Margaret Tait in Living Colour

The delightful image above is taken from the Margaret Tait collection and is a painting of her wonderful eightsome reel figures which feature in the animated film Painted Eightsome which can be seen here.






We also found the fiddled-diddledy figure's genesis in one of her notebooks:

If you like the film then pop along to the Pier Arts Centre before the 7th of June. Their current exhibition Living Colour celebrates the animation work of several artists including Margaret Tait and a number of films shall be screened.

 Supporting material from the Orkney Archive including copies of Margaret Tait's watercolour sketches plus correspondence about her film making are also part of the exhibition.

If you are not in Orkney, or shall not make it to the exhibition, then you can take a look at one of the films being shown here:



Painting: Orkney Archive Reference D97/44/2
Notebook: Orkney Archive Reference D97/28/15

Missing Home...

We are almost finished cataloguing the Margaret Tait papers... only a couple of boxes to go now.

The last two boxes have been a treasure of unpublished poems and other pieces of writing. There are many gems but this excerpt taken from one handwritten page touched us today.

'I miss Buttquoy. I miss the sun streaming in.
I miss its openness, its airy spaces.
I miss the freedom of the staircase
It had a good feeling in it      not grand, not poky.
The grates were well placed in relation to the doors.
Everything there was pretty well right, in size and placing-
Good fireplaces, where a coal or peat fire heated the room
I liked the height of the rooms, I miss that too.'


(The Tait family home, Buttquoy house was vacated by Tait in 1975. Her colour film, Place Of Work, as well as a black and white companion piece Tailpiece, were filmed in the house in the last few months before her departure.)

Great Tait!

Cataloguing more Margaret Tait papers today and noticing that everything was done in her own way. Letters about copying negatives and chasing up fees are firm, clear and unyielding, interviews and film shoots are painstakingly planned and everything from the posters, to the programmes to the promotional leaflets and calenders are designed and made by MT herself.

True, this probably had a lot to do with economics, but it is obvious that Tait was an auteur through and through. She seems like the type of person who, even when making a simple cup of tea, would have a highly individual and personal vision of the outcome of the project.

Even the language used on the posters and invitations for the Rose Street Film Festival of 1955 was very her: she describes Rose Street on the poster as "the long, low street of pubs in at the back of Princes Street.", and directs visitors up to her projection room thus; "up two flights of stone stairs and follow the smell of coffee."

Here is a handmade leaflet to promote her films mixing text, handwriting, film stills and sketches...

..and I also found a lovely little twiddle of water-colour on the back of an envelope.

Reference D97/24