Alec Finlay

About

Alec Finlay is an internationally recognised artist, poet and publisher whose work crosses a range of media and forms, from sculpture and collage, to audio-visual, neon and new technologies. Born in Scotland in 1966 and currently based in Newcastle, England, much of Finlay's work reflects on our interaction with nature and considers how we as a culture, or cultures, relate to landscape. Finlay describes his work as microtonal, combining a number of smaller elements within a wider field, drawing frequently on innovative poetic forms such as the embedded mesostic, the circle poem and the poem-object. He often works collaboratively, weaving together art and text to create generous experiential works, some mapped directly onto the landscape, others woven into the fabric of our social selves. Recent projects include Specimen Colony (2008) a permanent artwork for the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool, The Road North(2010/2011) a contemporary word map of Scotland across a year long journey through its landscape, and a new civic grove for Leeds City, a set of interrelated works carved in stone, engraved in steel and sited in the trees of Victoria Gardens. In 2010 Finlay was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize.