Opening up a Window to the West

A major five-year project aimed at redefining the status of visual art in Highland Scotland is being led by Murdo Macdonald, Professor of History of Scottish Art at the School of Fine Art. Two years into the ambitious programme Professor Macdonald reflects on the progress so far to unlock and reclaim a hidden culture.

The suppression and destruction of Highland culture which followed the battle of Culloden is well known. However a more subtle cultural destruction of the Gaidhealtachd brought about by patterns of land ownership and educational policy, continued to be politically acceptable almost up to the present. In recent years the study of Highland culture has seen a welcome growth both in terms of research and teaching. The wider political significance of this has been underlined by the protection for the linguistic heritage of the Highlands afforded by the Gaelic Language Act of 2005.

However the place of visual art in the Gaidhealtachd has been neglected, except with respect to a limited set of stereotypes. No one likes to accept complicity in acts of cultural destruction, but most of us are indeed complicit. It is easier to stereotype and deny than it is to work out one's relationship with what has been suppressed.

Our project, Window to the West: Towards a redefinition of the visual within Gaelic Scotland, began in 2005 and places the study and practice of visual art at the heart of interdisciplinary research. The title was the inspiration of Professor Will Maclean; it links directly to Sorley Maclean's poem Hallaig which is a profound reflection on the cultural destruction of the Highlands.

'Tha bùird is tàirnean air an uinneig / triomh 'm faca mi an Aird an Iar'; 'The window is nailed and boarded / through which I saw the West.' Our task is to help unboard that window from the perspective of the history and contemporary practice of visual art.

The project is a collaboration between the Visual Research Centre of Duncan of Jordanstone and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic College of the University of the Highlands and Islands. Funded over five years by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it is driven by three strands of activity: rethinking of the history of visual art in the Highlands; the making of contemporary art in a Highland or Highland-related context; and the exploration of the visual in the Gaelic language.

How are memory and history represented in visual art? How do artists respond to geography? How does visual culture develop through periods of change: for example with respect to land use? How has the evolution of other Gaelic cultural domains (in particular linguistic and musical) inter-related with the visual? All these are questions for us.

Two years into a five year project is an interesting time to reflect. Overall there is a real sense of an interdisciplinary community of thinkers at work. This is no small achievement: it was exemplified in a one day conference, A Context for Highland Art, held at Dundee Contemporary Arts in September 2007, which we organised along with the Scottish Society for Art History thanks to the efforts of our research fellow, Lesley Lindsay.

There was a seamless mix of academic papers and reflections on the making of contemporary art. One of the papers was by Dr John Purser, who - as well as being a renowned commentator on the history of Scottish music - is one of our research team members based at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. He presented a pioneering exploration of the links between the modernist artists William Crosbie and J. D. Fergusson and the founding of the Celtic Ballet.

Later in the day the artists Will Maclean and Arthur Watson (both of whom are part of the Dundee research team), presented a visual account of the ideas and techniques which led to their Crannghal sculpture, which was installed at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig in November 2006.

The site, overlooking the Sound of Sleat, is of such visual impact that it demanded a work of the very highest quality. It is worth noting that the Highlands, because of their qualities of light and colour, have been raising the game of artists ever since the monks in the monastery founded by Saint Columba on Iona made the Book of Kells at the turn of the eighth century.

Maclean and Watson's sculpture was inspired by the vessel in which Columba came to Scotland and it also relates to an earlier collaboration between Will Maclean and the Gaelic poet Aonghas Macneacail.

The day ended with discussion of the sculpture's iconography in terms of wider Gaelic literature by another team member based at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Dr Meg Bateman. Crossing the boundary between academic thinking and creative practice, she did this through her own poetry, written as a direct response to the sculpture.

The work of project members, therefore, acted as a kind of armature for the other contributors to the conference. These included, among others, Professor Duncan Macmillan revisiting his seminal work on the eighteenth century Romantic artist, Alexander Runciman; Hugh Cheape (formerly curator of Scottish Collections at the National Museums of Scotland, and now course leader of the postgraduate Material Culture course at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig), who explored the intriguing realities of the history of tartan rather than the stereotypes; and Malcolm MacLean, director of the Gaelic Arts Project reflecting on visual art activities relating to the Gaidhealtachd such as An Leabhar Mor / The Great Book of Gaelic.

In an extensive review of the conference on the Hi-Arts website Georgina Coburn said: 'The re-examination of Visual Art as an integral part of the history of the Highlands is long overdue, and each speaker added weight and dimension to the importance of Visual Arts in our understanding of Highland life past, present and future.'

Window to the West activities include our involvement as an exhibiting group at the 2007 Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition. The exhibition's 'Highland' theme brought together major contributions from Academicians such as Frances Walker and Marian Leven, both of whom have held the artist's residency at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. Also included was Ossian work by Professor Calum Colvin of the School of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone. Our project complemented these by contributing drawings by Will Maclean and Norman Shaw, sound works by John Purser and Norman Shaw and an electronic presentation of one hundred research images, which I selected. Another AHRC funded research project based at Duncan of Jordanstone, the Demarco Digital Archive, was also a key part of that RSA show. The exhibition was well received: Studio International noted that it 'powerfully develops the Highlands and Islands theme in contemporary art and sits well within global aspirations and directions'. Iain Gale in Scotland on Sunday wrote that 'the RSA has been born again as a serious platform for some of the best art in Scotland'. It was a privilege to participate and we are now collaborating with the RSA on a publication related to a further aspect of the exhibition, a selection of Highland work curated by Joanna Soden.

That gives some indication of our recent activities. What is important to us now is to ensure that we establish a secure base for future funding of research into Highland art and visual culture. From the point of view of visual art this is a deeply interesting, yet surprisingly under-researched area.