The Gunnie Moberg Archive
- Reference:GB 241 D135
- Dates of Creation:1940s - 2007
- Name of Creator:
- Language of Material:English
- Physical Description:Please contact the Archive for details
Scope and Content
Images and papers of Gun Margoth Moberg, photographer, artist and gardener. The collection includes Gunnie Moberg’s works, notebooks, photographic negatives and transparencies, reference prints, exhibition prints and manuscripts.
Administrative / Biographical History
Gun Margoth Moberg, photographer, artist and gardener, born Göteborg, Sweden on 8 May 1941, died Stromness, Orkney, on 31 October 2007. Photographer Gunnie Moberg worked as a commercial photographer as well as a photographic artist. Her work has been published in a number of book projects, notably with the poet George Mackay Brown, who became a good friend, and in exhibitions not only in Scotland but also in her native Scandinavia. She was unofficial photographer for the St Magnus Festival from its beginnings in 1977 and was close to its founders Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and Archie Bevan as well as many other leading lights of the Arts in Orkney and beyond. George Mackay Brown said hers was "the kind of temperament on whom fortune smiles. That's the way it is with Gunnie," he wrote in his diary after she persuaded him to visit Shetland in 1988. "People tend towards the brightness of her nature." Moberg's introduction to Scotland began in Edinburgh in 1958, when she went to work at the Kingston Clinic as an au pair. Subsequently, she worked briefly for a portrait photographer at home in Sweden before enrolling to study pottery at Edinburgh College of Art. She met her future husband Californian "Tam" McPhail in Edinburgh in 1960. After marrying in 1961 they moved to an isolated cottage in Argyll in 1964. Tam MacPhail exhibited his sculptures and Gunnie Moberg became known in Edinburgh for her exhibitions of batik, much of it making use of designs based on rubbings from Celtic stones. She also worked in the art therapy department of a nearby hospital, and was "making things all the time: jewellery, batik, weaving". Gunnie visited Orkney for a holiday in 1975. Tam and she moved permanently to Orkney the year after. Gunnie had taken a job at the desk of the local airline, Loganair, shortly after arriving in the islands, and the pilots were always happy to take her along as a passenger. The result was a great interest in aerial photography and, with ample opportunities to fly, she was able to assemble a group of photographs that would became Stone Built, published by Stromness Books and Prints in 1979. Gunnie's first real break as a photographer had come quickly, not long before, when a US warplane, a Tomcat, crashed in the sea nearby. Moberg persuaded a pilot to take her up to look for the wreckage, which they found and photographed, and, helped by Gerry Meyer, she was soon earning substantial sums of money, both for those photographs and for the new work that began to come her way from the national press. She began to receive invitations to contribute photographs to books such as those by Liv Schei (The Shetland Story, 1988; The Faroe Islands, 1991; and The Islands of Orkney, 2000) and George Mackay Brown (The Loom of Light, 1986; A Celebration for Magnus, 1987; Portrait of Orkney, 1988; and, posthumously, his poems illustrating her pictures, Orkney: pictures & poems, 1996). She also contributed to exhibitions, many of them through the Pier Arts Centre, which opened in Stromness in 1979; her first group exhibition took place there in 1980, a retrospective in 1996. She published a book of photographs in 2006, Orkney, with Birlinn and mounted what she intended to be her final photographic exhibition before concentrating on painting, a large show of around 60 works entitled "Three Island Groups: Orkney, Shetland and the Faroe Islands." It began its tour in Denmark, at the new North Atlantic House in Copenhagen. Her feeling for nature, for birds as well as for people led her always towards expressions of hospitality and celebration. This is clear in her publications and her exhibitions, but privately also in the stack of "Housebooks", records of every visitor to the house outside Stromness to which they moved in 1991. It was here that Gunnie created a garden, largely with her own hands. The creation of the garden, open to the harsh Orkney winds, was admired by all and was featured on the BBC television programme "Beachgrove Garden". Gunnie recorded the creation of the garden photographically throughout the process. In 2003, Moberg was one of 20 prominent contemporary Scottish artists commissioned to produce work for permanent installation in the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, for which she selected 11 prints of Orkney and Shetland.
Access Information
The collection is open but has been allocated certain restrictions by the owner of the collection