Helen MacAlister
At the Foot o' Yon Excellin' Brae
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Helen MacAlister
Ben Dorain
2010,
il on linen
148 x 210 cm
and At the Foot o' Yon Excellin' Brae, 2010, oil on linen, 42 x 59.4 cm
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Helen MacAlister
Buidhe
2008
pencil on paper
42 x 59.4 cm
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Helen MacAlister
Don’t give a tinker’s curse
2012
oil on linen
42 x 59 cm
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Helen MacAlister
Cold air the nostrils
2011
sand-blasted glass
10.5 x 15 cm
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Installation view with post card texts
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The Lido, Campbeltown Bay
2011
oil on linen
123 x 175cm
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Glen Urquart
2012
oil on linen, 123 x 175cm
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Glen Urquhart + Glen Morison
2008
pencil on paper, 42 x 59.4cm
Helen MacAlister
At the Foot o' Yon Excellin' Brae
27 February – 6 April, 2013
MacAlister’s elegant, reductive art conveys an overall exploration of a specific cultural / political history. This substantial body of work – paintings, drawings, prints and glass – reflects her poetic use of language in which Gaelic and Scots are part of her subject matter. From the fact of language, built-in bilingualisms to sentence landscapes, the mountains, braes, roads and bays align themselves with single words or phrases in a visual encapsulation which fuses word and image metaphorically.
The large landscapes are monochrome, in a range of muted colours such as the rich brown of Ben Dorain. Its surface of applied binary marks reveals the grandeur of its silhouette while At the Foot oʼ Yon Excellinʼ Brae depicts the very words of the exhibition title, itself taken from Hamish Henderson’s similarly named essay on the language of Scots folksong.
The exhibition and accompanying online catalogue (see link below) were commissioned by An Lanntair, in Stornoway, and shown in 2012.
