Helen MacAlister
17th February - 19th March, 2009
No Lack of Lamentation
New Paintings & Drawings

The title for this show, slightly droll, even ironic, continues MacAlister’s exploration of ideas of cultural resilience–the resonance of language and place. She is a learner of Gaelic herself and the process of unravelling meaning is pivotal to her work. The painting Mol, shingle praise took a year to complete, its making, like the tide’s continuous movement over a shingle beach, acting metaphorically for human speech, with its ever malleable vocabulary.

The conceptual open run of space in the drawings extends the poetic sense of breathing, of residual surface, and like A Participant Observer we are lead into the particular dual richness of the Highland culture that MacAlister explores.

MacAlister trained at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and in 1993 won the Rome Scholarship in Painting at The British School in Rome, was twice awarded a year at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and has had Residencies at the MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, USA and at Bellagio Study and Conference Centre, Italy. Work is in public collections including The Fleming Collection, London and the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh.