Ian Hamilton Finlay - Biography

Biography

Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, of Scottish parents. He was educated at Dollar Academy, in Clackmannanshire. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. In 1942, he joined the British Army.

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published books including The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958) and The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960) (which was included in its entirety in a New Directions annual a few years later), and some of his work was broadcast by the BBC.

In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press. Eventually he began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment.

This kind of 'poem-object' features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples.

In December 2004, in a poll conducted by Scotland on Sunday, a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be the most important work of Scottish art. Second and third were the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and The Skating Minister. Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945".

The Little Sparta Trust plans to preserve Little Sparta for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Ian Appleton, Stephen Bann, Stephen Blackmore, Patrick Eyres, Richard Ingleby, Ian Kennedy, Magnus Linklater, John Leighton, Duncan Macmillan, Victoria Miro, Paul Nesbitt, Jessie Sheeler and Ann Uppington are trustees.

His work is notable for a number of recurring themes: a penchant for classical writers (especially Virgil); a concern with fishing and the sea; an interest in the French Revolution; and a continual revisiting of World War II. His work can be austere, but it is also at times witty, or even darkly whimsical. His use of Nazi imagery led an accusation of neo-Nazi sympathies, and to a court case, which Finlay won. He also came into conflict Strathclyde Regional Council over his liability for rates on a byre in his garden, which the council insisted was being used as commercial premises. Finlay insisted that it was a garden temple.

One of the few gardens outside Scotland to permanently display his work is the Improvement Garden in Stockwood Discovery Centre, Luton, created in collaboration with Sue Finlay, Gary Hincks and Nicholas Sloan.

Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Aberdeen University in 1987, Heriot-Watt University in 1993 and the University of Glasgow in 2001, and an honorary and/or visiting professorship from the University of Dundee in 1999. The French Communist Party presented him with a bust of Saint-Just in 1991. He received the Scottish Horticultural Medal from the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society in 2002, and the Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award in 2003. Awarded in the Queen's New Year's Honours list in 2002, Finlay was a CBE.

Finlay was married twice and had two children, Alec and Ailie. He died in Edinburgh.