the village of Beauly. Now, as I walk in, it lies half-asleep, one eye open like a dolphin.

‘You will have noticed the unexpected interior. Outside – classic Georgian, and inside – Gothic. Mock Gothic. Note the wooden-trefoiled shafts, unusual pink colour, herringbone roof and narrow-planked flooring. Beautifully old, don’t you think? And better with the surprising interior which, indeed, dates to 1835.’

The inside is almost bare. An enormous broom with carefully painted yellow stripes and matching dustpan sit in a corner. There is an assortment of ancient chairs and Black Allan’s ‘magician’s cabinet’: cobweb-thin silk around a six-sided frame that comes to an ornate finial. It is too old to touch, an object of no conceivable modern use, but Black Allan has moved it somehow from place to place for years.

‘I may, should a suitable purchaser be found,’ Black Allan said, ‘be in the position of allowing this fine building to change ownership. I can see that you like beautiful things.’

Beyond the church lie the hills of the west. Here it is all trees, wide-flowing river and the yellowing Scottish dusk. I am twenty-seven years old and surrounded by beauty. Black Allan is right, I realise. The Damascene awe-shine of beauty. It was beauty that pulled me from the confines of the childhood bedroom outside to the fields, towards the deer I saw in a thunderstorm from my window, and to the secret clearing in the woods. Both are now gone. The field built on and the wood felled. It lured me from university south in Edinburgh to the clear air of Inverness-shire – my body always felt lighter as it headed north in the bus – and today it brings me out to this old church. I am a moth to the light of beauty and now I am being scrutinised for a new role by the enigmatic Black Allan. He is short and bald on top, but his quick-moving eyes and limbs make him difficult to age. He also has the ability to melt away. Rules for Black Allan are a plaything. At least ten different pseudo-names help him avoid various authorities. Rumour has it that he stole slates from a construction site and then sold them back to the panicked owner the next day.

The old kirk, 1995

This is the murky underbelly of 1995. There is so much freedom. On a Sunday, rural pubs open in a haze of smoke, beer and pool before the community drives back for dinner. Films have captured this spirit. Braveheart and Rob Roy were released the year before, and there was a call for wild-looking extras. We came to have our teeth blackened and appear on the big screen. You could, if you wanted, exist just below the surface. Black Allan dipped up, down, and around all laws.

‘Maybe we could come to some mutually agreeable solution?’ Black Allan suggests.

‘Aye,’ I say.

But first, Black Allan plans to weigh my worth. He knows I could not afford to pay much. He will reel me in and out, part of the game of a man between surfaces. We agree to meet in his mother’s house the next day.”

Extract from Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer by Tony Davidson. Woodwose Books 2022

Fresh Find

January 2023

It was great to find the old multi-fonted sign. In 1997 many people remembered the names Kenny ‘the bank,’ Reverend Thomas Lind and Sam from Glebe Cottage. The image is the burning bush with the Latin words ‘nec tamen consumebatur:’ and ‘yet it was not consumed.’

While waiting for planning permission for the gallery, I built Canadian canoes. A window had to be removed from the old kirk to get them outside. We had many adventures in the rivers of the east as well as dangerous ones in the lochs of the west.

You can clearly see where the pulpit once stood. It was moved to this easterly gable in 1835 when the church interior was reconstructed in a gothic revival style. Before this the pulpit was on the roadside between two Georgian windows.

Canoe building 1996

Angels 1997

I would see an angel in this window when I sat on the floor in the evening.

Later when it was dark outside, under candlelight, the tall wooden columns made the church feel like a forest.

The mill is a sawmill. The glen was once famous for its incredible trees. Some were used for ship masts and others, during war years, became ammo boxes and coffins.

Lost Worlds

pre-dam Kilmorack

Kilmorack was always a magical place. There were large services held outside, by the falls, in the nineteen-century. Buried and forgotten are older things: crop circles from pre-Christian days. Most are now destroyed by the quarry.

worn stone

The stone where the bellpull once lay is worn by eight generations of tolling.

The Spring

This looks eighteenthcentury but the carved date reads 1919. There is also an older spring not far away.

Two Ages

The timber seen here is from two periods. The structural ‘Y’ is from the eighteenthcentury, and the warmer coloured woodsthe herringbone lining and cross infills - are from 1835. Behind the existing pink walls is a cream-coloured plaster from when the church had two doors and two balconies - a very different layout.

Art

It felt right, like building and place enjoyed the energy of art.

The First show

The Lights were from a skip, and the desk was an old door covered in hessian acquired from Scotland’s last jute mill in Kirriemuir.

The Gallery had wonderful artists in this first exhibition: Gerald Laing, Kirstie Cohen, Michael Forbes, James Hawkins, Allan MacDonald, Suzanne Gyseman, Allison Weightman - and it was full of character. Notice the chair legs used as finials on the screens. The elderly lady (previous page) with comfortable sandals and a sensible handbag is my grandmother.

The Second Exhibition

More artists: Helen Denerley, Lotte Glob, Simon Fraser, Michael Cairncross and illona Morrice.

Year Two

I lived hidden upstairs in the gallery.

“At night it creaked as floorboards cooled down after a hot day. All sounds were amplified: a bit of rubble dislodged by a nesting bird crashes behind the wall, wind-blown particles of lime that were once bedded under the slates come down and hit the wooden floor; even the occasional rain of dead flies makes a sound as it lands: tap tap tap. There is also a climatic movement of air in such a large room. It is rare for its highest point to be the same temperature as the floor, so there is always a breeze, best detected at night from a sleeping bag on a thin foam mattress.”

Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer

Helen Denerley and James Hawkins

August 1998

“Both artists were forty-four years old. It seemed a good age for an artist to be. They fizzed with energy. There was not enough light on the large triptych, Hawkins complained, so more spotlights were bought and installed. The hanging was too busy, so it was refined. Everything was moved around until it was just right. Less is more, I was instructed. A photographer was hired to make large transparencies of the show in situ, wine glasses were cleaned thoroughly, and kilt socks pulled up before the preview. Helen Denerley even made an extra piece of sculpture to hang outside on the gallery’s wall: a lizard made from horseshoes, with a bolt cutter for its mouth and a car horn for its eyes. “

Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer

1999

1999: one foot in the past and the other in the future.

Surrealist Tendencies in the Highlands

There’s more to the rich artistic world of the north than landscape painting. This exhibition set out to prove it.

Autumn, 1999

As the world digitised, I experimented with images on invitations.

Winter 1999

The gallery stayed open all year, with a large gas space heater that threw a flame across the room.

“Light in the gallery had a cold blue note in winter, which changed to yellow as the temperature rose in March. It was not long before I opened its doors, and cars pulled up outside once again. When I’d opened the previous year, there was an assumption that I knew a great deal about art.

‘You must have been to the Slade? Where was your previous gallery?’ they asked.

I replied, ‘No, why? I’m just making it up as I go along. It’s instinct.’

Most thought I was modest, but the truth was that I would have loved to have studied art, and maybe been an artist, but we were not allowed. If you were good at science at school, you were sent to university.”

Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer

The gallery’s third year. Tim Pomeroy is on the invitation for the preview. Soon we head to Glasgow Art Fair.

Glasgow Art Fair

Helen Denerley got most of the press photos and I spill wine over fellow dealers.

“My fellow dealers were already choosing soups. As I sat down, a glass of red wine was accidentally knocked into the lap of Bruton Gallery’s owner. She was pretty angry but eventually calmed down. We shared an artist, Jane MacNeill, and she would have been happier if I wasn’t there and didn’t know Jane MacNeill.

When the main course arrived, I reached to get the pepper and knocked another glass of wine over. This time it was into the lap of Will, from Will’s Art Warehouse. He was a small man, an ex-jockey. Will’s approach to art was less elitist than mine. His stand was full of bright, square, unframed canvases, but we also shared an artist that year, Michael Forbes, the surrealist. I remembered Mike saying ‘This is what people want. They like colour and dogs, something optimistic for the next millennium. I call it A Little ofWhat you Fancy.’”

Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer

A designer looked at the gallery’s printed material. It was good to work with others.

Leonie Gibbs and Wendy Sutheland

First show of the year: Leonie Gibbs, James McCallum and Wendy Sutherland.

A big big exhibition

2002 and our retrospective exhibition of forty years of Gerald Laing’s work: including Pop Art from the 1960s, conceptual and early sculpture from the 1970s and up to monumental and classical works. An incredible artistic journey.

A new hair cut, a new dog.

The words of Black Allan drifted back. ‘I can see you here with flowers in the garden, a beautiful lady and maybe a dog.’

The flowers were there. Neck-high delphiniums and lupins were at the side of the cottage, catmint at the front and buddleias, bushes and copper beech planted elsewhere. He was right. I needed a dog. The next morning, I drove to Elgin with a friend to view Chloe, a springer spaniel puppy.

‘She’s a wild one. Not bad, but crazy. You’ll have to keep her outside in a kennel. I’ve found her impossible to walk.’ Chloe’s owner holds up a short thin lead, more suited to a cat.

‘You walk her on a lead?’

‘All the time.’

The three of us drove back: my friend, Chloe and I.

‘You can’t call her Chloe. It’s a crap name for a dog,’ my friend suggested.

‘I agree. It has to be an artistic name: related to the Scottish art world and it should end in a vowel. How about Peploe?’

‘Peploe it is.’ My friend removed the small cat collar. ‘Here’s to freedom.’

‘Bonjour Peploe,’ I said. Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer

There’s another twenty years and I’ll continue with this photo story when there is more time.

But if you want to learn more you can always read the multi-award listed book ‘Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer.’