Page 11 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae

which he observes that these two languages demonstrate The tinkers may curse, but they come out on
‘a curious bilingualism in one language.’ top. To return to Thomas Reid, however, what he suggests
Several of her works make a play on the in his analogy between language and painting is that both
linguistic consequences of this peculiar characteristic of the are ways of setting a grid of signs, a legible, transparent
Scots mental landscape, though they do not always reflect screen of location and meaning over the incoherence of
deep mutual understanding between the two linguistic experience, over ‘the dazzle and confusion of reality,’ to
communities that have shaped it. Nonsense Vocables, for allow us to make sense of it. Helen’s own painting suggests
instance, the words almost dissolved in deep blue, is a exactly that grid, or indeed Stevenson’s half-closed eyes.
reflection on the Scots usage for nonsense of the syllables Her pictures of landscapes are monochrome in a range
of the canntaireachd, the hidorum-hodorum of verbalised of muted colours. Bealach nam Ba is a rich brown, for
pibroch, or Gaelic mouth music. Don’t give a tinker’s curse, instance. The Lido, Campbeltown bay is yellow, in this
the words in black on flat grey, reflects a similar inversion, case the colour is a compound of translingual and verbal-
but in a way that is typical of all her work, one that opens visual pun playing on ‘bay’, the Gaelic buidhe, yellow, and
out into a much wider reflection on the nature of tradition. buidheachas, gratitude.
The tinkers and travelling people were a major source of The paintings themselves consist of a layer of
traditional Scots song. Murdo Macdonald commented binary marks, of signs, light and dark, and in detail chaotic,
twenty years ago how it was Hamish Henderson who but which, overlaid on the raw image which sits behind
demonstrated this fact and how it inverses conventional them, reveal its outlines. The drawings, which frequently
social values: relate directly to the paintings, work the same way with a
mass of pencil marks from whose confusion the image
Henderson has shown over the years, the finest emerges. In both cases, her process is one of formalising
sources of Scottish tradition are found among and refining and here she refers back to Hamish
the berry pickers and the travelling folk. At a Henderson again. She quotes from the same essay that
stroke the previously peripheral is recognised has given her her title where he comments on the formality
as culturally central, and when that happens, of the language of folksong. ‘It is in the great songs, licked
what of the so-called centre? What we see into shape like pebbles by the waves of countless tongues,
here is a complete disjunction between what is that this sense of formality is most marked.’ That, we feel,
culturally central and what is politically central. is exactly how she paints, licking her image into shape
What Henderson presents us with is a very clear with countless marks and infinite care. She herself refers
example of this anomaly. When on the basis of this to this obliquely in Mol, shingle praise where the image is
we ask ourselves the simple question ‘who is more the sea-smooth, piled up stones of a raised beach on the
important to Scotland, the ballad-singer or the Isle of Rum. The stones are like her thoughts, polished with
Secretary of State’ there is really no contest.” 3 reflection, but also massed and, in the mass, potent. In an
earlier work she used shingle as an image taken from Hugh
MacDiarmid, ‘the roar o’ human shingle’: the power and
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