ALLISON WEIGHTMAN

Georgina Coburn considers the work of Allison Weightman

Shotgun blue (detail) ceramic

33cm (d) x 34cm (h)

Workingwith clay naturally brings formative ideas to the surface. The ancient knowing in clay is immediately tactile. It’s the earth, the stuff we are made of in legends and the dust we will all return to. There is something deeply connective and optimistic about making, acknowledging what we value most in the process. Allison Weightman’s latest sculptural vessels are evidence of creative evolution, not just in the artist’s practice, but in the essential connection between humanity and the natural environment.

In ‘April Snow on the Ridge i’ Weightman brings heightened awareness to form, in a distilled top line one might walk on a mountainside. The precariousness of elements is present in sculptural form, akin to the melt of glazes and snow, mirrored in the firing process, which even after years of experience still surprises. The landscape is experienced in form, colour, and the inner reflections of Weightman’s alchemical glazing, which conjures temperature, altitude, and a reverent state of mindfulness. Walking around this repository of memory triggers what it is to be in the mountains. This moves beyond the purely physical conquest of landscape, to a sensuous and distinctly feminine understanding of what moves and renews the world. As Weightman suggests in ‘Vessel’ the human body is a vessel of knowledge and experience, the open shoulder giving function to form.

Weightman’s spherical sculpture ‘Shotgun Blue’ combines a holistic sense of the earth and the body, beauty and trauma. Weightman’s shotgun works mark the surface with violent human action, mirroring the destruction of flesh with bullets. As the world discovers with increasing urgency, that the earth and our own flesh are bound together, Weightman’s pierced vessel provides a space of profound meditation. A crafted object of beauty and nature’s sublime design pivot in counterpoint with our capacity to exploit and destroy.True to the artist’s character, there is nothing didactic about the execution, the glazing of ‘Shotgun Blue’ is tempered with warmth, oranges and browns, which despite the explosive action of shotgun cartridges and dominant cool blue, invoke a grounded, natural order of renewal and endurance.

In ‘Northern Lights’ Weightman spins the heavens and an entire landscape of mind into sculptural form, standing tall and voluptuous. All of nature’s elements are elusive, yet Weightman grasps them. Moving around the vessel, lustrous light and colour play across the surface. Feathered expansion of glazes meet gravity bearing change, as Weightman’s immersion in the Northern landscape partners joyfully with her technique. Separation of pigments create a microcosm of momentous natural phenomena. It’s a wonderful example of felt sense, not just seeking to capture the landscape as an optical vista, but as core to what we are. When we stop and behold nature, the sense of connection to forces greater than ourselves is a source of awe and delight, equal to the liberating fluidity of Weightman’s ceramics.

The exquisite compositions and memories in Liz Knox’s work

by Tony Davidson

Memoryis a psychological process. We acquire and store experiences and then, when we recall them, they are reinvented in a little noticed artistic act - the recreation of a captured moment. Colours are enhanced and balanced – more blue a little less yellow; unneeded distractions are removed to focus this vision, and the meaning is enhanced. This reconstructed work, our psychological painting, defines who we are and what we have learned on the journey. Liz Knox takes this process, her ‘mind’s eye’ recollections, and makes them tactile again. They are reality, with an element of dream, painted by an artist whose many years of artistic practice are evident.

Knox’s compositions are exquisitely balanced. This is what I notice first. There is often a deep blue background which recedes like the midnight-dreamworld from which her iconic elements emerge: and there are beautifully rich reds which come forward and walk you into the gardened, tabled world of a Liz Knox painting. All of Knox’s paintings have joyous yellow and a more sinister black perched in a corner waiting to play its role. The colour in Knox’s work becomes characters in a play, and every one of them has something to say when they strut into Knox’s stage. The balancing of each painting is done with an eye to mathematics. Look carefully and you can count many threes, or find spirals which take you to a detail. There are golden ratios too and other divine proportions. It is an understanding (intended or otherwise) of these geometries that bring balance to a painting, and harmony to the world. Mathematics, of course, is one of the few eternal things and this lies at the core of all good artworks.

And what of Liz Knox? You must read her paintings to find out. There’s a tree with orange fruit, European-style buildings, lilies, an open window, a table set with pomegranates and a reclining red-headed nude. Like the midnight background, they are endless.

Blinds oil on canvas

56cm x 56cm

Borders oil on canvas

61cm x 51cm

Waiting to Sleep

LIZ KNOX oil on canvas | 92cm x 152cm

Weather Words

The holy trinity of words, art and weather

by Tony Davidson

Theradio this morning tells of artificial intelligence (AI) and how words, rather than machines, define (and shape) our lives. The right word, the radio told me, can insight a revolution, or calm one. Art is similar because an image - painting or sculpture - also charts and steers human experience. Yuval Hoah Harari, author of Sapiens, suggests that a word can start a religion, even if whispered by a computer, but that is forgetting about something far larger: the old Gods, the elements. They have always been with us and will be there long after we have gone, no matter what AI whispers in our ears. In a place like Shetland, storms and calms always have the final say. Sailor, pilot and

Rost PETER DAVIS Watercolour,

fisherman look out to sea first thing in the morning; and, only after doing this, will they decide what to do.

These Shetland words (as described in ‘Orkney and Shetland Weather Words’, John W Scott) have been a long-time fascination for the island’s artists. Many of these – Ruth Brownlee, Peter Davis, Janette Kerr and Gail Harvey – were drawn north by the pull of the weather to eventually settle in their studios, their almost sheltered nests, where they attempt to capture its enduring power – the sublime.

Here are a few of the traditional words which capture these cycles of nature and how they are seen through watercolour, body colour and chalk on paper 50cm x 70cm mankind’s eyes.

Alikrogi – a weakly animal that cannot stand the cold.

Bladd – a very large raindrop.

Blashey wadder – wet and unsettled weather.

Blooter – a wet mass or jelly.

Brenna – a fine mist-like spray from heavy breakers.

Brennek – a mock-sun.

Dask – a dense haze of fog.

Dofnin – abatement of storm and rough weather.

Duffin – moderating in weather.

Fjora – foreshore

Flinterkin – (1) a very dry cowpat. (2) a light snow shower.

Air and Sea | GAIL HARVEY oil on canvas | 121cm x 170cm

Gruggie – dim, dark and threatening.

Gven – an improvement in the weather

Haagle – boundless; implacable; remorseless

Hoolan – a strong gale

Hoss – the muffled murmur of lapping waves on the shore in calm water.

Innsog – the suck of the sea towards the land.

Katrisper – a very strong gale

Kwal – to lull, to abate (applied to wind)

Livd – a calming, abating of bad weather.

Lenfter – of the sky; to clear and form a bright patch.

Glet – mild weather.

Gruggie -

Lunk – a calming, clearing of the weather.

Maegins – the heart or depth (especially of the night.)

Megin – the centre (especially the night)

Org – oppressive heat (it is mostly described as oppressive.)

Platt – perfectly calm.

Pusk – to come in gusts of increasing violence.

Rullyo – a heap of stones on a beach thrown up by the sea.

Runk – dry weather.

Skelter – a great commotion in the sea.

Skudder – driving, thrashing rain.

Snarr – turn of the tide.

Swaa – the noise of the sea heard from a distance.

Softness and Warm Light

GAIL HARVEY oil on canvas | 121cm x 170cm

Snjóbylus y fir hafinn, Skagaströnd

JANETTE KERR oil on canvas

140cm x 300cm