Ken Currie - An Turas/The Crossing - video Dailymotion

The Scotsman

Ken Currie - An Turas/The Crossing exhibition  The Crossing transports viewers to an unknown archipelago, characterised by its desolate and barren islands and towering sea stacks. The landscapes, reminiscent of the westernmost islands of the Outer Hebrides, feature eroded rock towers that emerge from a deep, black sea, foaming and spraying at their bases.  In this stark and unforgiving environment, an unidentified community endures a precarious existence without shelter. Stranded or perhaps in a state of perpetual waiting, figures balance barefoot on guano-coated rock faces and navigate the waters in wooden-hulled vessels, steered by hooded ferrymen through the treacherous sea stacks. Their weather-beaten appearance is marked by salt-stung, red-tinged eyes and skin.  Currie’s print's are imbued with imagery evocative of inherited folklore, ritual, and faith.  Given that the catalyst for these paintings was Currie’s experiences over several years in the Western Isles it is fitting that they should return to be exhibited in this part of the world.  Ken Currie shared the following words about this new body of work from his studio journal:  “People of the Sea. People on the Edge. People at Extremes. Contested Land. Crossing the Sea. Eviction. Evasion. Evacuation. Displacement. Dispossession. Destitution.”    About Ken Currie   Ken Currie (b 1960) studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978–1983 and rose to attention within a generation of painters known as the ‘New Glasgow Boys’ in the 1980s. He is renowned for his unsettling portrayal of the human figure. The artist’s rich, luminous paintings depict mysterious rites, rituals, and quasi-medical practices, offering a meditation on violence in its many guises. Ken Currie has exhibited widely internationally, including a 2013 solo exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, which also commissioned his painting Three Oncologists. Currie’s work is held in many major public collections including Tate, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; New York Public Library; Imperial War Museum, London; Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; and the British Council, London. In October 2023, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery acquired Ken Currie’s painting of Professor Dame Sue Black, Baroness Black of Strome, The Unknown Man, 2019. Ken Currie’s book, Ken Currie: Paintings and Writings, compiled and edited by art historian Tom Normand, was published on 9th December 2023. It offers a rare insight into Currie’s challenging and enigmatic art, providing access to his private studio journals for the first time.

Transcript

00:00I'm Ken Curry and I'm a painter and printmaker.

00:03We're at Glasgow Print Studio because we're launching a new series of aquatints that I've made at the workshop called Anturas or The Crossing.

00:14We decided that we were going to print these in a kind of indigo.

00:18Normally we just print with quite rich blacks but we decided to print with indigo because it seemed to

00:25chime with the themes of the work which are very much related to the sea and the sky and the Hebrides and stuff like that.

00:32I wouldn't say that it was a departure in the sense that it's very much what I've been thinking about

00:39and these prints very much feed into the paintings I've been making.

00:45In fact, both recent paintings and these prints have been in a kind of dialogue with each other for quite a while now.

00:54A lot of painters are really great printmakers as well. A lot of printmakers are good painters as well.

01:01And sculptors, you know, it's a very fluid interaction between the different disciplines.

01:06It's almost like there's no boundaries sometimes.

01:09I certainly don't see a massive boundary between what I'm doing as a painter and what I do as a printmaker.

01:14They both have very similar qualities, particularly in aquatint which is a very, very painterly process actually.

01:21I just love the atmosphere that a print has. Sometimes I love the richness of the dark colours and dark blacks.

01:28I love that velvety quality that they can have. But also I like the really very, very incisive line that you can get with etching as well.

01:38Which you wouldn't really get in painting, but with etching you get a really incredible fine line, which I absolutely love.

01:46The overall title is The Crossing and it suggests a journey from one place to another, which can be a physical journey.

01:54You know, that someone crosses from one land to another land. But there's also the sense of an artistic journey as well.

02:00Every piece of work you make is like a journey. You go from the start to the end and you cross all the challenges that you face.

02:09But a lot of the work recently has been very much focused on my experiences in the highlands and islands.

02:16The more archipelagos up there of St Kilda and North and South East, these places have been going up there for quite a long time now.

02:26Looking into the history of the peoples there and also, in particular, some of the sort of traumas that that particular part of the world faced.

02:39You know, it's a very beautiful landscape, very haunting landscape, but there is a kind of tragic element to it, which I find I'm attracted to.

02:48The paintings have been exhibited, the paintings have been made. They were exhibited last October in London.

02:55And just recently, again, in Stornoway, in Anlantair. It was really important for me to bring that work back to that part of the world,

03:03because a lot of the ideas that I was kind of exploring were from that part of the world.

03:10But there's also other elements as well. There's a kind of Atlanticist element in the sense that it's not just about the Hebrides.

03:16There's also things in this particular body of work that touch on places like Iceland and stuff like that.

03:22You know, it's that kind of North Atlantic area that has provided me with quite a lot of imagery.

03:28We will see them coming together. We're going to exhibit them together in Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in October.

03:34We're going to show the paintings there. And as they've got a kind of little room at the side, we will show the prints as well.

03:41And people will be able to see with their eyes, as it were, the dialogue that has existed between the paintings and the prints,

03:49particularly the kind of surface textures and the surface abrasions that are in both.

03:54I always have this rule never to talk about paintings that have never been painted, you know, in case I give the game away.

04:00But definitely there's not going to be an abrupt change to what I'm doing.

04:04What I'm doing just now is very much a continuity here.

04:07But maybe just going in a slightly different direction.

04:11The exhibition is called Indigo Series and Turas The Crossing.

04:16And it's from the 5th of September to the 4th of October at Glasgow Prince Studio.

04:21Pause.

Ken Currie - An Turas/The Crossing

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