Ian Hamilton Finlay – War and Pieces of a Garden

Ian Hamilton Finlay – War and Pieces of a Garden
31st October – 22nd November 2025
Garnethill Gallery

This exhibition marks the centenary of Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006), internationally recognised as a poet, writer, visual artist and gardener. He is best known for his garden Little Sparta, which is set in the windswept Pentland Hills in the village of Dunsyre, twenty-five miles south-west of Edinburgh. Finlay viewed Little Sparta as a contemporary version of the classical Greek Arcadian idyll. His wider work takes many forms with several recurring themes, including the sea and seafaring, the Classical world, 20th-century warfare and most notably, the French Revolution. The latter served as a metaphor for Finlay’s moral position in relation to the world around him.

A number of the items in the exhibition are drawn from the Glasgow School of Art Library Special Collections, which holds many prints and booklets published through the Wild Hawthorn Press. Alongside these, the exhibition includes several private loans, including prints and photographs from Finlay’s friends and collaborators.

The works within War and Pieces of a Garden explore the juxtaposition between two main themes within Finlay’s wider practice, that of the natural world and the brutality of war. Such contrasting subject matter, synonymous with much of Finlay’s output, mirrors the complexities within the artist himself. Battles were not just historical metaphors within his work, but a declaration that it is necessary, as the artist himself viewed it, to accept conflict as a means to restore order. This was evidenced through his own ‘battles’ with various establishment forces, including the Scottish Arts Council and Strathclyde Regional Council.  Likewise, Finlay’s lifelong reflections on the pastoral idyll provide a deeper understanding of his own position within the world, given that illness restricted him to the physical limits of his garden for much of his life.

Ian Hamilton Finlay was born in Nassau, the Bahamas, in 1925. At age six, he was sent to boarding school in Scotland; however, the outbreak of war interrupted his schooling, and he was evacuated to the village of Gartmore in the Highlands. In 1941, aged sixteen, he briefly studied Drawing and Painting at the Glasgow School of Art, and worked for a time as a janitor at the school. The terror of the Clydebank Blitz in March 1941 had a lasting effect on him, and the ‘hail of bombs and bruise of war’[2] would manifest in his later work amongst the recurring motifs of warplanes, tanks and battleships. It was while at the Glasgow School of Art that Finlay befriended fellow artist and future collaborator Margot Sandeman (1922-2009), alongside the likes of Joan Eardley (1921-1963) and Bet Low (1924-2007). Whilst undertaking national service with the Non-Combatant and Service Corps between 1944 – 47, Finlay travelled to post-Nazi Germany, where he was struck by the sight of tanks stationed outside Neoclassical buildings.

Finlay spent a period living in the Highlands from 1948 onwards, working as a shepherd and labourer, first whilst living at Invergeddie Farm in Glen Lednock, before moving to a cottage at Druim-na-Cille, on the Dunira Estate near Comrie. He spent eight years in rural Perthshire, living as a painter and writer, periodically publishing his short stories in newspapers and magazines. It was during this time that he first began to suffer from agoraphobia, a condition that affected him until the mid-1990s. Finlay was hospitalised in 1954, at the same time as his first marriage was ending. In a later proverb, Finlay declared: ‘Illness and exile restore our horizons to us’[2].

By the winter of 1955 Finlay was living in the Orkney island of Rousay, which served as a continued source of inspiration for later works. From 1956 onwards, he was largely based in Edinburgh. His first collection of comic and melancholy lyric poems, The Dancers Inherit the Party, was published in the autumn of 1960. He met Jessie McGuffie the following year, and together they set up the Wild Hawthorn Press. In the spring of 1962, he launched the periodical Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. which featured both notable Scottish and international poets, and was a critical outlet for Concrete Poetry. Finlay married Sue MacDonald Lockhart in 1964 and lived in various rural farmsteads throughout Scotland before settling at Stonypath in 1966. Together they embarked on the garden, which was renamed Little Sparta in 1979, and is now regarded as one of Scotland’s greatest 20th-century works of art.

Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985, and his work is held in major collections including the British Museum, London; Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St Louis, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Tate, London and Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Finlay suffered a stroke in the early 2000s. A consequence of this was that it reversed his agoraphobia and allowed him to travel again in the final years of his life. He died on the 27th March 2006, aged 80. On his gravestone, beside his name, reads only one word: ‘Poet’.

Finlay’s centenary has been marked through several exhibitions across Scotland, including the Tower Foyer Gallery (University of Dundee), Bigger and Upper Clydesdale Museum, Cairn Gallery (Pittenweem, Fife), Ingelby Gallery (Edinburgh), Pier Arts Centre (Stromness, Orkney) and The National Galleries of Scotland (Edinburgh). Further centenary exhibitions have been held at Victoria Miro (London, UK), Kewenig (Palma de Mallorca, Spain), David Nolan Gallery (New York, USA), Sfier-Semler (Hamburg, Germany), Stampa (Basel, Switzerland), Hubert Winter (Vienna, Austria) and Massimo Minini (Brescia, Italy).

[1] Alec Finlay, Ian Hamilton Finlay Selections (University of California Press 2012) p.8
[2]  Ian Hamilton Finlay, Detached Sentences on Friendship (Wild Hawthorn Press 1991)

Image: ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Sparta‘ Silver Gelatin Print (2004) © Robin Gillanders, courtesy of the artist.