Sandstone Press

The Nairn Book and Arts Festival

Posted by RLD on 14th June 2009

Best known for its golf course and a romantic association with Charlie Chaplin, Nairn’s long-past symbiosis with fishing and the sea has been its greatest claim to fame until recent years.  The calendar pages are torn off month by month though, the diaries stacked away year on year.  Fishertown has become quite the place to live for the well off with, on its fringes, the Little Theatre, as good a venue as any for literary events.  Enter the NAIRN BOOK AND ARTS FESTIVAL; witness its dramatic year on year growth at the Little Theatre, the new Community Centre and a variety of hotels around the town.

Legend has it that George Grey, proprietor of the ever fascinating Nairn Book Shop and an idea-a-day man, was speculating with an assistant on how best to stimulate trade, action, activity, when he came up with the idea.  The assistant thought it a good one so George said, ‘Right, we’ll have a Festival next week.’  I like these stories.

However it began, this past week saw its sixth running, now under the leadership of former headmaster John Fyffe and the redoubtable Jean Campbell.  Sandstone Press has been ever present.  First time out I participated in a public discussion on publishing in the Highlands, second we ran with Lin Anderson and Margaret Elphinstone and their Vistas.  Third time we went with Brian Irvine and Winning Through, with Peter Urpeth introducing Kenneth White’s ON THE ATLANTIC EDGE.  Fourth time, the stakes were rising for both Sandstone and the Festival; Remzije Sherifi talked to a packed Little Theatre about SHADOW BEHIND THE SUN, Kosova and the Maryhill Integration Network.  Last year Eric MacLeod discussed THE KERRACHER MAN.  On Thursday it was John Allen speaking, again to a packed Little Theatre, about CAIRNGORM JOHN and mountain rescue.

I was there for most of the day since George had suggested we make Thursday a Sandstone Taster Day, with John appearing at the shop in the morning, Jamie Whittle in the early afternoon, and Eric just before John’s main gig.  Between events I had time to wander.  Music and the visual arts have played a great part in the Festival from the start and I had heard that this year the art competition, now with increased prize money, had drawn a huge, widely sourced entry of fantastic standard. As many paintings and sculptures as could be accommodated were on display at the Court House.  No problems in deciding where to go then.

Amazingly, entry was free.  It was worth a tenner; easy.  The competition had drawn professional entries, art school entries, dedicated amateur entries, all stunning.  First prize went to Ruth A Nichol’s FREUCHIE SERVICES, ON THE WAY TO KILMANY, a whizz of colour and lines suggesting action, confusion, organisation and chaos in frantic collaboration.  Sam Cartman took second with HUT, which reminded me of Howard Hodgkin so much care did she take with her choice of colours.  I wondered how many of these she had thrown away before getting it right.

Jonathan Robertson took no prizes with his two pictures of fishermen but he ran away with a piece of my heart.  Among all on view, it was these I would have actually bought if I had a couple of thousand pounds (each) to spare and enough room on my walls.

In another room, one with no prizewinners, I came across DRESSIE UPS by Sonia Rose, the portrait of a little girl, two maybe three years old, dressing up in an adult woman’s clothes, we might suppose her mother’s.  The child’s face was still, let us say ‘rigid’, a mask looking directly out of the frame, her arms and hands wide as she lifted the extremities of the dress.  Hollywood has stolen away the reality of this kind of facial image with cheap shots on evil children and malicious dolls.  The reality belongs to the 19th century and the fashion for death masks.

In an age with high levels of infant mortality, levels that are still with us in many parts of this shrinking world, especially with the same world’s nine million (and rising) refugees, the death mask preserved as memory could not, and disallowed the important process of forgetfulness.  I do not believe anyone harbouring the memory of a child, dead, missing or unborn, could stand unhurt before this painting and its invisible catalogue of helplessness, failed obligations, and guilt.  Disturbing?  I almost fled, but you can’t run from memories.

Like the death masks such a work of art has the awful power to keep the memory of loss not only ever-present but fresh.  Let go, I thought, let go; but who can release the child, least of all under the gaze of such a stony, painted face?  This is what it is to be haunted in the real world, to be denied forgetfullness.  The one-to-one power of art can make solitude in a gallery.

John Allen gave a great talk, his first since the CAIRNGORM JOHN launches and the first to a paying audience.  He was confident and witty from the start but when he showed some of his many slides on mountain rescue, as he has to audiences over many years, he came truly into his own.  The full house laughed at all the right places, oo’ed and ah’ed at the audacity of the rescues and, as ever, had a special warm feeling for the dogs.  He emailed me two days later from his anchorage at the head of Loch Torridon to say he was ‘surrounded by mountains’.  Not that I’m jealous.

Sandstone Press has been a sponsor of the NAIRN BOOK AND ARTS FESTIVAL since its beginnings and our Director, Iain Gordon, also sits on its Board.  Sandstone’s growth and the Festival’s have run roughly in parallel and I like to think will continue to do so.  Both are bottomless wells of creativity and ambition.  Both feed into the Highland artistic and financial economies and intend to increase their contributions.