Second Sightings - 'An da Shealladh'
Highland Council, Scotland, touring art exhibition - 1996/97/98
Inverness; Wick; Thurso; Kingussie; Portree, Skye;
The Scott Gallery, Hawick Museum, Hawick,
LLantarnam Grange Arts Centre, Gwent, Wales, 10 Jan - 15 Feb. 1998
Timespan Centre, Helmsdale, 1998 - dates to be announced.
Notes on the sculpture
'Highland Sightseer'
John Kraska
The enigmatic figure from 13 th century Scottish history, Michael Scot, or Magister Michaelis Scotus, has been described by an array of titles. For a period of time my study of him became a measure in painting a mural in an underpass in Glenrothes. Each day I descended from Cawdor Drive, on the Tanshall side, to a dank, freezing subterranean passage, grappling with Scot's demonised (dæmonised?) legacy, emerging some months later to Spring blossom in Macedonia - the curiously named district on the other side.
In the Inferno, Dante placed Michele Scotto in the 4th Bowge of the 8th Circle of Hell; Boccaccio described him as a necromancer, one versed in the magic arts. Scot's history remains tantalisingly incomplete. Those who claim him as the Fife Faust or as the same man who was patronised as court astrologer by Frederick ll of Sicily and mission leader of the ill-fated voyage to retrieve the Maid of Norway stretch credulity. Other historians claim him as the first Scottish intellectual to make his mark in mediaeval European centres of philosophical and scientific study.
Putting aside the problem that Michael Scot is at best a peripheral Highlander, the myths and legends that surround him and the interweaving of scholarship and black arts reflect aspects of the tradition of Scottish and Highland mysticism. In `The Silver Bough" by F. Marian McNeill, published by my old friend and dreamer, William MacLellan, she writes of the three orders of Druidic religion, - " the Seers are, says Strabo, diviners and natural philosophers" - and, "To our Celtic forebears the universe consisted of two interpenetrating parts - the visible world, as revealed to mortals through the five senses, and the invisible, which is immanent in and transcends the other, and which they call Fairyland or the Otherworld. Glimpses of the invisible world could be occasionally obtained by those who had that sixth sense we know as second sight".
To enter this Otherworld before the appointed
hour of death, a passport was necessary. This makes me think about the regimentation
and suspicious, exclusive, righteousness of present-day identity. Renan,
in his book on Averroes, suggests that Michael Scot, who represented "the
Arabic spirit in so original a manner, and by the diabolic powers ascribed
to him... is the first of the line of these heterodox thinkers who.....
disguised their scepticism under the name Averroes". Openness carried
no less a risk for a prophet even in another's land. The question remains.
Is Asylum still possible on this side ?
Making The Exhibit
Before I decided what I would finally make for the Second Sightings exhibition, I wrote the above notes intended for inclusion in the catalogue.The illustration for the catalogue was made quickly by working in a form of reverse collage directly on to the glass bed of a laser colour copier using some `components' picked on the way, petals of poppy, papaver somniferum, and monkshood, aconitum, etc., coupled with recent chalk drawings and a tape measure. Only at the point of editing the completed image, examining it to place differing dynamic emphasis on the shapes and lines, did the arched form become quite definite. At that point however it was not this arch but still only the idea of an arch. Both the written text and picture, created by means of today's technical wizardry, would be left behind, having prepared the ground for the structure that was beginning to form.
The final work was informed by those previous speculations with a constant reentry into, and expansion of the research fields until the constructing processes developed a momentum of their own. There was no outright visualisation, no complete preemptive vision, no instructive plan. It was more like a process of erosion and deposition - gradual, persistent, surging, examining numerous options, permutations and possibilities, probing and testing, measuring what might be done with what could be realistically achieved within certain fixed and shifting parameters. The making of the work, in a short period of time, using many processes and techniques was physically and mentally demanding. Working to a tight deadline on a three-dimensional structure for a public space leaves little room for error. The work constituted a self-imposed test through which the form of the artwork would be discovered.
In my September 1996 notes to the Second Sightings exhibition I referred to the publisher William MacLellan. William, or Bill as he was known, died five weeks later on 16 October. Amongst the papers that I had carried to the exhibition Opening in Inverness were three of Bill's own poems, type-written back to back on a sheet of paper, that he had given to me some years before. When asked by the Inverness journalist Sandie Van Beelen as to what my work was about, and figuring that my multitude of sources and references were muddying the waters, I dived into my bag to fetch Bill's poetry. Read this poem, I said.....it will help to explain something....
In his poem The Point Of The Lens Bill used the phrase "glass of thought". In constructing the sculpture, I debated long whether to allow a clear passage under the arch... this seemed of great importance. I swayed this way and that.... Ultimately I decided to use a plumb line as the device which would severe and delineate the passage, and also measure the verticality of the structure itself. The taut brass-weighted line would additionally describe certain surrounding conditions, through movement for example - caused by transmission of ground and airborne vibrations. The plumb weight would centre on and hover over a vessel full of water. Physical barriers would in effect be formed but of light and sensitive substance. The water vessel that fitted my purpose I had acquired, rather absentmindedly some short time before, a large circular glass dish, left behind in a Glasgow house by the recent occupant, in fact a daughter of Bill MacLellan. Only after the sculpture was made I discovered that the dish had formerly come to her from the potter Jim Holden. Perhaps six months before, Jim had shown me one of his garden sculpture pieces in which a large clay urn was to retain water whereby the viewer would, in looking in, see the surface film as a mirror, this work having references to the thought of Spinoza and Don Cupitt. Some years earlier I had taken a photograph of Jim Holden's head reflected in the surface of a rainwater filled metal vessel.
The completion of "Highland Sightseer" relied on that strange mixture of chance and borrowings that with hindsight seem now to form an evident chain of connected associations. Having said all this, I'm aware that I've only said the half of it.....
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William MacLaren MacLellan (link to Scotsman obituary notice)
Nobody knows for certain How life evolved on our planet Richard Dawkins A Cambridge don Thinks it all came through What might be called "The blind watchmaker's syndicate" Just as computers need a mind To give them purpose Evolution has no long term goal The dinosaurs ruled the roost for the two hundred million years it took To work out the complexity in the forms of power In lenses and muscles Which go to make human vision Into the miraculous organ We tend to imagine is for telling things like the time Or for recognition between lovers Instead of recording the point in the middle of the present moment Where memory and imagination combine To shatter the glass of thought as it comes alive in the moment of
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Second Sightings Artists: Marshall Anderson/ Lottie Glob Lesley Burr Emma Cameron Gair Dunlop Karen Guthrie/Nina Pope Brian Hoey Mark Johnston John Kraska Fiona Macdonald Donald Mackenzie Tommy Mackenzie Neil MacPherson Liz Munro Colin Pettigrew Cameron Ross Ian Scott. |
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Second Sightings catalogue contains essays by writer Lorn Macintyre and curator Lindsay Gordon. Exhibition organiser - Cathy Shankland, The Highland Council, Inverness Museum & Art Gallery .
JOHN KRASKA, 104 HILL STREET, GLASGOW. G3 6UA. SCOTLAND,U.K. EMail:kraska(at)tones.demon.co.uk Member of the Conseil d'Administration of the European arts network "Banlieues d'Europe" 1995 - 2005
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