New Artspace for Moffat

Ram's head motif on the wall outside the Edinburgh Woollen Mill shop on Moffat High St

The Moffat Gallery is a new contemporary artspace, formerly a builder's yard and early 18th cottage near the town centre. The gallery building and pend lead through into a  gravel display space and garden  featuring a pavement by sculptor Peter Coates who, with Ian Hamilton Finlay, made the memorial to Princess Diana  outside the Serpentine Gallery in  London. The Moffat pavement, appropriately for a town whose emblem is a ram, is engraved with the first lines of a sonnet by the 16th century French poet Joachim du Bellay refering to Ulysses and the Golden Fleece* and forms the centrepiece of a garden being made by Dawa Sherpa and Janet Wheatcroft of Craigieburn Garden, Moffat. Plans for 2012 include: Paths (suite of 12 black and white photographs by Jennifer Gough-Cooper of Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden at Little Sparta); Documenting Change work in progress by Argyll-based landscape artist Lizzie Rose, arising from a two-year residency in a commercial forestry plantation in south Lanarkshire as it was being turned into part of the enormous Clyde windfarm; Weaver of Grass, about a remarkable artist who wove clothing out of grass (book and poem by Chrys Salt with a short film) and The Dying Empire - book launch of a new history of the last days of the Hapsburgs by Moffat Book Events chairman Andrew Wheatcroft. 

A commission to make a visitors book for the Moffat Gallery will be announced on May 25

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Joachim DU BELLAY   (1522-1560)
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme celui-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge !


Link to French actor Gerard Philippe reciting 'Heureux qui, comme Ulysse' can be found on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtPyrIsakTE



We have our opening party and a private view here on May 25 12noon-2pm. Do come and have a look.