Page 17 - Art First: Will Maclean: Gleaned and Gathered

show of 2002 was entitled Driftworks.) In his often whited-out relief space,
frag mented materials and objects not dissimilar to Franklin’s tragic
debris lie caught in icy suspension. As the images of Franklin’s newly

discovered boat indicate, all of this world is after all cast in mineral and,
as we have known since the Greeks, moves through rocks, animal, veget -
able and objects them selves, belying their seemingly fixed state.

Closing Time

Maclean is not alone as an artist in his passion for collid ing such ‘times’
as I’ve described, and similar concerns can be seen on a global scale, both
in the current inter na tional scene and in the arts and crafts of the past.

Many of the contemporary artists with which Maclean feels kinship are not
Scottish, such as Susan Hiller, Jimmie Durham and Christian Boltanski;
their concerns are with the struc tures of memory, death and ritual and
the ways they have devised to shape their stories, though differ ent from

Maclean’s, are inspirational and reassuring to him because they have
found the right stories and the right way to tell them. I believe that if
we also pay due atten tion to the materiality to be found in Gleaned and
Gathered we can see that Will Maclean also has found the right histories

for him, the right crafted way to tell them and with a mineral, fluid logic
worthy of a true seafarer.

Andrew Patrizio

Professor of Scottish Visual Culture
at Edinburgh College of Art

Natural Selection, 2013, mixed media construction with found objects, 74 x58 cm