Only Connect is an arched bridge by Ian Hamilton Finlay, made of Northumbrian limestone and flanked by two milestones inscribed with the words ‘ONLY CONNECT’.

‘Only connect’ is a much-cited phrase that ends E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End. In the novel, which explores the theme of fragments becoming whole, the character Margaret Schlegel implores:

‘Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion without it. We are meaningless fragments, half monk, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into man.’

Through referencing Forster’s novel, Finlay’s Only Connect transforms a familiar object and functional structure into a poetic thought.

Alongside Only Connect, Jupiter Artland’s permanent collection includes three other artworks by Finlay: Beehives, Temple of Apollo and Xth Muse.

Biography

Ian Hamilton Finlay CBE was an artist, poet, philosopher, gardener and landscape designer. He is now internationally recognised for his work in each of these art forms. He was born in 1925 in the Bahamas. He was sent to boarding school in Scotland and continued to live there for the rest of his life.

Finlay left school at the age of 13 and had a wide variety of jobs from fisherman and shepherd to soldier and farm labourer, all of which had an influence on his later work. The intermediary stage in his development from writer to artist was his concrete poetry, which demonstrated a ‘formalist purity with a polemical edge’. Much of his writing was published through the Wild Hawthorn Press which he co-founded in 1961.

Poetry is at the heart of all of Finlay’s work and a further expression of this was the creation of Little Sparta, his garden near Edinburgh. The garden is on a windswept hill and blends classical sculpture with his unique use of language. At every turn, plaques, walls, statues, bridges and paving stones carry poetic and philosophical inscriptions reflecting the enduring themes of Finlay’s art.

Finlay was awarded honorary degrees or professorships from Aberdeen, Heriot-Watt, Glasgow and Dundee Universities, the SAC’s Creative Scotland Award, and a CBE in 2002. His work had received a steady stream of critical attention since the mid-1960s and by the time of his death, in 2006, he was recognised as a major contributor to modern art.