Having been unable to attend the artist's talk, I arranged to meet up with Kirsten Body, Exhibitions Co-ordinator at IMAG on 14 March, a day the museum is normally shut to the public, for a tour around the exhibition. She also showed me some of the books and catalogues collected to accompany the show.
The exhibition features works ranging more than forty years, from the 1970s to 2014, selected by MacLean for this retrospective. The show was curated and hung by Kirsten Body, and the main first floor gallery space at IMAG provides a spacious yet suitably intimate setting. At first glance the works seem eclectic - the familiar box constructions and layered panels hang alongside sculptural installations, prints, poems, mixed media collage and watercolours. The title Veering Westerly makes the accustomed reference to the sea; this exhibition, as all his work, is united by this central theme.
In MacLean's work found objects, seafaring stories, poems become the concrete starting points for narratives about imagination, culture, identity, time and place. For his detractors, MacLean is perhaps too founded in gaelic/Scottish culture, too much about the act of making, the materials. Although he has had exhibitions in the USA and Canada, is represented in London, and has various academic and other accolades, his choice of subject matter can be seen to bind him too closely to a Scottish or North Atlantic tradition. His proponents, however, among them well-known art critic and Emeritus Professor Duncan MacMillan, place MacLean's assemblages in a Surrealist tradition alongside William Johnstone and Magritte, with the artist, shaman-like, as 'an intermediary between worlds'. Sorley MacLean wrote of his art as, 'social realism transmuted with immanent and religious and surrealist images...to make a metaphor or another image as a symbol, and to do that unobtrusively or, as it were, unconsciously, is to my mind the mark of great natural power in any art.' (Foreword to Duncan MacMillan The Art of Will MacLean: Symbols of Survival, London 2002). There is a sense that MacLean's work does translate local into universal. Writing of 'Veering West', art critic Georgina Coburn comments that, 'the skills of an artist, visual poet, engineer and mariner are finely honed...his assemblages of objects cast ashore on eternal tides of human history feel strangely comforting...it's this transcendental quality of the specifically local and deeply personal, expanded to the universal, which distinguishes and elevates MacLean's work' (http://georginacoburnarts.co.uk/category/will-maclean/). What MacLean himself says is that he reacted against the solipcism of contemporary art, preferring to start from a grounding in real place and culture, and, like the Surrealists, working with the 'autonomous world of the imagination.'
All of these responses are in my mind as I spend time in the gallery. As I look around I quickly see why Andrew Patrizio, ECA's Professor of Scottish Visual Culture, characterises MacLean's work as revealing 'three particular kinds of time that merge together' - 'historic time', 'craft time' and 'mineral time.' (Essay for exhibition Gleaned and Gathered, Art First, 2014).
By the entrance 'Fladday Reliquary' (1978), from IMAG's own collection, is a box construction on darkened boat-boards with a white gannet skull placed within a wooden niche and edged with rusted fishing hooks. The 'reliquary', traditionally a repository for saints' bones, is a common motif in MacLean's work, used to raise to almost votive status artefacts of indigenous gaelic identity.
Memory Board (mixed media and found materials)
Nearby, the fifteen panel 'Bottle Beach Settlement' series (1988) makes reference to even earlier, prehistoric time. A buried cache of small 19th-century bottles found on Lewis and cast in resin are a linking theme; each panel records and incorporates an aspect of the context of the find - flint, salt, bone and metal. Together the pieces create a quasi-archaeological timeline denoting time and continuity, from stone to bronze age towards the present day.
Over one broad wall 'Nomad Trace' (2011) is a large mixed-media construction on two white-painted fibreglass panels, with small burial-cist-like niches holding bones and created artefacts of human survival.
Opposite this, in an altarpiece-like boxed assemblage of painted toys and pudding-dolls, is a piece apparently of a more current historical nature, 'The Archaeology of Childhood- reworked' (1989, reworked 2012)
Again of a more personal nature is 'Study for Skye Fisherman - In Memoriam', a semi-abstract painting suggesting a figure in oilskin, the preparation for a final mixed-media work of 1989 dedicated to his Uncle William, who lost at sea.
Another piece where story is entangled with making is 'Crotal Box', a mixed-media commission for the RSA, which makes reference to an incident in which a tweed jacket was not permitted on a fishing boat because it had been dyed with crotal lichen.
Two series of collaborations with poets complement these very physical pieces. MacLean has worked with prominent poets over the years, including Angus Martin, Sorley MacLean and George Campbell Hay. In 'A Catechism of the Law of Storms', a collaboration with the poet John Burnside, MacLean's twelve screen prints are engravings found in the London Times of 1880 and reworked into surreal collages. Burnside then interpreted these images into fine poems that seem to relate to real events, including Song of a Storm Wave, Storm-Bird Harbinger, Towards the Voice of Night and Apparition of the Re-drowned. The second collaboration is with Kenneth White in a series of poems and paintings. In this case, the poems preceded MacLean's small watercolours, which have a simple fluency and energy that is a good counterpoint to the somewhat heavy sculptural works.
What is abundantly clear is that MacLean's works cannot be read quickly or superficially; each piece incorporates layers of symbolism and thought into a lengthy process of making. Through them he reimagines the many mythologies of maritime culture, his 'Cardinal Points' from sea reliquaries and whaling and fishing, to emigration and arctic exploration.
In addition to the two poetry collaborations there are two pieces that stand out for me. The first is fairly simple. Entitled 'Memory Board', it is a piece of boat rudder set on end, painted and inscribed in tiny script with the names of boats leaving the port of Stornoway. I like the simplicity of the concept, the hidden narratives suggested by the text and the construction of the piece, which seems to be half-seascape, half totem.
The second is a series of three pieces entitled Atlantic Messengers- Sula Sgeir, Hirta and Fulmarus (1998, mixed media, each 158 x 52 x 31cm.) While these installations are intricate, somewhat heavy in construction and clearly dense in symbolic significance, they are also intriguing to look at. Each one has a similar open shrine-like form, hung with 'offerings' shaped like small transparent bladders. They resemble the artefacts of a tribal culture. Closer inspection reveals that 'Fulmaris' contains a fulmar skull, oil sack and feather, representing the fulmar oil that provided the St Kilda population with light. 'Hirta' includes the fragment of a love song from St Kilda, and 'Sula Sgeir' makes reference to a nun who died on the island and whose skeleton was later found with a bird nesting in her breast bone. Their common theme is the miniature bladder-like messenger 'boats' that were set adrift at the mercy of wind and tide to carry messages from St Kilda to the outside world. While one might wish to relegate these pieces as nostalgic relics of a lost culture or as items of mere local historical interest, this would be to miss something of their significance. The strength of MacLean's work is that there is nothing artificial or glib about it. Of course these pieces speak of the real challenges of a particular place and time. But in bringing to mind those challenges, they stand counter to all that is fluffy and shallow in our increasingly virtual world. Perhaps, as well as reminding of the fragility of a lost society (St Kilda), they call into question the real durability of what we call civilisation.
