Ghosts and Stories - exhibition by Antony Hodgson at Orkney Museum

This Saturday, 5 February 2022, sees the opening of a new exhibition at the Orkney Museum, Tankerness House, Broad Street, Kirkwall.

‘Ghosts and Stories’ is an exhibition of new artworks by Antony Hodgson.

Orkney provides the inspiration for this quirky mixture of drawings, prints and sculptures. Book jackets are designed for unwritten texts, wrecks and ruins exist in undefined surroundings and familiar folktales are re-imagined with bizarre consequences. The viewer is left to interpret the situations and complete the stories.

Antony was a teacher and freelance cartoonist before moving to Orkney in 2013. He now lectures part time in the Art Department at UHI. He says of the work:

“I have been particularly inspired by the wrecks, visible and invisible that are a significant part of Orkney’s landscape and history.

"As a child, I was fascinated by shipwrecks – especially the idea of a familiar thing that belonged in one environment being lost to another.

"The relief sculptures are produced using imagination, guesswork and memory.

"I prefer to work quickly and directly, relying on the emotion of the scene rather than obsessive detail and accuracy.

"Coming from a cartooning background, I set out to entertain, amuse, question, provoke and occasionally offend in equal measure. There is a bit of tongue-in-cheek social commentary in the imagined book covers and a nod to the bygone styles of publication which were familiar in my childhood."

‘Ghosts and Stories’ runs from 5 February to 12 March. The museum is open Monday - Saturday, 10.30am - 12.30pm, 1.30pm - 5.00pm. Admission is free.