Stripes

We spoke before about our textwork balustrade, an Elizabeth Ogilvie commission for our new building back in 1999. Well, now the haar has finally lifted and the sun’s shining through, it seemed a good time to photograph another piece of Elizabeth’s handiwork. The camera doesn’t convey the visual loveliness of the hologrammatic effects of the light, and the boxes are not ideal, beauty-wise, but this gives an idea:

Elizabeth explains: ‘By Leaves We Live’, the Patrick Geddes phrase which greets the visitor at the library’s entrance, influenced my thinking when planning the front window art work. Using the library’s often quoted MacEwen poem, ‘Rug Eadrain’, in Gaelic, English and Lowland Scots, I have created a very minimal design with the text running down the tree or book-end shapes. Black, grey and aqua tie in with the greys of Caithness stone. I have evoked and suggested with these restrained forms leaning slightly towards the library entrance. And again, referring to the natural world, I used hologram film set in the glass for one line of the poem. This film uses the ambient light, transforming the text into the changing colours of the spectrum.’

Here are the stripes on a grey day: