Talk on Gunnie Moberg and Margaret Tait

Please join us to learn more about the Orcadian artists in our Festival exhibition; Gunnie Moberg and Margaret Tait.

Rebecca Marr will explore the creative space of Orkney’s shore through the work of photographer Gunnie Moberg. The images will travel the Orkney coastline through aerial photography and examine the detail of the shoreline through close up photography of beach stones. Using both distance and closeness, from the air and on the ground, the artist draws our attention to the shore - not a specific location but a shifting space. From her early images of Orkney in Stone Built published in 1979 to her later work, Gunnie Moberg was drawn to the edge of the islands concentrating her focus on the rich natural and cultural heritage of the shore. This talk will explore that particular aspect of Gunnie Moberg’s work, a theme through which the artist has expressed her relationship with place.

Sarah Neely’s talk will explore the significance of Tait’s photography in relation to her later work as a a moving image artist. Before picking up a moving image camera, Margaret Tait was an avid still photographer. From a young age, she was keen to explore the world around her through the lens of a camera. Her incredible collection of photographs, taken from her time growing up in Orkney, as well as time spent travelling the world, including places like India, France and Italy, forms an important part of the story of Tait's development towards becoming one of Scotland's most unique and inventive visual artists of the 20th century.

Tickets £5

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Rebecca Marr is a photographic artist living in Orkney. She spent 3 years working with the artist's collection during the establishment of the Gunnie Moberg Archive at Orkney Library & Archive. https://gunniemobergarchive.wordpress.com/

Sarah Neely is a writer and lecturer at Stirling University. Neely's work currently focuses on the areas of film history and memory, and artists' moving image. Recent publications include Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (Carcanet, 2012) and Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait - Portraits, Poetry, Sound and Place (Peter Lang, 2016).

This event has been generously sponsored by Highland Park.

Gunnie Moberg Archive, Orkney Library & Archive.