Alan Young - VOICE, PLACE, TRANSLATION: drawings, paintings and an artist’s book A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Alan Young has valued the connection between teaching, commissions, and personal projects. An award from the Arts & Humanities Research Board has enabled him to continue his exploration of culture and wilderness in Finland, particularly through his response to the country’s leading modernist poet, Edith Södergran. In August 2003 he journeyed to Raivola where Södergran lived until her death in 1923. The village, renamed Roshtshino, is now many miles inside Russia, whose army invaded Finland in the 1940 ‘Winter War’ and succeeded in annexing a large slice of Karelia With the help of a Finnish friend, Pipa Anderson, he has made translations from Södergran’s Swedish, initially choosing poems that use imagery from Karelian landscape to describe an intense personal domain. With these in mind, he produced charcoal drawings and paintings in southern Finland and Karelia, near the sea, beside lakes and in the forest, incorporating words and phrases, trying to fuse the spirit of place with the shamanic power of her voice. As the great Norwegian painter, Frans Widerberg, remarked: ‘Deep inside me I find a vision. I try to bring it out, make it shine and be recognised by others. The inner landscape is what I am looking for.’ Five of these drawings and his translations of four poems were published in AMBIT 156, the London magazine edited by Dr Martin Bax. In the final phase of this project the various stages of his research crystallised in a forty page artist’s book, designed by him in Photoshop and printed on Bockingford A3+ double sided inkjet paper. All the images originated as drawings or paintings made directly before nature. Many of these are in the exhibition. view images>