IN CONVERSATION: Artist, poet and publisher Alec Finlay talks about art, poetics and Little Sparta

摘要

Jackie Bennett: How did your upbringing and experience of growing up at Stonypath, or Little Sparta, influence you? Alec Finlay: It was an ordinary Pentland upbringing, like that refrain of Morrissey's that I always mishear as: "Just a boy born / on ahillside desolate / Will nature make a man of me yet". And a childhood bundled up with the loving and sometimes tragic endeavour of Little Sparta [the garden designed by Alec's parents, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Sue Finlay]. As patchwork as any life, butretrospectively those aspects do separate into The Stonypathian - home, gardening, the valley. And The Little Spartan -symbolic territory of lan's devising.