Page 16 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae

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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