Listening to a Landscape of Voices at Kinburn House
By Lucien Willey
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, Barn Owl, 2020, watercolour on paper, St Andrews Museum (Kinburn House). Image courtesy of the collection.
Reading week is upon us once again, as the student body once again migrates south – briefly pausing our university’s drive “ever to excel” in pursuit of sunnier, more amenable climes, displays of fine art, a good swing, or perhaps just more reasonably priced beverages – it’s worth pausing temporarily to appreciate the many virtues of St. Andrews when we aren’t stressing our deadlines. Chief amongst these is the Kinburn house, a moderately haunted grand estate-turned-local museum that is arguably the “town” counterpart to the Wardlaw’s “gown”. Offering a selection of local artifacts and history – as well as good tea – the museum also has a large gallery devoted to seasonal rotating exhibitions, which brings us to our subject, their current exhibition: The Lost Spells, Listening to a Landscape of Voices.
A collection of watercolour paintings and poetry by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, The Lost Spells is a series of calm, simple depictions of the wildlife of the British Isles. Most pieces presented are studies of individual animals on a simple white background. The watercolours sit on heavy paper of the sort that, if you squint, could have been torn from some 19th century naturalist’s notebook. You might imagine that leaves them feeling unfinished, but on the contrary, it adds to their depth. The simple white of the paper forms part of the portraits of Foxes, Badgers, Owls, Seals, Curlews, and even a Silver Birch grove. The limitations of watercolour makes each subject appear to be under a very slight Gaussian blur, but that just enhances their nature, capturing the essence of the animal better than even a perfect pen-and-ink that captures every hair or feather would.
The aim of this exhibition, more than anything else, is to produce wonder and magic. Not the imposing wonder of the grandiose, nor a sweeping magic. Instead, it produces a simple, childlike wonder – the sort you would feel as a kid when you caught the briefest fleeting glimpse of an owl in the woods, or the magic that lets kids turn yards, forests, parks, and paths into their own Arthurian kingdoms.
The poetry excerpts that accompany these add to this atmospheric magic. The two portraits of a grey seal, one diving, one staring straight into the viewers eyes, are accompanied by the first two lines of a poem, “go now, Selkie-boy, swim from the shore, rinse your ears of Human chatter…”. In these two brief lines, the spirit of the exhibition is captured. The viewer is invited, like the Selkie (a mythological fae that is both person and seal) to briefly shed their human concerns at the door to Kinburn House’s high-ceilinged upper gallery, and just appreciate the simple beauty of the world.
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, Peregrine Falcon, 2020, watercolour on paper, St Andrews Museum (Kinburn House). Image courtesy of the collection.
To this end, the gallery itself is perfectly staged. Walking in, on the wall in front of you the elaborate portraits of owls, the signature image of the expedition, welcome you into the space. Next door, in great big letters, is an invitation to contemplate the exhibition. An invitation to, in the words of the artists “listen with the ears of an owl, look with the eyes of an oak, call to a curlew, or swoop with a swallow.” Towards the Northwest side of the gallery, situated in the centre of the room by the seals, foxes, and curlews, is a small podium where you can hear the artists read the poems in full. One of them is half an hour long, so if you have the time, I suspect you could meditate away a good chunk of the afternoon here. The Southeastern side of the gallery, a more separate sub-room, is dominated by a single massive sofa with its back towards the gallery. What the sofa faces, on the Southeast wall, is one of my favourite pieces in this entire exhibition: a large portrait of the butterflies of the UK. The wall around it teams with portraits of other British wildlife, you could easily sit for an hour or more letting your eye wander from kestrel to rabbit to stag to moth.
What makes these pieces most interesting, though, is not their style, but their purpose. Each watercolour was painted to accompany a poem in the book The Lost Spells, from which the exhibition takes its name. In a way, it almost feels as though you’re walking through the book itself and appreciating its art in a larger form than you could on the page.
As an exhibition, The Lost Spells is the bracing shot of wonder that we all need, that charms us and celebrates the simple beauty of the world around us. I would recommend picking a slow or dreary afternoon, and walk down past the student union to Kinburn house. Go up the stairs, into the gallery, and enjoy the art, for as short, or long, as you like. Then, go to the tearoom downstairs and get yourself a warm cup. If you sit by the window, I suspect that you’ll look out on the simple grass and trees of Kinburn park and see, perhaps, a little bit more depth and beauty, and feel a bit more centred than before. And these days, that’s well worth a fraction of one’s time.