Helen MacAlister: The Glamour of Backwardness

8 Sep-18 Oct 2022

Helen MacAlister, The Glamour of Backwardness exhibition

Overview

It’s a great pleasure to present this long-awaited body of work, conceived and made in Edinburgh over the past decade. Those of you familiar with MacAlister’s art, know that language plays a central role. For her, it is a rich landscape of shared experience and in her subtle explorations painting and language elide.

Duncan Macmillan observed this previously: 

‘They are there in the unravelling of the layers of meaning, of her reflections on language, on the exchanges between Gaelic and Scots, on poetry and on the poets and their commentators, to all of which she also adds her own words in the notes she writes as guidance to her work.’   

The exhibition’s title (The Glamour of Backwardness) does indeed have accompanying notes which hint at what the elegant body of recent paintings have set out to explore:

“Glamour may comprise the Gaelic glac – to seize, to lay hold of, to fascinate + mor – great. “

The Glamour of Backwardness then, might be seen as an exhibition of MacAlister’s work spanning the 21st Century and its preceding decade in a continuous, evolving concept.  Writing about her work, Dr Lindsay Blair speaks of the ‘New Historicism’ it represents, and how MacAlister is among a group of Highland artists dealing with a collective consciousness with the artist as witness, as a ‘participant observer’ (the title of one of her drawings from 2011).  

Looking back at MacAlister’s previous exhibitions confirms the central role language plays in her art. In 2009 No Lack of Lamentation introduced the monochrome landscapes that evolved into the 2013 paintings featured in the Stornoway show. Before that, in 2006 came the roar o’ human shingle, an exhibition where drawings and paintings touch on ideas of cultural resilience and the resonance of language and place. With its own focus, Petrified Gossip was a small, intense exhibition held at Art First in 2004, while Hutton’s Rock in 2002, with a catalogue written by Duncan Macmillan, comprised a body of work that incorporated the Scottish language itself, where MacAlister literally stitched words and laminated images onto brightly coloured canvases; - an old proverb, a quote from a poet, a phrase, a single word. As a father of geology, Hutton was an 18th Century figure of the Scottish Enlightenment whose book Theory of the Earth is based on a reading of the earth’s history through rock sections on Salisbury Crags (Arthur’s Seat), and his theory of permanent flux has remained a source of inspiration to artists and scientists alike. 

Artists