Originating as part of arts centre An Talla Solais’ inaugural Art Week 2024, an exhibition at The Ceilidh Place, Ghost Boats, now extended to 21st September, features new work by renowned Scottish artist Will Maclean, in 23 small works.
Writer Jon Miller writes:
‘Maclean’s work has long examined maritime cultures and their relationship with the sea to interrogate ideas about culture, tradition and memory, including his own personal history: John Maclean, Will’s father, was a native of Polbain in Coigach and the history of the Highlands and the west coast, along with that of events such as the Clearances, have often been a part of the work he has created.
‘In the past he has often used assemblages and sculpture to construct works in which images objects and implements associated with sea-going cultures gain symbolic and totemic potency thus elevating the everyday routines and practices of those who work the seas and shores to a quasi-religious, if not pagan, ritualistic significance. This allows what can otherwise be seen as a unforgiving and hard way of life a resonance and importance we are used to bestowing on the art and rituals of ancient cultures and civilisations (Etruscan, Greek, Indian, Aztec, etc) thereby heightening the lives everyday lives of fishermen to reverberate powerfully through time.
‘The works included in Ghost Boats are not large gallery-filling constructions of this kind but twenty-three small mixed-media paintings on watercolour paper, postcard-sized, each accompanied by a short text. These texts range from extracts from poems by, among others, Angus Martin, John Burnside and the bard Neil Macleod of Polbain. Elsewhere there are quotations from fishermen, skippers and the Lewis-born poet and novelist Donald S Murray. A sample of these quotations point to the over-riding thematic concerns of Maclean’s latest exhibition: Angus Martin, Most of my ghosts are fishermen… and …herring boats sunk in history; Donald S Murray, ghosts of herring girls and fishermen; Roderick Macleod, For many years the sad skeletons of these boats lay rotting… and Ali ’Beag’ Macleod.
‘Almost all of these works involve fishing boats, trawlers or skiffs (sgoth – the traditional red-sailed fishing boat of the west coast) and as can be gleaned from the exhibition title, Maclean is memorialising the decline of the west coast fishing industry, specifically the Ring Net herring fishing in Skye and Loch Fine, and the Bag Net fishing tradition of Coigach in Wester Ross. In many of works, the boats are depicted in outline, the landscape visible through their lines and shapes, sometimes, as in The Old Sail Boat, drawn in white ink to give them a ghostly quality, adding to the sense that they are part of or embedded in the landscape, part of the place, still sailing the dim shores of memory.
‘So, for instance, in ‘Ghost Pair’, a painting in greys and whites, a ghost trawler is accompanied by serried ranks of ghost fish – not only are the boats and traditions vanishing but the great shoals that used to swim the west coast of Scotland. Ghost Boats II has chart positions as if the trawler still hauls in its nets in some afterlife or where a mariner could plot a course to see the ghost of the old trawler ploughing the waves. Not all is requiem, however. Others, such as The Days of the Skiffs, and Skiffs, Loch Fyne are vivid with red dashes of sails in a strong wing against the rich blues of a vibrant sea, very much a celebration of these craft (though there is a hint in the latter of the sails of paddle boards, where leisure pursuits have now replaced the traditional culture).
‘Maclean’s paintings, despite their small scale, are textured and layered, the surface worked into, scratched back to distress the surface like the worn hulls of trawlers but more metaphorically suggestive of the layering of time, the wearing away of memory, of passing into the past and history. Nonetheless these lines are clear and delicate suggesting both the weight of a boat and the lightness of ghosts. At times, there is an imprecision in the finishing of the painting – colours bleed from the frame onto the white of the underlying watercolour paper, edges are slightly ragged – again suggesting a temporariness or time leaking from one era into the next or, like Whistler painting outdoors, the seepage of water, in this case is not rain but sea water.
‘Symbolically, postcards are artefacts of time – they are sent into the future when we post them and are received in the present but recount to the reader events that have already happened several days or weeks before. Maclean’s images set off a similar confusion or melding of time in his use of the postcard as a form and structural device – as if we are reading a message or witnessing a history that places us in a disorientating fusion of past, present and future all at the same moment. And in this way this compact but powerful exhibition resists a simple memorialising and escapes the confines of the past to ring on into our futures as a kind of living tradition, as a way of life with its special and unique virtues and values, poetry, stories and songs, and allows us to imagine these ghost boats still gracing the harbours and western seaboards of Scotland.’
The full Art Week programme is available on An Talla Solais’ website (see panel).
