Exhibitions 2019
60 years ago, a group of visionary people founded Orkney Field Club, and so much good has followed – talks and outings, identifications and recording, research projects and published reports, Orkney’s Biological Records Centre and the beautifully-produced journal The Orkney Naturalist.
Orkney Camera Club mark the anniversary with an exhibition on the theme of Orkney Nature. It will be in three Kirkwall venues – Orkney Library and the windows of WHB Sutherland and We Frame It – and will also include photographs from Orkney College students and Kirkwall Grammar School pupils.
The Library is also the place to see some of Murdoch Mackenzie’s beautiful charts of the water around Orkney. The wreck of the East Indiaman Svecia on North Ronaldsay’s Reefdyke in 1740 added to the case for greater aids to navigation in Orkney waters. The Earl of Morton called on Colin Maclaurin, one of the greatest mathematicians of the day, to take on the challenge of producing a comprehensive set of charts. Maclaurin, who was professor mathematics at Edinburgh University, was too busy – but he recommended a former student, who was not teaching at Kirkwall Grammar School. This was Murdoch Mackenzie.
Maclaurin was not only a great mathematician and an expert surveyor; he was also a leading advocate of the ideas of Sir Isaac Newton about gravitation – which included the motion of the tides. Even Galileo had not believed that the Moon was the cause, but Newton provided this mathematically. Maclaurin understood the new ideas of gravitation so well that Newton had offered to personally fund his position at Edinburgh. So Mackenzie had contact with the finest thinking of the time about tides and surveying and geometry, and he set about his work in a more systematic way than anyone had done before.
He started on the land, and when a hard winter froze the lochs of Stenness and Harray he went on the ice with a very long chain which formed his dead-level baseline. From this he built up a detailed map of the mainland of Orkney – and only then did he expand outwards to the sea and the islands and gather it all together into his first chart.
“For mariners, with its soundings and accompanying detailed sailing directions, it was revolutionary and remained the standard work until the modern admiralty chart,” write the distinguished modern geographer, Prof. Ronald Miller.
Murdoch Mackenzie’s charts are indeed works of precision and beauty, and you can see some of them and find out more about his story upstairs in the Archive section of the Orkney Library in Kirkwall.
There are stories of the sea at the Kirkwall and Stromness Museums. The Orkney Museum at Tankerness House tells the story of the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow 100 years ago. Stromness Museum has two exhibitions, one on the wrecks and one on the marine life of the Flow.
Right on the Stromness waterfront, the Pier Arts Centre has four exhibitions, ranging from a commemoration of its 40 years to a look at landscape.
Further along the street, the Northlight Gallery in Graham Place has an exhibition of sound installations by Amy Beeston, sound artist and audio researcher, with a background in both music and computer science.
The Old Library in Kirkwall is the venue for an exhibition by John Cumming, artist and sculptor, originally from Burra Isle in Shetland and former head of art at Stromness Academy.
And Orkney Wireless Museum in Kirkwall is a treasure chest of history, with links to memories of wartime and stories of the sea.
“I was just stunned by this wealth of artefacts,” said one visitor, BBC Scotland’s Head of Radio Jeff Zycinski. “It was just an incredible experience.”
