Page 11 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: The Glamour of Backwardness

AF HM catalogue 2023 PRINT.qxp_Layout 1 15/06/2023 17:35 Page 9

fricatives in the Scots language. Poems and prayers in Scots will often open with high energy conson -
ants and MacAlister links this ‘explosive’ quality in Scots to the explosive characteristics of the gorse
pod. The yellow operates symbolically as the moment of illumination–the moment when reality is seen
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beneath the layers of wallpaper or ‘history’s hazelraw’ as MacDiarmid saw it.

There is no question, but that MacAlister’s works take their place within a canon of resistance: resistance,
that is, to hegemonic powers. The distinctive feature of these works is that they are difficult to read
because they are written in an unfamiliar juxtaposition of word and image; it is difficult to place them
comfortably in a genre in which they can readily be forgotten. According to the radical thinker and
theorist, Fredric Jameson, the problem with culture is simply this: ‘the cultural monuments and master -
works that have survived tend necessarily to perpetuate only a single voice in class dialogue, the voice
of a hegemonic class, they cannot be properly assigned their relational place in a dialogical system
without the restoration or artificial reconstruction of the voice to which they were initially opposed,

a voice for the most part stifled and reduced to silence, marginalized, its own utterances scattered
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to the winds, or reappropriated in their turn by the hegemonic culture’. As we look into MacAlister’s
works here we see glimpses or whispers of a Scottish culture–language(s), literature, politics, imagery
and relationship with nature–all but eclipsed through processes such as those outlined by Blaikie,
above, and through a ‘historiography of external control’.

Dr Lindsay Blair
Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Theory,
University of the Highlands and Islands

8 Hugh MacDiarmid uses the word in one of his early Scots poems: The Eemis Stane.
‘Hazelraw’ means lichen: the kind of mossy organic substance that grows over rocks.
In the poem the ‘hazelraw’ obscures the inscription on the stone so MacDiarmid is
suggesting that history is actually something that obscures underlying truths.

9 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Routledge Classics (2001), p.71.