Page 8 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: At the Foot o’ Yon Excellin’ Brae

Duncan Macmillan There are beaches around Scotland where those in the them. Similarly, by nature we see only the visible
know can pick up rough pebbles, take them home to appearance of objects, but we learn by custom
tumble in carborundum for hours, or even days and finally to interpret these appearances and to understand
reveal in them the beautiful layering of agate, the rich red their meaning. And when we have learned this
of jasper, or the warm, transparent gold of carnelian. Helen visual language and it has become familiar to us,
MacAlister’s art is like that; precious and highly polished we attend only to the things signified and find it
by long tumbling of ideas in her mind and slow and careful very difficult to attend to the signs by which they
execution. The final result is always elegantly simple. They are presented. The mind passes from one to the
are not easy pictures, however. Indeed, their complexity other so rapidly, and so familiarly, that no trace
is in inverse proportion to their apparent simplicity. Each of the sign is left in our memory, and we seem
work has a layered richness, which like the agate pebbles, to perceive the signified thing immediately and
emerges for the spectator too as it is polished by long without the intervention of any sign. 1
reflection. She herself remarks in an early draft of her
notes to the works, ‘with irony’, she says, (but I feel aptly Thus, incidentally also coining the phrase, Reid
nevertheless) that the Gaelic word ‘taisbeanadh’ is used for identified what he called ‘visual language’. We tend to think
‘exhibition’ but also for ‘revelation’. of the visual and the linguistic as two very different modes
The object of the artist’s own reflection is, in the of perception belonging to two quite different faculties of
very broadest sense, language. Words in many different the mind. He however proposes a direct analogy between
ways are her subject. She is not a poet manqué, however. this language of visual signs and the more familiar
Far from it. She sees words and images as two, closely language of words, whether spoken or written. With both,
analogous modes of perception. In this, she follows the he argues, we read intuitively a set of signs which have
Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid. She does this no coherence in themselves and to whose actual form
intuitively, picking up on themes in art that stretch back to we pay no attention, but from which we have learnt to
Reid. She is not dependent directly on the philosopher in select and interpret the information that we need and thus
any way, although she does indeed quote him in a different proceed from raw sensation to perception, from confusion
context in her note on the drawing Standard Habbie. to meaning. In her notes to her pictures, the artist also
This is what Reid wrote in a key passage on quotes Robert Louis Stevenson expressing a very similar
perception in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man: sentiment, if less philosophically: “Man’s one method,
whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes
When someone speaks to us in a familiar against the dazzle and confusion of reality.”
language we hear certain sounds, and that is the In explaining how he sees this process,
only effect that his discourse has on us by nature; Thomas Reid uses the painter as an example. “The painter
but by custom we understand the meaning of has a need for an abstraction regarding visible objects
these sounds, and so we fix our attention not somewhat similar to what we need here, and this is indeed
on the sounds but on the things signified by the most difficult part of his art. For it is obvious that if
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