GEORGE  MACKAY  BROWN


Collaboration with ~
Gunnie Moberg        
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Gunnie Moberg
photograph © Janke de Vries,
Groningen, Holland

"That's the way it is with Gunnie;  people tend towards the brightness of her nature."
GMB in Shetland Diary, pub in Northern Lights 1999.

Gunnie Moberg moved to Orkney in 1976 and has since then produced a substantial body of work, photographs of the islands' people, landscape and wildlife.  Her unique gift for capturing patterns and textures in the natural world is finely illustrated in some of her aerial photographs.

Gunnie and George Mackay Brown published four works together in the eighties:  
The Loom of Light (1986), A Celebration for Magnus(1987) and Portrait of Orkney.  
In 1987, they also published a limited edition book of poems and photographs: Stone is printed on hand-made paper, a connoisseur's book.  

In the mid-nineties, Gunnie was preparing for a retrospective exhibition at the Piers Arts Centre in Stromness and had an idea for a book which would gather together a selection of her landscape work.  She asked George to write short captions for the photographs; his reply was characteristically modest, that he thought he could find something to say about them.  An easel was set up in George's sitting room and over a period of about six months, George and Gunnie looked at the display of pictures together.  Gunnie had no idea that George had been producing not captions, but remarkable poems.  It was a new experience for George, having photographs suggest the subjects for poems.  He wrote 48 before deciding that was enough.   The result is a beautiful combination of light, line, texture and words in Orkney:  Pictures and Poems (1996).

GMB died before the book was published, but the collaboration was complete and the book's dedication is a fitting tribute:

In memory
of
George Mackay Brown

you have inspired
and touched us all
Thank you.

St Magnus Day 1996

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© Gunnie Moberg      Stromness, Orkney

Pebbles in Ice A glacier dragged us      All the way from the north. Did he dump us like a dustman? No, he dropped us       Here, from his hand, like a              jeweller. © GMB 1996

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Shags:  Mother and Chick Young one, You are to thank the artificer of birds always You have not swan's beauty Nor kestrel's cruel plummet and strike Nor lark's broken Scattering necklace of notes Along the red west Nor duck's clown procession From barn to farmyard Nor gull's blizzarding After ploughs and fishing boats. To be a cormorant  Is to sit on a sea rock A lean dark tide-watcher; Of passing interest To photographer and poet only. © GMB 1996

© Gunnie Moberg      Stromness, Orkney

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The quality of reproduction above in no way reflects on the quality of the original.

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Gunnie Moberg

To learn more about Gunnie's work go to www.orknet.co.uk/oar/moberg.htm

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