Setting course for Coquet Island: how one man’s vision led to Amble community arts project
Coquet Island … captured the imagination of Allan Sutherland
The exhibits may have been taken down, but the works survive online … you can still find 36 Views of Coquet Island, the Amble arts community’s realisation of one man’s lockdown vision, on the internet.
One of the attractions at Amble’s recent annual Puffin festival was an exhibition of this remarkable project celebrating Coquet Island, which many will have visited on boat trips to spot puffins, terns and other seabirds, and seals. The project embraces art, music, poetry, film, and memoir.
Allan Sutherland came up with the idea while walking along Amble’s shoreline during Covid. He has explained on the social media platform Substack that he became immersed in all things Japanese, which took him to the Japanese artist Hokusai and his woodblock series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. As a result Allan decided to invite contributions to a project titled 36 Views of Coquet Island https://substack.com/home/post/p-143301707.
Allan Sutherland … Coquet Island ‘has a cultural, spiritual and visual significance for Amble and this part of the Northumberland coastline’
He said: “On daily lockdown walks along the coastline, I gazed at the sea and wondered how 36 Views of Coquet Island might look - thinking of a View as being an idea, opinion or memory as much as a visual representation. Seeing it, while immersed in Japanese, helped me consider the island as being of equivalent importance to Fuji. It has a cultural, spiritual and visual significance for Amble and this part of the Northumberland coastline.”
You can read more on Allan’s Substack about the process which led eventually, earlier this year, to Amble Masonic Hall being filled with artists, musicians, and poets, as well as Ambleites with important and fascinating stories to tell.
Rookie painter Antony Beal talked enthusiastically about the impact his truly iconic picture called Puffin Cruise has made. Born and bred Ambleite George Martin remembered boat trips to Coquet island for childhood picnics before it was declared off-limits to protect the birdlife, and living in a town once “filthy with coal dust”. George recalled how soft the turf was on the island, having been undermined by so many puffin burrows.
The Roseate’s Return To Coquet Island. ©️Max Shepherd 2024. Used with permission
Poets Ali Rowland and Paul Mein contributed poems about clumsy counterfeiters who once operated from the island, and links to Grace Darling. There was also an atmospheric, ethereal film-poem from Ali and her husband Phil.
Isabel Morrison and fellow musicians performed Isabel’s haunting Coquet Lament - lyrics by Tony Rylance - to mark the end of manned lighthouse-keeping at the island in 1990.
Bird warden Paul Morrison talked of his “great privilege” of being involved with the island for 38 years, and spoke of the “catastrophe” of bird flu: “But they are very resilient. We are seeing them coming back.”
Other fascinating contributions included Amble artist Luke McTaggart’s Moon Over Coquet Island, and Sally Howarth and her “alienoid” Blue Mannequins made of recycled plastic, that she likes to position and photograph around the shores of Northumberland: “The reaction of Joe Public is usually brilliant. Someone thought I was Antony Gormley.”
Sally Howarth with one of her blue mannequins
At another launch event to unveil an exhibition of the work at Amble’s Dry Water arts centre, in advance of its inclusion as part of the town’s Puffin Festival, Sally spoke of how she photographs the mannequins in various coastal settings, and of accidents such as the tide coming in and knocking them over: “You can have a laugh while enjoying the art. I love the blues of the coast. Sometimes we feel blue, too.” There’s also a message in the fact that the mannequins are made of plastic, of course.
The festival exhibition gave me a chance to view other art works more closely, such as Max Shepherd’s The Roseate Returns to Coquet Island, a digital artwork created on an iPad Pro, with an Apple Pencil 2, using ProCreate software - an attempt at a ‘bird’s eye’ view. As Max says, the roseate tern (sterna dougallii) is probably the rarest of breeding birds in the UK, raising its young almost exclusively on Coquet Island.
Max points out that ‘rosies’, once commonplace along the English coastline, and first described by naturalists in 1813, were targeted by egg collectors throughout the 19th century. The fashion for feathered headwear further pressured the species and by the beginning of the 20th century they were virtually extinct as a breeding species across most of the UK.
A few remained, notably in the north-east of England. Coquet Island eventually became the sole significant breeding site. They arrive in small numbers in April/May each year. Most of them over-winter on the coast of west Africa, commencing their long journeys south in September.
Attention Seeker, collage by Cathy Greenhalgh
Another striking exhibit that caught my eye was Attention Seeker, a collage by Cathy Greenhalgh that captures a memorable moment for Coquet Island that attracted flocks of birders. She commented: “Other birds and the island hardly got a look-in when the rare bridled tern from the Caribbean and the albino golden puffin arrived in June 2024.”
I first learned of the Coquet Island project after meeting Allan Sutherland almost two years ago at a meeting of Amble Writers. I sent him a poem I’d written almost 15 years ago, on a family visit to Northumberland, when I never dreamed we’d end up living here. It was about a boat trip to Coquet Island to see the puffins.
‘Puffins at Coquet Island’ … poem by Greg Freeman
You can see all 36 Views of Coquet Island on Allan Sutherland’s Substack social media platform
https://substack.com/@allansuth
Greg Freeman