Alec Finlay (born 14 March 1966) is a Scottish-born artist currently based in

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

. He is a son of Sue Finlay and

Ian Hamilton Finlay Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Life Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent. He was ...

. Finlay's work takes various forms and media, including poetry, sculpture,

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

, audio-visual,

neon Neon is a chemical element with the symbol Ne and atomic number 10. It is a noble gas. Neon is a colorless, odorless, inert monatomic gas under standard conditions, with about two-thirds the density of air. It was discovered (along with krypton ...

, and new technologies; often it reflects on human engagement with landscape. His work has been widely exhibited at The Bluecoat,

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

Norwich Castle Museum Norwich Castle is a medieval royal fortification in the city of Norwich, in the English county of Norfolk. William the Conqueror (1066–1087) ordered its construction in the aftermath of the Norman conquest of England. The castle was used as a ...

, ARC Gallery (Sofia), and HICA (Highland Institute for Contemporary Art). In 2010, Finlay was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize. In 2012 he was a finalist in the first annual ALICE awards, nominated for his 2009 project ''white peak , dark peak'' (Public Art Category). WorldWideLetterBox016

Artistic style

Finlay's use of

nest box A nest is a structure built for certain animals to hold eggs or young. Although nests are most closely associated with birds, members of all classes of vertebrates and some invertebrates construct nests. They may be composed of organic materia ...

es, botanic labels, clothing name-tapes and

wind turbine A wind turbine is a device that converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. Hundreds of thousands of large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, now generate over 650 gigawatts of power, with 60 GW added each year. ...

s are examples of ways in which Finlay embeds smaller elements into wider landscapes to create 'families' or 'colonies' of work, emphasising the experiential and lived. He has produced letterboxes with circular poems on the stamps. Often these works are collaborative, sometimes mapped directly onto the landscape, at others embedded socially, or accessible on-line using

QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...

technology. Finlay has published over twenty books, and has won three Scottish Design Awards (Best Typography, Best Book, Chairman's Award, 2000). In conversation with Gavin Morrison of Atopia Projects, Finlay described the importance of collaboration to his practice, explaining that the artist's identity 'has no defining value in terms of an autographed activity, as such. ..There are boundaries that can be marked, but also sparks that leap between consciousnesses. The work is not within one consciousness. That is a fact. Yet it is still always filtered through mine, and this is an endlessly subtle and complex and delightful experience. It is evident in the different ways in which I could refer to collaboration and participation, their contradictory aspects of election, inflection, infection - one could consider my work as an overarching encirclement of other people's work, where what they make appears under my name; as an animation of others, as I spark their creativity; and as a sharing of consciousness, through identifiable poetic or artistic forms (wind blown clouds, names,

haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

and so on). I do not find the information that the activity is producing is really suggesting that we try to pin down authorship, and for me it has become increasingly clear that the material was shared consciousness, which is after all what all art is in some way about.'

References

External links

www.alecfinlayblog.blogspot.co.ukwww.company-of-mountains.comwww.the-bee-bole.comwww.whitepeak-darkpeak.co.ukwww.theroadnorth.co.uk
{{DEFAULTSORT:Finlay, Alec 1966 births Living people Walking artists Scottish artists English-language haiku poets Artists from Edinburgh

Artistic style

See also

References

External links