Richard Demarco at Skateraw, East Lothian
Until 30 October

“Demarco Gallery” – the two words, stuck in the front window of a bus, proclaim that Ricky Demarco has risen from the ashes yet again. Since its inception in 1966, the Demarco Gallery has been almost as much a wanderer as its restless owner, but this is the first time it has found a home outside Edinburgh’s walls.

The gallery bus, woefully empty, speeds along the A1 towards Torness power station, its monolithic walls strangely invisible against the pale blue sky. Nestling at the foot of this nuclear giant is an overnight miracle: the Demarco Gallery, born again, at Skateraw Farm.

“We knocked this building up in nine weeks,” I’m told by the farm’s owner, Johnny Watson. We’re standing in a huge seed-barn, wind and water tight, and big enough to hold at least one food mountain. It’s stacked skyward with paintings and photographs, and piles of storage boxes make neat Minimalist sculptures on the polished stone floor.

The ever-kinetic figure of Ricky Demarco is shooting about at the far end of the barn. He’s forgotten to tell anyone of our arrangement, and it’s extremely possible that he’s forgotten the arrangement too. But that’s okay – everyone who knows Ricky is accustomed to this atmosphere of constructive chaos.

Just a few months ago, Watson had never met Demarco. On hearing the besieged gallery director on the radio, bemoaning the plight of his homeless archive, Watson had a brainwave. “Farmers are being asked to think differently,” he explains, “and to rise to the challenges of 21st century farming. Why not take a past-time that’s quintessentially urban – the world of contemporary art – and take it onto a farm?”

Demarco, always on the lookout for imaginative ways to bring art to the world, jumped at the chance. And now that his archive is settling in at Skateraw, it looks far too comfortable to be ousted at the end of October, when its rent-free time is up, and the exhibition officially ends.

Before I get my guided tour from Demarco, I’m shown around the farm in Watson’s four wheel drive. He shows me the meadow of wild flowers he’s planted to attract birds (55 species were identified just this year). A little further along he points out a gurgling spring in a miniature valley which has never been cultivated by man.

To the north stands a lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s father, and just along the coast in the other direction are rock formations famous for inspiring the great Scottish geologist James Hutton. Robert Burns once stayed here, and so did a stone-age man who was dug up with his golden dagger.

There’s an eight-tonne granite fish sculpture on the shore, which Watson’s daughter has christened Mr Floaty. The farmer has plans to fill the area with site specific works for a walking trail “which will allow people to consider certain aspects of life that they wouldn’t normally consider”.

“This is going to be a bit bumpy,” Watson warns me, “but I’ve got a reason to take you round here.” We rattle our way down an alarmingly steep hill and up a sloping field, stopping in its golden-stubbled centre. The A1 and the railway stretch out below us. “I think this would be a great place,” he says, “to have a cultural icon welcoming people into Scotland.”

“When you go over the border,” he continues, “there’s no special signal that you’ve arrived in Scotland, and I think this is not a bad wee field for it.” I wonder how such an icon might fare in the shadow of Torness, but decide there are plenty of Scottish artists who’d relish that particular challenge.

Very soon I’m back at the barn for my audience with Ricky Demarco. I haven’t prepared any questions because I know he’ll just keep talking until I run out of tape cassettes, or batteries, whichever comes first. For a man who has just celebrated his 75th birthday, Demarco is still remarkably full of energy and imagination, and above all a charming innocence.

He wears two cameras around his neck (“I know that one of them won’t work”), clicking them every so often in great excitement. During the course of our three hour encounter, the Demarco Archive increases by at least ten photographs. He seems more tired than he used to be, but in the end Demarco’s stamina outlasts my own as his imagination propels him ever onwards.

Born into an Italian family in the Portobello area of Edinburgh, Demarco had a hard time at school, bullied for being an “Eye-Tie”. He has remained outside the Edinburgh establishment ever since. When I ask about his tie, he tells me he’s a member of the Order of the Knights of St Lazarus, whose job was traditionally to look after lepers. “I wear this proudly,” he says, “because it means you’re not accepted, and you can’t enjoy the security of the walls of the city. You’re outside.”

When Demarco established his gallery in the 1960s he was quick to bring outsiders into the fold. Eastern Europe won his heart, and he has brought countless unknown artists and performers to Edinburgh from all over the Eastern Bloc, many of whom went on to become big names in art and theatre.

Introducing the German artist, Joseph Beuys, to Scotland was Demarco’s most celebrated achievement. Beuys and hundreds more are represented in the Demarco Archive, by their own artworks and by hundreds of thousands of photographs. Dundee University has money to catalogue 10,000 of these, but for Demarco, “the nightmare in my mind” is the question of who will catalogue the rest.

This exhibition is Demarco’s life’s work. Or at least that portion of it which has not been auctioned off to raise funds, or secured by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, or stored temporarily in neighbouring barns. Demarco is at pains to explain that the archive is meaningless when broken up, pointing to one of his own watercolours. “See this mark here, and this one? They’re part of a unity; you can’t separate them.”

Demarco sees his archive as one giant work of art, equivalent to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden at Little Sparta. Inspired by a mysterious signpost Demarco once found on the cusp of the Highlands, he calls this work his Road to Meikle Seggie – a lifelong journey of the imagination, to a place beyond his grasp. Meikle Seggie exists almost only in name, but it is Demarco’s Holy Grail. Every item in his sprawling archive is a clue along the way, a moment of revelation.

As we talk, Demarco is forever grabbing my hand and leading me to something he wants to show me. He gathers an audience along the way, engaging visitors in conversation and insisting that they, too, come and see. We zigzag between photographs, paintings and books, as Demarco explains the myriad links between them. “I’m going to have to put arrows all over the place,” he jokes, “or strings, I don’t know.”

I ask him if he knows what’s inside the storage boxes. He opens one at random, picks out the first envelope, and shuffles through the colour photographs. He recognises the boat on which one of his Edinburgh Arts expeditions sailed around the British coast “the long way round to the Edinburgh Festival”.

“Look!” he says. “David Nash, drawing – I’ve got to show you what he drew. In fact, I’ve got to photograph that, because I’d forgotten.” He lays the photograph on the box and snaps at it with one of his two cameras. “My problem is,” he frowns, “how do I pass all this information on? That’s him drawing Bardsey Island. I need to be alive so I can tell whoever’s looking at this that it only has meaning if you know how to read the exhibition. Can I show you what he did?”

And off we go, zigzagging to the drawing of Bardsey Island that Nash drew on that day in 1980. But Demarco’s brightness frequently turns to brooding as he reels off the names of those artists and friends who have died before him. “This isn’t an ordinary exhibition,” he says. “This is what happens when you’re 75 years of age and you’re thinking of all the guys that are dying off.”

Demarco is desperate to find a good home for his archive before he gets much older, and Skateraw feels like that perfect home. I ask Demarco if Skateraw might be his mythical Meikle Seggie. His big grin says it all.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.09.05