“ ‘Today the garden; tomorrow the world!’: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s revolutionary instincts” Prospect 11th August 2025
Christopher Silver marks the centenary of the Scottish poet-artist Ian Hamilton Finlay’s life, tracing how his work always wrestled with tension: the pastoral and the militant, sculpture and concrete poetry, serenity and provocation. Finlay’s experiments – from Little Sparta to his mock micro-state – were more than artistic statements; they were critiques of cultural institutions. Silver argues that in contemporary Scotland artistic vitality is under threat – from underfunding, inertia and an institutional mainstream that tolerates little dissent. The Scotland issue of Irish Pages explored this “cultural malaise,” noting that among Scottish arts figures, “none is happy, none particularly optimistic.”