Manchester literature festival joined the city’s glorious art gallery to celebrate a new exhibition of magnificent Scottish-themed art. And who better to add another focus to the art than previous TS Eliot award winner and Shetland inhabitant Jen Hadfield.

She embraced this commission with her usual blend of quirky observation, warmth and tenderness, bringing new focus to some of the best-known and other, more obscure pieces from the gallery’s huge collection. Her reading is tentative but gently compelling, her writing inquisitive and sharply poignant. The small gallery echoed to her lilting voice and listeners were encouraged to wander around and look at each painting as she read the thoughts they inspired in her. She explained her unique spin and twist on each piece which eloquently wove the artists’ ideas with her own memories and imagination. The pictures showing wide open, deserted places in Scotland mischievously contrasted with her spiky intrusion of nuclear submarines and warplanes (Sealoch, with Nuclear Deterrent) were particularly effective, but her melding of modern life in her own Scotland with the joys of celebration and history in the works were also moving (The Wedding Road, with Free Bar).

Dip into the link here from the gallery’s website to see the works and the poetry they evoked in Hadfield – and if you can, go the gallery and enjoy the pictures up close and personal. 

Judy Gordon

PHOTOGRAPH: CATHY BOLTON