Page 9 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: The Glamour of Backwardness

AF HM catalogue 2023 PRINT.qxp_Layout 1 15/06/2023 17:35 Page 7

In the work entitled The Binary Mindset of Imperialism the Butter Bridge is presented as a flat yellow
tone against the textured and contoured surface of the surrounding landscape. The deliberate avoi -
dance of the pictorial is achieved by the insistence upon the diagrammatic, the tactile, the diptych divi -
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sion and the legend. A more conventional representation would allow the image to be comfortably
read through the well-known trope of the Highlands as ‘an antique land’. The word-image presented by
MacAlister allows no such easy assimilation. Suddenly we are confronted by the stark division of the
world into self and other, order and disorder, civilian and barbarian, Lowland ally and Highland enemy.
By the construction of roads and bridges, imperial forces were able to access and exert control through -

out the area. The name Butter Bridge comes from the tradition of bringing cattle high up into the glen
in the summer months for pasture. The cattle would be milked here and butter and cheese would be
produced in temporary dwellings. The pastoral world evoked by the name contrasts uncomfortably with
its aggressive military function. We are forced to take in several readings at once under an unfamiliar,
original aesthetic which operates as sign in some unnamed branch of semiotics.

The function of memory in MacAlister’s work is crucial: it is often in relation to place, that the fundamental
creative intervention will occur. This is especially relevant to the pieces at the Rest and Be Thankful.
Michel de Certeau’s optimistic, even utopian, rewriting of contemporary society defines the dynamic
role of memory in the creative process. He signals the way that the operation of this associative memory
has the power to ‘illuminate’ the moment: ‘it concentrates the most knowledge in the least time’. He
continues to define more clearly the characteristics of this associative memory: ‘each memory shines
like a metonymy in relation to the whole. From a picture, there remains only the delicious wound of this
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deep blue. From a body, the luminosity of its eyes, or the texture of a bit of white . . . ’ It is a quality of
illumination that is sought, and this is most clearly seen in MacAlister’s use of the gorse yellow–the only
colour that is allowed to shine through the layers of different white tones which make up the ‘wallpaper’.
This gorse yellow operates symbolically in relation to the whole. MacAlister describes the thinking
behind the gorse: ‘yellow was the ground; the gorse pod because gorse has pods which open explos -
ively.’ However, she also links the explosive opening of the pod to the characteristic use of plosives and

6 Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Binary Mindset of Imperialism’, The Irish Times (14 September 2019). MacAlister references this article
as the source of the phrase as well as its implications: ‘What is at work is not so much nostalgia for empire as a throwback
to the binary mindset of imperialism, in which there are only two possible states: dominant or submissive.

7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press (1984), p.88.