The Tin Road

An exhibition of digital prints and mixed media work exploring ideas and themes found in the stories and recollections of Scotland’s Travelling people.

The Tales at Martinmas Storytelling Festival which inspired these prints is part of the Merry Dancers Storytelling Project,
a three year initiative by The Highland Council Community Learning and Leisure in Ross and Cromarty,
with additional funding from the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund, and Ross and Cromarty Enterprise.

Particular thanks to Alec Williamson, Essie Stewart and Duncan Williamson at the Tales at Martinmas festival of 2003, and to the organisers, Bob Pegg and Mairi MacArthur.

This exhibition has been developed from a project funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Board

The Travelling people of Scotland - tinsmiths, horse dealers, hawkers, pearl fishers, itinerant labourers - made their living on the road.
Many of them now believe that, rather than being related to the Gypsies, they are descendants of an indigenous group,
perhaps of clan members dispossessed during the Jacobite Uprising, or even of Pictish metal workers.
Whatever the truth, they are heirs to an archetypal way of life, and an ancient culture.
Though this way of life is vanishing, the older generation - some of whom, in the Highlands,
have Gaelic as a first language - still possesses vivid stories, poetry and song which, once widespread, now scarcely exists elsewhere.

When, in the 1950s, Scottish folklorist Hamish Henderson came into contact with Traveller culture, he became its life-long champion.
Even then, traditional Traveller life was declining, as tin was replaced by plastic, and the farm horse by agricultural machinery.
A mark of the tenacity of Traveller culture is that new material is still being recorded.

Illustrative work inspired by Traveller culture has been largely nostalgic, evoking traditional imagery.
However, through developments in technology, illustration has acquired an experimental and contemporary edge,
and greater freedom from media constraints than ever before.
There is a need to explore how the stories passed down among the Travellers can be treated visually with a dynamic appropriate to their content,
and to contemporary experience. The complexity of the ideas embedded in the tales is worthy of much more than traditional illustration methods.

Traditional stories are passed on from one person to another, from one generation to the next.
When they are told well, it is because the teller has seen in the story something which connects directly with his or her own life experience,
and it is this ‘point of view’ which becomes that particular person’s very own story.
So, while these stories truly belong to everyone, each individual both hears and makes them his own.
Universal truths only make sense when experienced on an individual level.

Landscapes can be used in different ways in both accessing and performing stories by drawing upon particular locations,
direct personal experience, family tradition and memory. The processes involved when making images are very similar.
Whilst out walking, I can’t help picking up bits and pieces of evidence of where I’ve been.
This stuff is charged with my memories of where it was found, and comes complete with its own history – at which I can only guess.
My interest is roused because it somehow speaks to me about my own experience. It tells me a kind of story - which I hear in my own way.

On reflection, back in the studio, the found objects fuse into new stories and further imaginative journeys.
I like to put these treasured objects and materials together, sometimes changed and adapted, and with the addition of paint,
and sometimes unaltered, where the context or juxtaposition itself does the work.
When I do this, it is painting with ‘stuff’ - invoking the history and character of the materials themselves,
letting them tell their own stories which I have recognized because they speak to me of my own experience and vision.
The pieces often like to tell me what their shape should be, and I have tried to let them speak for themselves.

In my ‘retelling’ of these stories, the viewer must look out upon the world from within the focus
of a unique point of view, ‘hearing’ or telling these stories in his or her own way.

The prints which form the core of this exhibition were made by similar processes to the mixed media constructions
which I have pursued for many years, except that the found materials used were combined on a Macintosh computer,
using a variety of graphic software. This facilitated the use of of photographs, video, drawings and additional kinds of material,
complex blends and controls over scale together with further processing techniques, not possible with the found items themselves.
In this respect, the prints are not a substitute for one off constructions, but another way of extending
the use of samples of the real world into images, a visual equivalent to sound mixing.

Bob Pegg and John Hodkinson have been friends since the mid sixties, and have collaborated on many occasions.
They have shared interests and each has, in his own way, quarried the same rich grounds for the raw minerals of inspiration.

The Storytellers

Essie Stewart was brought up in Sutherland. She tells her stories both in Gaelic her first language – and English, mixing them with vivid accounts of life on the road.
Alec Williamson learned his stories and songs in the days when he travelled around Britain and Ireland. He is one of the last of the great, old-style storytellers.
Duncan Williamson is Scotland’s best-known storyteller, as well as being a fine singer and musician, with many collections of tales published.
He travels the world as a leading ambassador for Scottish storytelling.

Digital prints by John Hodkinson

The Travelling people are the inheritors of a rich tradition of stories and song. Some of these stories have a very long history.
They are full of insights, wisdom and texture. Illustrative approaches to them have usually been intentionally
traditional in appearance, and looking back in time to some kind of historical past.
It should be remembered that these stories are sensual, oral and are not necessarily best served by being written down.
This has the effect of freezing the story in time and in my opinion, hightens the sense of looking back, and seeing them
as images from a historical past.
To hear them told by a good teller, even if the story is of events in the far distant past, is to have them forced into the present,
into our own personal circle of firelight.
Being passed on by a living person makes them current, rather than a distant echo from within the neutral space of a book.
My interest began during the 1960’s and since then I have often returned to such themes.
For this series of prints I wanted to explore ways of illustrating stories using contemporary media and approaches,
and avoiding consciously nostalgic, sentimental or well established visual clichés.
The stories were chosen to cover a broad spectrum, from from the tragic through to a joke (although even the joke hides a serious side.)
The stories used various methods to drive them forward, personal memory and anecdote, specific landscapes,
metaphor and so on, and I have used equivalent visual techniques in driving the images.
When a story is passed on, it isn’t simply replicated, it becomes possessed by the next person,
and tells it from their own point of view.
So it is with images, and I have used a mixture of common and personal imagery, “telling” them from my own visual point of view as it were.
You will look at them of course from your own point of view, and so stories are passed on in different ways.

John Hodkinson April 2005

The Prints

The Tin Road
An elegy based on a phrase of Alec Williamson’s whilst reminiscing about days on the road, as the old ways were changing,
and it was “the end of the days of tin, horses, and plastic coming in.”

The Haunted Jacket
This is based on a story told by Alec Williamson during a session on the second sight.
A man came into a ceilidh wearing a naval jacket, but a traveller with the sight saw an apparition of a man behind him,
reaching out for the jacket. It turned out that the jacket had been found on a body washed up on the shore.

Outwitting the Devil
This, as told by Alec Williamson is a funny tale of an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman and their contract with the Devil.
It is the Irishman, of course, who in the end outwits the Devil and saves their mortal souls.
Like the best jokes, it has an unspoken dark side. We can laugh at the most desperate thoughts in order to cope with them.

The Three Cat Sisters’ Enchanted Gifts
This is a very long, epic story told by Alec Williamson. In it, Rory and his two brothers whilst on the road in Sutherland fall in with three cat women,
who give them three magical gifts. Rory loses these, and after much adversity and adventures round the world
eventually, through his ingenuity manages to regain them and is re-united with his brothers.

The Silkies Grave
Duncan Williamson tells many tales of the seal people.
They tell of people going in to the sea to join them, of the deaths of seal people and of shells marking the graves of silkies.
I have drawn on several strands from these stories, and included a personal experience of a seals grave in a certain beach in the western isles.

The Apparition, by Cill Chriosd Church on the road to Torrin, Skye
This eerie story told by Alec Williamson, concerns the vision seen by a man of his dead brother, as he returns from America
to his family home, and how this vision saves his life.
The location of this story was very specific.

The Black Isle Witches
Essie Stewart told several stories about the witches of the Black Isle.
Their fishing was described, and how after a confrontation with the people of Tarbert,
a fish was cursed by one of the witches, and ever after that kind of fish was never again seen there.

Passing it on
This is about the idea of the tradition of passing on stories or songs oraly, and how they change slightly in the telling,
taking on something of the teller whilst retaining something of the essence of the original.

The Last Wolf
Based on a story told by Bob Pegg. Stories of ‘the last wolf’ are found all over the British Isles,
a powerful archetype. The original drawing is in pastel on beeswax and fire ash. A kind of fossil memory. The print is technically the most straightforward one of the set.

The Shape Changers
Creatures who can change shape appear in all mythologies,
Ovid’s Metamorphoses list many, and the seal people are in this sense, only one of many species with this capability.

Forest of the Wolf
Another based on the archetypal wolf, this time with a nod to the Pictish version.

These prints can be ordered via the Museum Shop and can be sent directly to the buyers address.
A full set of the eleven prints can also be ordered for £350.

Other Pieces
Although these pieces were made either for other reasons, or before the series of prints,
I have included them because they relate to some of the same themes and the same kind of mental landscapes as do the stories.

The Storytellers first patch. “Sharp tooth from the moor.”

The Storytellers second patch. “Many a great house is on the hill…”
Weaving stories out of things found. Everyone can make their own stories out of these.

Ancient Days
“We live entirely in the past.” But all is not what it seems.

Lucifer’s Song whilst Falling
The oldest piece, done in 1972. Perpetually falling through space, Lucifer was an Angel.
Cast out, and derided by all, but he has all the best songs. A complex character.
As night and day are just parts of the same twenty four hours, good and bad are two sides of the same coin.
We flip the coin each day of our lives and take our chance. You can’t have one without the other and both have to be valued.

The Last Wolf
This was made as the artwork for Bob Pegg’s CD of the same name.

Urban Dreaming
Although originally done for a CD cover, I had in mind for the little figure,
the idea of the universal Jack of the stories who uses his ingenuity to rise above whatever adversity life throws at him.

The Last Wolf
The original drawing is in pastel on beeswax and fire ash. A kind of fossil memory.

A Fair Moon Rising
Another piece of done originally for a CD cover.
Beneath an ageless moon, sheltered from the wilderness, a lone traveller survives, carrying the memories and wisdoms of his people.

Under Black Mound
Many stories describe magical hills or mounds, beneath which strange things happen.
How will such mounds continue in an uncertain and possibly urban future?

The Dangerous Life of the Fishing
This was a proverb I came across in Lewis.
An encounter on a beach there told me that the proverb in fact can be seen to have a two edged blade.

John Hodkinson

Born Yorkshire, 1946.
1967 Departmental Phil May Prize for Drawing, Leeds School of Art.
1968 Dip. A.D. (Leeds), Illustration.
1971 M.Art (RCA) Illustration, Royal College of Art.
1971-1973 Technical Assistant (Design), Lake District National Park.
1973-1975 Part time Lecturer in Graphic Design (Illustration), Cumbria College of Art and Design.
1975-1979 Lecturer II in Graphic Design (Illustration), Lancashire Polytechnic.
1979-January 2005 Senior Lecturer and Course Leader
for Illustration, University of Central Lancashire.

Publications:
1976 Fossils from the Daily Detritus (Graphic Lines, Harris Press)
1977 A Book of Pages (Editor - Harris Press)
1978 Tunes for Bees (Harris Press)
1982 The night the sky was torn apart (in Pathways, Isle of Wight Education Department)
1990 Meta Incognita Exhibition Catalogue.
1995 Thir a Muigh Exhibition Catalogue.
1998 Illustrations for John Fletcher -Tuba Extraordinary
(Philip Jones, Andre Previn, Elgar Howarth, Derek Bourgeois, Margaret Cable - The John Fletcher Trust Fund)
1998 Illustrations for Spanish Wine, Kirkstall Vintage (Kirkstall Oral History Group)
2000 July/August Mere Illustration (Association of Illustrators’ Journal)
2000/2001 December/January Don’t look back, ‘fings aint what they used to be.
(Association of Illustrators’ Journal)
2000 March/April . Some thoughts on borders and boundaries
(Association of Illustrators’ Journal)
2002 The Yates Family Cdrom for the Armit Museum. (AHRB funded Research Project)

One Man Exhibitions:
1980 Lancashire Polytechnic Arts Centre, Preston.
1981 Charlotte Mason College, Ambleside.
1983 Liverpool Everyman Theatre.
1985 Newcastle Playhouse, Newcastle upon Tyne.
1986 Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal.
1989 Lancashire Polytechnic Faculty of Arts.
1992 Heyoka. University of Central Lancashire.
1995 Gallery III, The Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.
1995 Thir a Muigh, University of Central Lancashire
1995 Thir a Muigh, Morven Gallery, Isle of Lewis.
1996 Millom Station Craft Centre, Millom.
1996 The Bookcase, Carlisle.
1997 Windermere Steamboat Museum.
1999 Land, Marks, Morven Gallery, Isle of Lewis.
1999 Landmarks (Rim of broken images), Pendle Art Gallery.
2003 Passing Places, Morven Gallery, Isle of Lewis.

Two Man Exhibitions:
1990 Meta Incognita (with Ian Walton), Brantwood, Cumbria
1991 Edgin’ the Blues (with Ian Walton), Faculty of Arts, Lancashire Polytechnic.
2003 The Last Wolf and other stories (collaboration with Bob Pegg.) The Bleddfa Centre, Powys.

Selected Group Exhibitions:
1978. Works in honour of Ted Hughes, Ilkley Literature Festival
1979 Illustration RCA, Royal College of Art.
1987 Kurt Schwitters Centenary Exhibition, Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal.
1989 Lake Artists Society, Cumbria.
1989 Cumbrian Artists.
1993 Mixed Feelings, Dean Clough Gallery of Contemporary Art, Halifax.
1995 CD3 The Finale, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.
1995 Edge of the North Wind II, Morven Gallery, Isle of Lewis.
1995 Edge of the North Wind II, Ramsgate Library Gallery.
1995 Here Comes Summer, Mid-Pennine Gallery, Burnley.
1996-2004. Morven Gallery, Isle of Lewis.
1996-1998 Blue, Artreach Touring exhibition.
1998 May/June New Lines, Diorama Gallery, London.
2000 Summer USA. Group exhibition, Staff of the University of Central Lancashire.

Works in private collections in England, Scotland, Canada, America,
Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan.