Acclaimed Dornoch artist celebrates lifetime of creativity with retrospective exhibition
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An acclaimed Dornoch-based artist, who has created a wide body of varied work over decades, is set to launch a special retrospective exhibition which will help raise funds for Highland Hospice.
Sally Wild The Creative Life opens at Dornoch Social Club next Saturday, June 17 and runs for a week until Sunday, June 25.
An illustrator, etcher, printer and textile artist, Sally’s work is described as “reflecting the beauty, wonder and whimsy of her northern surroundings”.
On show will be her colourful, handmade sketchbooks, traditional rugs, etchings, linocuts and wood engravings as well as watercolours.
An only child whose father was in the Navy, Sally was born in 1941 and has been drawing for as long as she can remember.
“My childhood was very itinerant,” she said. “We lived in many different places from Wester Ross to the West Indies before settling in Wick. My creativity – especially drawing – was my stable place and my friend. I could always go there when I wanted.”
On leaving school, She was sent to Edinburgh to train as a typist which she said she was “hopeless at”, but she found her calling after attending an evening class run by Derek Clarke at the Edinburgh College of Art.
“I absolutely loved it. Derek saw something in my work and persuaded me to leave the typing school and take an art degree,” she said.
After graduating she returned to Caithness and married Charlie Orr who had been in the year above her at college. At the time he was working as a designer for Caithness Glass in Wick and went on to set up Lybster Pottery.
Sally looked after their young family and helped with decorating pottery. She kept chickens and goats, grew their own vegetables and made cheese. It was after a farmer gave her a blackface ewe and lamb that she developed her lifelong interest in sheep and wool.
Sally painted when she could, mainly watercolours and mixed media.
She said: “I drew what I saw, the Caithness landscape or scenes with the children in them, and charged £2 for a commission. When the Queen Mother bought one of my paintings for the Castle of Mey, I charged her £12, which was a lot!”
After the collapse of Lybster Pottery in the recession of the 1970s, the family moved to Fife. Sally continued painting and exhibiting work in Edinburgh galleries and the Royal Scottish Academy.
She returned north to Golspie when her father, who was by that time living in the village, died suddenly, and got a job at Seaforth House Care Home where she worked for 20 years. It was at Seaforth that a resident taught her how to make rag rugs and it was through her developing interest in textiles that she met and married fellow artist Peter Wild and moved to Dornoch where she began keeping sheep again and spinning wool.
She began working with community groups in Caithness and Sutherland, running creative workshops for different groups of people; and also illustrating books and interpretation panels including panels for Historylinks Museum in Dornoch and for the Wick regeneration project in Caithness.
Sally Wild The Creative Life runs from 10.30am-4.30pm each day and is also open from 7pm-9pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. A percentage of the sales will go to Highland Hospice.
