Ian Hamilton Finlay

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Finlay, Ian Hamilton (1925– ). Scottish artist-poet, born in Nassau, Bahamas, of Scottish parents. He studied briefly at Glasgow School of Art, but originally attracted attention as a poet. In 1963 he began making Concrete poetry, in which the physical appearance of the poem—its shape and typography—is regarded as part of its meaning. From this he developed the idea of using artists and craftspeople—stone carvers, potters, calligraphers, even specialists in neon lighting—to translate his poems into other media. In 1967, with his wife Sue, he moved to Stonypath, a remote farmhouse in the Pentland Hills of ‘Strathclyde, the Infernal Region’ ( Finlay's words), and they created a garden in which many of his poem objects are displayed: ‘it is a garden full of surprises and contrasts, and manages to entertain as well as to stimulate thought. Visual puns and other jokes abound: for instance, a headstone next to a birch tree has the slogan “Bring back the birch”; a real clump of grass resembling an Albrecht Dürer watercolour has Dürer's monogram placed next to it; a tortoise carries the words “Panzer Division” engraved in gothic lettering on its shell; and birds land on a bird tray in the form of an aircraft carrier’ ( Michael Jacobs and Paul Stirton, The Mitchell Beazley Traveller's Guides to Art: Britain & Ireland, 1984). The garden has attracted considerable publicity, not only because of its artistic interest, but also because of Finlay's long-term fight against Strathclyde Council, which has attempted to tax a garden ‘temple’ as a commercial art gallery. Finlay has many admirers, but Brian Sewell dismisses his work as ‘adolescent word-play’ and writes that ‘I find the puffed portent of his enigmatic statements as irksome as his whimsy.’

Finlay, Ian Hamilton (1925–2006). Scots writer, publisher, poet, and garden-designer. From 1966 at Stonypath (or Little Sparta), near Dunsyre, south-west of Edinburgh, he and his wife created a remarkable landscape garden in which water, trees, and plants set off fabriques, inscriptions cut in stone, architectural fragments, sundials, etc., creating an evocative place with many mnemonic triggers linking his work to C18 gardens of allusion. The carving and fine lettering on the monuments was carried out by various individual artists, including Michael Harvey (1931– ) and Alexander Stoddart. Finlay created a ‘Sacred Grove’ in the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterloo, The Netherlands, in 1982, and other works.

Bibliography

Abrioux (1992);
Journal of Garden History, i/2 (April–June 1981), 113–144;
Simig et al. (1995)

Finlay, Ian Hamilton (1925– ), Scottish poet, graphic artist and sculptor, born in Nassau in the Bahamas and brought up in Scotland. He became widely known in the 1960s as a leading figure in the concrete poetry movement, and has published many handsome and innovative pamphlets and volumes of verse in association with his own Wild Hawthorn Press and other little presses. His creation of a sculpture garden at Stonypath, Little Sparta, in southern Scotland is celebrated for its combinations of nature, word, image, and artefact, and its reconciliation of the classical with the modern.