Alec Finlay
Alec Finlay (born 14 March 1966) is a Scottish artist living in Edinburgh. He is the son of Sue Finlay and Ian Hamilton Finlay. His work spans poetry, sculpture, collage, sound and video, neon and new technologies, and it often looks at how people relate to landscapes.
His work has been shown at venues including The Bluecoat, Tate Modern, Norwich Castle Museum, ARC Gallery in Sofia, and the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art. He was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize in 2010 and was a finalist in the 2012 ALICE awards for his 2009 project white peak | dark peak.
Finlay often embeds small things into larger landscapes to create “families” of work—nest boxes, plant labels, clothing name-tapes, and wind turbines—focusing on lived, experiential experiences. He makes letterboxes with poems on the stamps. Many projects are collaborative, sometimes mapped onto the landscape, sometimes shared socially, or accessible online via QR codes.
He produced his first Morning Star Folio in 1990, has published more than twenty books, and won three Scottish Design Awards (Best Typography, Best Book, Chairman’s Award) in 2000. In talks with Gavin Morrison of Atopia Projects, Finlay described collaboration as central to his practice. He says art isn’t owned by one person; it is shared consciousness that connects many minds, sometimes appearing under his name, sometimes inspiring others, and often expressed through simple forms like wind, names, or poems.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:06 (CET).