Ian Hamilton Finlay

Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent. He was educated at Dollar Academy in Clackmannanshire and later at Glasgow School of Art. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside (firstly to Gartmore and then to Kirkcudbright). In 1942, he joined the British Army. Finlay was married twice and had two children, Alec and Ailie. Throughout his life, he suffered severely from agoraphobia. He died in Edinburgh in 2006. He is buried alone in Abercorn Churchyard in West Lothian, Scotland. The grave lies in the extreme south-east corner of the churchyard. The gravestone refers to his parents and sister.

At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories, in 1958, with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald. His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party, was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962. The third edition, published by Fulcrum Press (London) in 1969, included a number of new poems and was inaccurately described by the publisher as a first edition, which led to a complex legal dispute. Dancers was included in its entirety in a New Directions annual a few years later. In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press, in his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. Finlay became notable as a poet, when reducing the monostich form to one word with his concrete poems in the 1960s. Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton's poetry, and exploring "the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas".

Later, Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment. This kind of 'poem-object' features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, although Finlay was always explicit that while "the original brief suggests sculpture being added to the garden, but I had them revise this to the understanding that the work would be the garden itself." The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples. In December 2004, in a poll conducted by Scotland on Sunday, a panel of fifty artists, gallery directors and arts professionals voted Little Sparta to be the most important work of Scottish art. Second and third were the Glasgow School of Art by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn. Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945". The Little Sparta Trust plans to preserve Little Sparta for the nation by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Richard Ingleby, Ian Kennedy, Magnus Linklater, and Ann Uppington are trustees. Former trustees include Ian Appleton, Stephen Bann, Stephen Blackmore, Patrick Eyres, John Leighton, Duncan Macmillan, Victoria Miro, Paul Nesbitt and Jessie Sheeler. Finlay's work is notable for a number of recurring themes: a penchant for classical writers (especially Virgil); a concern with fishing and the sea; an interest in the French Revolution; and a continual revisiting of World War II and the memento mori Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego. His 1973 screenprint of a tank camouflaged in a leaf pattern, Arcadia, referring to the Utopian Arcadia of poetry and art (another recurring theme), is described by the Tate as drawing "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank". In the 1982 exhibition The Third Reich Revisited, Nazi iconography featured on architectural drawings by Ian Appleton, with captions by Finlay which could be read as a sardonic critique of Scotland's arts establishment. Finlay came into conflict with the Strathclyde Regional Council over his liability for rates on a byre in his garden, which the council insisted was being used as commercial premises. Finlay insisted that it was a garden temple. His propaganda campaign against the Council between 1982 and 1985 became known as the Little Spartan War. Finlay's use of Nazi imagery led to an accusation of neo-Nazi sympathies and antisemitism which resulted in the loss of two commissions to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, The Belvedere of Thiais and Un Jardin Revolutionaire at Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs, Versailles. Finlay sued the Paris magazine Art Press which had made the accusations, and was awarded nominal damages of one franc. The stress of this situation brought about the separation between Finlay and his wife Sue. One of the few gardens outside Scotland to permanently display his work is the Improvement Garden in Stockwood Discovery Centre, Luton, created in collaboration with Sue Finlay, Gary Hincks and Nicholas Sloan. Finlay was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985. He was awarded honorary doctorates from Aberdeen University in 1987, Heriot-Watt University in 1993 and the University of Glasgow in 2001, and an honorary and/or visiting professorship from the University of Dundee in 1999. The French Communist Party presented him with a bust of Saint-Just in 1991. He received the Scottish Horticultural Medal from the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society in 2002, and the Scottish Arts Council Creative Scotland Award in 2003. Finlay was appointed a CBE in the Queen's 2002 New Year Honours. Finlay's work has been seen as austere, but also at times witty, or even darkly whimsical. He is represented by the Wild Hawthorn Press, the Archive of Ian Hamilton Finlay, which works closely with the Ingleby Gallery (Edinburgh) and the Victoria Miro Gallery (London) in the U.K.

Finlay's designs were most often built by others. Finlay respected the expertise of sandblasters, engravers and printers he worked with, having approximately one hundred collaborators including Patrick Caulfield, Richard Demarco, Malcolm Fraser, Christopher Hall, Margot Sandeman. He also worked with a host of lettering artists including Michael Harvey and Nicholas Sloan and Vincent Butler.