Reports    Published 13/06/11

Will Maclean: Two London Exhibitions

Will Maclean: Collected Works 1970–2010
The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, London
8 March–4 June 2011
Will Maclean: Lead and Line
Art First, London
5 May–18 June 2011

Will Maclean combines narratives, myths, perspectives and characters across time and place to create relationships within his constructed spaces. He fuses disparate sources with a fluidity of articulation. He personalises history and focuses on the minutiae of individual lives – oftentimes the lives of his own family members – and says something larger about narrative, history, the hieratic and the individual’s place in a sequence of events. What emerges is the “constructed narrative”, no longer tethered to specific narratives, but offering up to us a collective voice.

In the retrospective exhibition at The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, we are privileged to see a range of works from the 1970s through to 2010 including some of his truly iconic and beautiful works as well as a glimpse into the notebooks which he uses, just as he uses his assemblages, to shape the play of his poetic imagination. 

At Art First, in Lead and Line, Maclean’s most contemporary works are on view in another major solo show. 

In an earlier work, Abigail’s Apron (1980), at The Fleming Collection, the humblest domestic item may allow for the imaginative recreation of a life. The kitchen apron (in this case) conjures up Maclean’s Aunt Abigail from Polbain (Coigach) and his father’s people. The legacy of his ancestors gleaned from photographs, his father’s journal (in particular), objects, images, stories, songs and memories are given a palpable presence: they are shaped or embedded within the framework of the created assemblage. Abigail’s apron in this work is fashioned out of wood and hung on a hook within a wood panelled, glass-fronted cupboard as if we are looking at it hanging in the pantry. Her apron pocket contains domestic and crofting tools and implements (or so it seems).  Within the vision in his mind’s eye of her workaday clothing, between the whittling and shaping of his hands, Maclean has lifted his own early history and unearthed his personal pre-history. Like an archaeologist, he excavates the past: “My family were living in Badentarbat within a community that’s no longer there, up on the braes of Badentarbat, at right angles to the beach. My family came there in the 18th century. They were evicted to Tanera and then they came back and settled in Polbain. In my own childhood in Polbain with my father and my mother and my aunts, I spent a lot of time talking to the old people. Then, when I was a student I worked there as a salmon fisherman. I have always been drawn back.”¹ Entwined narratives in which the artist re-imagines the lives of others, especially his family, combine with other layered references creating, what the American artist Joseph Cornell would refer to as, “a second life” or an “unauthorised biography”.

Another portrait example in this same exhibition at Flemings is Portrait of a Polymath – 1, The Morphologist (2007), which makes for a revealing comparison with Abigail’s Apron. Of course it is a much later work. It is part of a series of three portraits from Maclean’s oeuvre inspired by Dundee University Professor D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), a great biologist, mathematician and polymath whose book On Growth and Form (1917) captivated the imagination of Maclean. The three artworks (only the one is represented here) are not relevant to the Highland context but the method of working is common to Maclean’s compositions. Around the reading and intense reflection on the subject an accumulation of detail is gathered: Maclean knows that to aspire to the universal the particular must be embraced.

Underlying the detail of an artwork lies a meditative quality: action is combined with reflection, assertion with introspection, and actual things with the world of the imagination – Maclean himself says “it all gives way to the art”.

In Portrait of a Polymath – 1, The Morphologist D’Arcy Thompson’s mathematical ideas on the nature of measurement and balance are embedded into the paint surface (found text). We see his pet parrot (sculpted) and the cast of a fossil shell (reproduced) in two symmetrical cages. (The white, narrow boxed space, parrot and cage structures again bring to mind the work of American Surrealist Joseph Cornell). There’s a sense of a dialogue here in Maclean’s work between the visual sources: found objects or diagrams work with the modelled sculptural form; structural elements work with paint surface and an insistence of mark, brushstroke, tracings and rubbing back. For Maclean it’s not just about excavating the past in a psychological sense but about a physical engagement with it. 

 “I was interested in Calanais” says Maclean, “I was reading about Professor Alexander Thom who first discovered the Megalithic Yard. I assumed there would have been some kind of druidic priest class of builders and thinkers and engineers … there must have been a school of thought. That was why I built this travelling box and in the box there are instruments of ‘unknown use’ and these markings are based on the Calanais Stones and these are the actual alignments …”

Maclean is speaking about Alignment Receiver/Calanais (1994–2008), at the Fleming Collection, a box that he re-worked. He removed the box from its plinth and extended the metaphor out onto a lead platform which also worked to anchor the sculpture. The play between reality and a poetic interpretation was the feature of Georgio de Chirico’s early Metaphysical paintings which Will Maclean most keenly admired: “the master of the non-specific specific,” he said referring to The Melancholy of Departure (1916) and Hebdomeros (1929) de Chirico’s strange and poetic novel, also much loved by Maclean.

The Lead and Line exhibition at Art First is a journey, a voyage, taking us through complex narratives to mythologies and imagined scenarios tied into the sea – Maclean’s enduring subject, and it is so because it reverberates so profoundly with his own history and his own people and their livelihood. It’s all tied in “physically and emotionally” he once said when creating a series of works around the West Coast salmon fishery station at Badentarbat. The Lead and Line works take us out to the Northern seaboard: the North Atlantic Islands of North Rona, St Kilda, Iceland and the Faroes. Maclean worked in the Minch as a ring net herring fisherman in the 1960s – it was this rain-swept vast expanse of sea, physically inhospitable and unforgiving, that was most familiar to him. His father was away at sea during his childhood, his Coigach uncles were fisher folk as were his mother’s family on Skye. Two issues dominate the subject matter in Maclean’s work – the epochal tragedy of the Highland Clearances, and the deeply affective experiences of the sea – in both people were sacrificed and in terms of the commonality of human experience we find ourselves inexorably drawn into the narrative, to the loss.

The form or fragments of a boat and its “instruments” runs through several recent assemblages: Transom Echo, A Short History of North Rona, Shaman Board/Whale Wind Plotter, Western Skerries Salvage. The concern for the nature of narrative and for the dialogue between visual sources remains constant. The presence of the factuality of stone, lead, bone shards, figurine, driftwood, text is employed to create imagined scenarios. So strong is the presence of these elements that the fictional narrative convinces as fact,

Jorge Luis Borges recounts the tale of his many futile attempts to document the streets of Buenos Aires. The results he says were hopeless. Several years later he woke from a dream and wrote the dream down – what was contained in the dream was described by a critic as the best description ever of the streets of Buenos Aires.² Borges’ story is interesting in relation to Maclean because he suggests the element of the unconscious coming into play whereby surface elements which are there when he tries to describe the streets are dispensed with, in the essentials of the dream. The fictive world can be more real than the real. We sense in Maclean’s work the reaching out for “other” worlds and feel indisputably the notion put forward in Marianne Moore’s poem of the essential quality which has to be conveyed in a work of art:

It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honoured-
That which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
It must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
It must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.³

References
1. Interview with the artist, Tayport, 2010.
2. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Labyrinths, Penguin Books, London, 1970: 215-216.
3. Marianne Moore, ‘When I Buy Pictures’, The Poems of Marianne Moore, Penguin Classics, London, 2005: 144.