Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay was a poet, sculptor, philosopher, landscape designer, and conceptual artist – but then again, he was never one who had much of an interest in labels. Finlay's three-dimensional works in paper, cards, bronze and glass can be found at Little Sparta, a world Finlay began to create in 1966. Born in Nassau in the Bahamas in 1925, Finlay’s family moved back to Scotland where he attended school until about the age of 13. His only formal training included a year at Glasgow School of Art and his time with the Royal Army Service Corps during the war. Finlay published short stories in 1958, and then poetry. All were issued by small publishers and are now out of print. In 1961 Finlay founded the Wild Hawthorne Press with Jessie McGuffie and published collections by Black Mountain College poets and other avant-garde writers. Finlay was one of the first artists to develop ‘concrete poetry,' where the font and positioning of words is as important as the meaning. In 1966, Finlay bought a five-acre farm at Stonypath, south of Edinburgh. Over the course of several years he transformed the farm with sculptures, carved poems, bridges, and lochs. The farm was renamed ‘Little Sparta’ to commemorate Finlay’s run-in (one of many disputes with the rest of the world) with the local sheriff, who claimed that Finlay’s farm was now an art gallery and thus needed to pay higher taxes. Instead, Finlay declared it a temple. In 1987, Finlay was commissioned by the French government to design a garden as part of the bicentenial celebrations of the French Revolution. A French magazine organized a protest, objecting to Finlay’s use of symbols of the Third Reich in the gardens. Although Finlay eventually won a defamation suit in the French courts, he lost the much coveted commission. Finlay has created other landscape installations in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. Finlay died in Edinburgh in March of 2006.
