Burnsiana

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About the Book: 

A queer Amalgam
O Rousseau's 'noble savage'
An Ossian's weird dreamscape –
A wild creature tamed bi education.
Heid stapt fou o' buikish lear

Calum Colvin and Rab Wilson provide a new perspective on Scotland's Bard in this masterful union of art and poetry.

Colvin's images encourage you to deconstruct his art in your own way, creating a deeply personal experience for each individual reader.

Written in both English and Scots, Wilson's exquisite and carefully crafted poetic responses to the artworks add further layers of meaning. The result is a magnificent tribute to Robert Burns and his legacy.

About the Authors:

CALUM COLVIN was born in Glasgow in 1961 and is Professor of Fine Art Photography at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee. Colvin’s artworks have been widely exhibited in venues as diverse as Orkney, Los Angeles and Ecuador. A practitioner of both sculpture and photography, Colvin brings these disciplines together in his unique style of ‘constructed photography’: assembled tableaux of objects, which are then painted and photographed. His complex compositions are rich in association and spatial ambiguities. As well as being visually exciting, humorous and intriguing, Colvin’s work demonstrates that the art of the past is relevant in a modern society.

His work is held in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Art, Houston; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London as well as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh and the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow.

RAB WILSON is one of Scotland’s most accomplished poets. He was born in New Cumnock, Ayrshire in 1960. After an engineering apprenticeship with the National Coal Board he left the pits following the miner’s strike of 1984–5 to become a psychiatric nurse. As a Scots poet, his work appears regularly in The Herald, Chapman, Lallans and Markings magazines and he is the author of a number of highly praised volumes of poetry and a Burns scholar.

Rab has performed his work at the Edinburgh Festival, the StAnza poetry festival at St Andrews, the ‘Burns an a’ That Festival’ at Ayr and has been ‘Bard of the Festival’ at Wigtown, Scotland’s National Booktown. Additionally Rab is a previous winner of the McCash Poetry Prize and was ‘Robert Burns Writing Fellow – In Reading Scots’ for Dumfries and Galloway Region. He has worked with the artist Calum Colvin on a book of responses to Burns and he is the Scriever in Residence for the National Trust for Scotland based at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Ayr. Currently a member of the National Committee for the Scots Language Resource Centre, Rab regularly attends the parliamentary Cross Party Group for Scots language held at Holyrood. He is a ‘weel-kent’ advocate for Scots writing. He lives in New Cumnock with his wife Margaret and daughter Rachel.