Ian Hamilton Finlay

Little Sparta

Description	Poet, Sculpture, Gardener, Philosopher...
Dates	1925, Nassau, Bahamas.
Lived/Worked	Stonypath, Scotland.

Best known for...

He is best known for his transformation of his farmhouse at Lanark, near Edinburgh, Scotland, which he started in 1966. The estate is a miniature ‘republic’ of symbolic sculptures, temples, and conceptual artistic pieces woven into the fabric of his garden’s flowers and water. Finlay named it ‘Little Sparta’.

Why is he important?

The art of Ian Hamilton Finlay is unusual for encompassing a variety of different media and discourses. Poetry, philosophy, history, gardening and landscape design are among the genres of expression through which his work moves, and his activities have assumed concrete form in cards, books, prints, inscribed stone or wood sculptures, room installations and fully realized garden environments. Common to all of Finlay's diverse production is the inscription of language - words, invented or borrowed phrases and other semiotic devices - onto real objects and thus into the world. That language inhabits, for Finlay, a material or real dimension gives rise to the two seemingly opposed but signal characteristics of his work. In 1961 he founded the Wild Hawthorn Press with Jessie McGuffie and within a few years had established himself internationally as Britain's foremost concrete poet. His publications continue to play an important role in the dissemination of his work as a visual artist.

Historical context

Ian Hamilton started his artistic career in conventional poetry and short story formats in his books The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958), The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960), and Glasgow Beasts (1962).Although his early work was admired in America by such poets as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Lorine Niedecker, it was not well received in Scotland. His pioneer contribution to the international Concrete Poetry Movement in the 1960s, in such works as Rapel (1963) and Canal Strip 3 and 4 (1964), has earned him the title ‘Scotland’s greatest concrete poet'. From the late 1960s to the present, Finlay’s art, has re-invented itself in the whole three-dimensional verbal / visual world of architectural installations, paintings, poster poems, and stone hewn pieces.

How to see his work

Ian Hamilton has produced an enormous amount of work exhibited around the world from the Tate Gallery to the Köller Müller Museum in Holland, the Max Planck Institute in Germany, The Eric Fabre Gallery in Paris, and the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Ian Hamilton on the web

www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com - A description of Ian's Hamilton work.