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Listen to the Silence.
it has so much to say.
Rumi
Silence has been sought since the first noise. Older sounds are heard when the world is quiet: rumbles that a mountain remembers and the long-ago drift of the sea have a sub-surface presence. Winds carry faraway ghost-smells and sounds; and here, where the world is quiet, we sense these things. The healthy mind is called to come to a silent place to listen.
When we listen to mountains, we yearn for untrodden ground and ancient pilgrim route alike, and we feel the quickening of trees and deer. In silence we connect to all things. This is why the first artists painted at the far end of a cave deep within the earth. Maybe they could hear more subtle sounds than we can hear now when the Earth was without roads, planes and cities? But the quiet artistic muse continues. In Kilmorack Gallery many of our artists follow this long tradition but do it above ground, making the most of Scotland’s quiet natural songs.
Now living in Shetland Paul Boomer’s artistic career is one that has gone from the loud chaos of the industrial ‘Black Country.’ Here he painted crowds, crucifixions, drink and drugs. After moving to Shetland in nineteen-ninety-seven, Bloomer discovered silence and found the time to listen to birds. Life and his work changed. We have had two recent exhibitions of his etchings: The Return of the Light and Entering the Dark. Both show the prophetic power of silence.
Other artists in Kilmorack also show this quality. The deeply textured boats, bowls and books of Peter White are completely void of sound but vibrate between our auditory world and another place, in another dimension, that is now quiet. They sit, paradoxical, where silence is a sound.
Allan MacDonald has sought quietness for all the twenty-five years I have known him. This has taken him from the Western Isle to the Shetlands, St Kilda and Canada. It is the quietness that distils his work down to the essence of land, God and sea. Quietness, for MacDonald, creates a moment that must be captured, brought home and painted.
This year, two of our main exhibitions are about silence and the connections it brings: Jane MacNeill’s The Silence of Mountains and Peter David’s A Sense of Place. Jane MacNeill revisits the Cairngorm mountains of her childhood. The mountains – Larig Ghru, Carn Elrig and Beinne Liath Mhor a Ghuibas Li - provide calm, a marvellous emptiness. The less MacNeill includes in her work, the more powerful it becomes. It is a form of artistic homeopathy, an attempt to distil the feeling of calm-silence the mountain gives. When we look at MacNeill’s work, we are forced to look harder: at the feathered edges of a treed hill or the merest suggestion of wind blowing at the hilltop. By looking harder, we also listen harder.
A Sense of Place, to Peter Davis is around his studio on the west coast of Shetland. There are no houses other than his own for miles, just sea, cliff and process. Shetland is like no other place and he has trodden around here so many times that its essence has entered him. When this happens, silence is no longer quietness. This muse has led Davis from Cumbria, to Orkney and now Shetland.
Maybe the solutions to modern problems can be found in removing noise, and listening to silence.
Tony Davidson
Gallery Director
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JANE MACNEILL
The Silence of Mountains 15 August - 5 September 2020These are the mountains of my childhood, the hills of home. They are ancient, weathered, and rounded by retreating ice; the colours they reflect are dictated by their geology, by the plants that manage to grow on them, by the quality of snow and ice, and by water. Although I have walked countless times amongst them, it is their distance that moves me. -
PETER DAVIS
A Sense of Place 12 September - 3 October 2020Most of the paintings in this exhibition are the result of walking the same Atlantic-facing walks in all weather. Peter Davis has trodden them so many times that the essence... -
ALLAN MACDONALD
Speed of Light 25 May 2020Last year, Allan MacDonald walked with another artist over west. His aim was to capture what lies underneath the surface of the landscape: topography, geometry and trees; and capture something deeper. Here is the realm of infinitely small and infinitely large, the quickness of light. The moment when… -
PAUL BLOOMER
The Return of the Light 29 September - 27 October 2018Paul Bloomer's latest work is magical. Inspired by great print makers of the past and the circular world around him in Shetland and beyond, Bloomer's latest etching create enduring images, eye-worms that are hard to forget. -
PAUL BLOOMER
Entering the Dark 25 January - 29 February 2020This exhibition celebrates the second set of etchings by Paul Bloomer to explore messages given to us by the wildlife of Shetland. The first was 'the Coming of the Light'...
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The Sound of Silence: The Paradox of Quietness
Past viewing_room