Callum Innes – a pure land

Callum Innes (b. 1962) began exhibiting in the mid-to-late 1980s and, in 1992, had two major exhibitions in public galleries: at the ICA, in London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, in Edinburgh. Since then he has emerged as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation, achieving widespread recognition through major solo and group exhibitions worldwide. He was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002, and the Nat West Prize in 1998. In 1995, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. Innes’s work is included in many major public collections, worldwide, including: the Tate Gallery, in London; the Kunstmuseum, in Bern; the National Galleries of Scotland, in Edinburgh; the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, in New York; the Centre George Pompidou, in Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto. Thomas A Clark (b. 1944) was raised in Greenock, Scotland. His poetry has been consistently attentive to form and to the experience of walking in the landscape, returning again and again to the lonely terrain of the Highlands and Islands. In 1973, with the artist Laurie Clark, he started Moschatel Press. At first a vehicle for small publications by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, Simon Cutts and others, it soon developed into a means of formal investigation within his own poetry, treating the book as imaginative space, the page as a framing device or as quiet around an image or a phrase, the turning of pages as revelation or delay. From 1986, Laurie and Thomas A Clark have run Cairn Gallery, one of the earliest of artist-run spaces, specialising in Land Art, Minimalism and a lyrical or poetic Conceptualism. After many years in the Cotswolds, the Clarks moved in 2002 to re-open the gallery in Pittenweem, a small fishing village on the east coast of Scotland.