Tim Stead's Four-Poster Bed (No. 2) 1992

This extravagant, fantastical essay in burr elm, is the second in a series of five similar beds made by Stead between 1975 and 1995. In true Stead fashion, the form links the deep past with a kind of indeterminate future - what the filmmaker Murray Grigor with characteristic, elegant wit termed 'Pre-Hellenic Post Modernism'.

The bed was made at a time when there was a surfeit of cheaply available elm, the silver lining in the cloud we know as Dutch elm disease. Stead was one of the first artist-woodworkers to unlock the mysterious inner structures and patterns of burr elm and the bed, by definition on a large scale, allowed imagination and material to collide, giving Stead the intellectual and physical space to explore the vast, unknown hinterland the wood offered.

As another astute Stead commentator, Andrew Guest, noted the artist was obsessed by atavistic thoughts, so what better place to lay these bare in the place most of us begin and end our lives, where we procreate and seek solace and comfort?

At the 'Scotland Creates' exhibition in Glasgow, in 1990, Stead exhibited a reinterpretation in wood of one of the dwellings at Skara Brae, Orkney's Neolithic village that lay buried for thousands of years until uncovered by a storm in the winter of 1850.

This bed continues Stead's pre-occupation with the deep past. Its corbelled roof is an echo of the technique favoured by the builders of stone structures such as Maes Howe, the burial chamber illuminated by the Sun's rays for a few minutes on the winter solstice.

In the bed, lying on one's back, looking upwards, it's possible to stare back into the abysm of time and to be moved by the same energies that inspired the Neolithic builders of Orkney. In this curtained bed, as in Maeshowe, in the words of Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown, "...The blackness is as solid as a / stone that locks a tomb. / No star shines here..."[1]

Here we may sleep and dream, as secure as in the womb, temporarily untroubled and untouched by the colder outside world.

[1] From the poem ‘Maeshowe Midwinter’