Page 18 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae

coherence of the mass of humanity, of countless individuals beautiful of them, however, is Bàn: Dearg, in English, White:
moving together as one. Here she extends that idea by Red. It consists of two equal, contiguous sheets of glass.
another translingual pun, from ‘mol’ the Gaelic noun for One, to the left, with Bàn engraved in it, is a translucent,
beach, or ‘shingle’, the stuff of which a beach, or at least slightly wavy white. The other, to the right, engraved with
this beach, is made, to ‘mol’, the Gaelic verb to praise, or Dearg, is a rich, glowing red. In Gaelic, these colour
celebrate. But then the shingle moving with the tide is also adjectives also name the sides of the plough’s furrow.
like language itself, at once both solid and fluid, moving As the ploughshare cuts through the fallow ground, the
with the tide of history. It seems the tide of Gaelic is going dearg, or red side, which is on the right with a right-handed
out, however. The bald figures of the screenprint Monoglots plough, is the dark, turned earth of the tilled, and potentially
are the year, 1971, and 477, the number of monoglot productive side. The bàn, or white side is the still untilled
Gaelic speakers who then still lived in Scotland. The artist and thus empty ground. In form, side by side, red and
contemplates these figures with delicate irony in her white, light and dark, the glass echoes this. Thus she turns
note where she records that the blue background is also the work into a metaphor for the whole business of making
numbered. It is pantone 300, the precise blue of the Saltire images.
as approved by the Scottish Parliament. Her approach to landscape is not so very
Several of her prints and glass pieces are as different from such eloquent word pieces. She treats the
terse as this one, but with them likewise, economy does not landscapes she chooses with great formality, but she
limit their meaning. Newly minted coins, for instance, is just also finds a formality that is there in them as though in
three words sandblasted onto pale green glass. The words sympathy with the poetry they inspire. Ben Dorain, for
are a quotation from John MacInnes on the poetry of Sorley instance, represented in the work referred to above, is
MacLean. Her point is Gaelic itself might be like the raised itself a peculiarly formal mountain. Its profile is remarkably
beach of Rum left high and dry, not by the tide but by sea symmetrical and even in plan its ridges resemble a rather
level change which is much more permanent, were it not neat three pointed star. Glen Roy and Glen Urquhart are
for the poets and especially Sorley MacLean. MacInnes two works which continue this theme. For the artist, the
describes how even against the decline of Gaelic, MacLean parallel roads of Glen Roy, which is what the Ice Age layers
added to the richness of the language with words that are of the glen were once thought to be, and the field bank
like ‘newly minted coins.’ that became an extended gallery for the Glen Urquhart
The transparent simplicity of these glass Free Kirk, both also seem to echo the formal shape that
pieces is wonderfully telling. Cold air in the nostrils is an poetry needs. She does not stop there, however, but
eloquent, poetic metaphor, indivisibly word and image. links these things back to language by different routes. In
The wavy surface of ice-blue glass embodies the words. Glen Roy, “The work,’ she writes, ‘is metaphorically giving
Sainte Chapelle is a homage to one of the greatest of all location to ‘bilingualism’ framing the running of the Gaelic
compositions of stained glass, but by reversing it, she and the Scots line. A parallel implicit in the landscape.”
suggests it is as though we were seeing it from the outside The drawing Standard Habbie extends this notion of line
and how little sense that would make. Perhaps the most and form to the poetic tradition itself, its line of descent
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