Page 7 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: The Glamour of Backwardness

AF HM catalogue 2023 PRINT.qxp_Layout 1 15/06/2023 17:35 Page 5

or lines of an intense greenish yellow. The immediate visual association is not accidental: one of the
phrases which had resonated with MacAlister as she was beginning the series came from Colin Kidd:
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‘the Union has become a part of the wallpaper of Scottish Political Life.’ That is to say that those
inter ested in maintaining Scottish identity for the last 300 years have had to do so with the Union
as a given;and it is only since Scottish Devolution in 1999 that it has been possible to think of it as
something mutable. The surface ‘wallpaper’ then is always indicative of that which needs to be stripped
away to reveal underlying realities. Apart from the piece entitled The Wallpaper of Political Life, the
notion of being enmeshed in the Union is present in all of the other pieces but is especially conspicuous
in British State Undergrowth, Illusion of the Nation State, Established Order, and Banal Nationalism.
The sense, however, of getting beyond the wallpaper resonates visually and metaphorically throughout.

What is it that will be revealed behind the wallpaper of Unionism? MacAlister chooses to focus on

something which could be considered insubstantial, or too small as to be of any real significance: a tiny
section of the A83 road which links the industrial central Lowlands of Scotland to the Highlands at the
Rest and Be Thankful. Many of the pieces in the exhibition focus on just this one location: Distancing
Effects, Sufficient Distance, Holding Position, The Binary Mindset of British Imperialism, A Culture’s Grand
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Pattern, The Rest and Be Thankful. This is where we link the formal elements of the works to minimalism.
MacAlister is drawn to the notion that within the limits of smallnesss we could find a culture’s grand
pattern. There is something of this same approach in the poetical works of Emily Dickinson or the boxed
art pieces of Joseph Cornell. MacAlister takes this specific section of road as symbol to find something
of the culture’s grand pattern. At the foot of the Rest and be Thankful sits the Butter Bridge. In the
shadow of Beinn Ìme the bridge crosses the Kinglas Water just beyond the bend in the road after the
descent from the Rest and be Thankful. The bridge was built between 1748 and 1750 as a section of
Major Caulfield’s military road running from Dumbarton to Inveraray. It was part of the roadbuilding
project which would enable the British military to bring the Highlands to order after the Jacobite risings.

4 T.M. Devine, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present, quotes from Kidd in The Sunday Times (February 28, 2016)
The sociologist Michael Billig had coined the term ‘banal nationalism’ to describe a nationalism that is so dominant and deep-rooted that
it does not need to be publicly articulated or proven in explicit terms, a nationalism that is simply taken for granted. This ties in with the tired
and well-worn narratives such as Kidd refers to in his metaphor where the Union has become part of the ‘wallpaper of Scottish political life’.

5 Richard Barlow, The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture, Notre Dame Press (2017). Although the artwork
is entitled The Rest and Be Thankful and depicts the geographical location, MacAlister was drawn to the connotations
of the phrase ‘Rest and Bethinkful’ which is a quotation from Finnegans Wake.