Page 16 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae
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he could fix in his imagination the visible appearance of      The languages that concern Helen MacAlister
            objects, not confusing it with the things it signifies, it would   are Gaelic and Scots. Exploring the peculiar complexities
            be as easy for him to paint from the life.. as to paint from a   of the way they overlay each other, she also demonstrates
            copy.” 2                                  how that overlay can illuminate what it means to be Scots;
                    The influence Reid’s argument had on the   how too Gaelic is a great unseen presence in all this. We
            future of painting was profound. I cannot discuss it here   may not acknowledge it, but it is there nevertheless. In this
            beyond saying that, because of his influence in France,   quest, for her, painting and language elide; words become
            it stands at the very heart of the project that has become   painting; painting becomes words. There is no difference;
            modern art. The fact that Reid was so influential does,   her paintings of words are as visual as are her paintings
            however, indirectly also locate Helen MacAlister’s own   of landscapes. Following Reid’s analysis, she paints the
            remarkable work, not in some obscure backwater, but in   signs of our verbal language, the letters and the words that
            an inquiry that extends back into the Enlightenment and   represent them, just as she paints the signs of our visual
            remains central even now. Indeed the relation between the   language.  In her drawings, if you look closely, too, words
            sign and the signified is still a crucial area of discussion.   are embedded in the image, hidden in the marks of the
            Just think of the writings of Jacques Derrida and Michel   pencil. But words are equally her subject when not actually
            Foucault and the whole argument about the opacity and   present. They are there in the unravelling of the layers of
            inescapable tendentiousness of language, of the insidious   meaning of her reflections on language, on the exchanges
            gap between sign and signified that they explore. In the   between Gaelic and Scots, on poetry and on the poets and
            subtlety of her own inquiry Helen MacAlister may match   their commentators, to all of which she also adds her own
            them, but she never follows them so far as to lose faith in   words in the notes she writes as guidance to her work.
            language. For her instead it is a rich landscape of shared      Crucially of course, a pass such as Bealach
            experience and, like a landscape, it invites the painter’s   nam Ba [sic] sits on a watershed, but if the waters divide,
            exploration.                              the pass unites. It is a place of joining, even if at the top of
                    Bealach nam Ba – The Pass of the Cattle is   an arduous slope and Helen MacAlister certainly does not
            one of her principal landscape paintings and so perhaps   flinch when faced with a steep climb. Indeed, her chosen
            offers a key to her whole project. It is of the mountain pass   title, At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae, (also the subject
            at the watershed between Kishorn and Applecross, but   of one of her word pictures) nicely encapsulates this
            symbolically it is also the pass between language and   process of mental mountaineering. As she links painting
            painting. For she paints these two things as though indeed   and language in a common pursuit and situates them
            they were one, linked in their uplands at the headwaters   meeting on a mountain pass, she also mirrors the Scots
            of the rivers that flow down from them. Her painting Ben   literary and poetic traditions in which, in the same way, the
            Dorain is a homage to Donnchadh Bàn MacIntyre’s long   two languages of Scots and Gaelic coexist, two sides of
            poem In Praise of Ben Dorain. In the poem, drawing on the   the same pass as it were. In this she is following Hamish
            rich and ancient visual tradition of Gaelic poetry, the poet   Henderson. At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae is the title of an
            himself makes the same link. His poem is a landscape.   essay on the language of Scots folksong by Henderson in
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