The Hunterian Art Gallery has within its archives a collection of screenprints by the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Dating predominantly from the mid-1960s, the prints reveal a poet in transition as he explores new poetic possibilities in the intermingling of word and image. This talk and accompanying podcast explores the beauty and significance of these works, showing how they relate to his concrete poetry and work in the garden at Little Sparta, and how they capture one of his most enduring and endearing poetic images: the world of the sail boat and the fishing boat.
The aim of my PhD project is to give a comprehensive study of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetics, attending specifically to his use of form and approach to metaphor.