Page 17 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae
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which he observes that these two languages demonstrate      The tinkers may curse, but they come out on
                               ‘a curious bilingualism in one language.’   top. To return to Thomas Reid, however, what he suggests
                                      Several of her works make a play on the   in his analogy between language and painting is that both
                               linguistic consequences of this peculiar characteristic of the   are ways of setting a grid of signs, a legible, transparent
                               Scots mental landscape, though they do not always reflect   screen of location and meaning over the incoherence of
                               deep mutual understanding between the two linguistic   experience, over ‘the dazzle and confusion of reality,’ to
                               communities that have shaped it. Nonsense Vocables, for   allow us to make sense of it. Helen’s own painting suggests
                               instance, the words almost dissolved in deep blue, is a   exactly that grid, or indeed Stevenson’s half-closed eyes.
                               reflection on the Scots usage for nonsense of the syllables   Her pictures of landscapes are monochrome in a range
                               of the canntaireachd, the hidorum-hodorum of verbalised   of muted colours.  Bealach nam Ba is a rich brown, for
                               pibroch, or Gaelic mouth music. Don’t give a tinker’s curse,   instance. The Lido, Campbeltown bay is yellow, in this
                               the words in black on flat grey, reflects a similar inversion,   case the colour is a compound of translingual and verbal-
                               but in a way that is typical of all her work, one that opens   visual pun playing on ‘bay’, the Gaelic buidhe, yellow, and
                               out into a much wider reflection on the nature of tradition.   buidheachas, gratitude.
                               The tinkers and travelling people were a major source of      The paintings themselves consist of a layer of
                               traditional Scots song. Murdo Macdonald commented   binary marks, of signs, light and dark, and in detail chaotic,
                               twenty years ago how it was Hamish Henderson who   but which, overlaid on the raw image which sits behind
                               demonstrated this fact and how it inverses conventional   them, reveal its outlines. The drawings, which frequently
                               social values:                            relate directly to the paintings, work the same way with a
                                                                         mass of pencil marks from whose confusion the image
                                  Henderson has shown over the years, the finest   emerges. In both cases, her process is one of formalising
                                  sources of Scottish tradition are found among   and refining and here she refers back to Hamish
                                  the berry pickers and the travelling folk. At a   Henderson again. She quotes from the same essay that
                                  stroke the previously peripheral is recognised   has given her her title where he comments on the formality
                                  as culturally central, and when that happens,   of the language of folksong. ‘It is in the great songs, licked
                                  what of the so-called centre? What we see   into shape like pebbles by the waves of countless tongues,
                                  here is a complete disjunction between what is   that this sense of formality is most marked.’ That, we feel,
                                  culturally central and what is politically central.   is exactly how she paints, licking her image into shape
                                  What Henderson presents us with is a very clear   with countless marks and infinite care. She herself refers
                                  example of this anomaly. When on the basis of this   to this obliquely in Mol, shingle praise where the image is
                                  we ask ourselves the simple question ‘who is more   the sea-smooth, piled up stones of a raised beach on the
                                  important to Scotland, the ballad-singer or the   Isle of Rum. The stones are like her thoughts, polished with
                                  Secretary of State’ there is really no contest.” 3  reflection, but also massed and, in the mass, potent. In an
                                                                         earlier work she used shingle as an image taken from Hugh
                                                                         MacDiarmid, ‘the roar o’ human shingle’: the power and
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