If they first provoke the question of what on earth they are, which is relatively quickly answered, they secondly insist that the viewer discovers how they were made. That takes more time, and is full of surprises. Finally and most lastingly, they make the watcher wonder why. There is no single answer to the final riddle. Their creator made them because he needed to make them. They fell into his head from the sky, and he could not relax until they had been given form. We know where they came from. They came from an ancestral tradition of weaving marram grass and heather. But we do not know where they were going, and neither apparently did Angus MacPhee. He was occupying and amusing himself. If he incidentally amused and intrigued you too, he was an unassuming man who had no objection to that.
The art establishment is equally uncertain – almost as uncertain as was Angus MacPhee – about the status of his work. It is still argued that unconscious art cannot be art; that art may only be created by an artist who sets out to make art. Angus MacPhee proves that to be a dubious assertion. Angus MacPhee might not have called his discipline art, and certainly placed no material value on it, but he knew what he was doing. He plucked grass, flowers and leaves deliberately, to make them into tunics, hats, sandals or swallow-tailed coats. As they were not made for exhibition – as they were entirely disposable – they were never given the polish of a professional. His leaf creations are unlike the leaf creations of Andy Goldsworthy partly because they have faded, and partly because they are not addressed to a gallery audience. In skill, craft and imagination they are equal.
They are at least equal. Angus MacPhee had natural artistic ability and artistic vision, or the terms have no meaning. He was not trained by an art school to finish and treasure his work, and he operated out of doors in the grounds of a Highland mental hospital rather than in a studio. He had only his fingers and a piece of fence wire, some snagged wool, leaves and grass, but he worked as best as he could for 50 years.
His own opinion of what he did is interesting, but should not define it. Others are allowed to make their own judgements. If we are free to recognise as being dreadful much of the art which is self-consciously created by people who call themselves artists, the converse is possible. Good art may be created by somebody who never thought of himself as an artist, not least because his sense of self was shattered by illness. He will not give us neat and pretty work. As Jean Dubuffet said, he will give us raw art.
Three years later, in 2000, Angus MacPhee’s objects were exhibited again at Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist. ‘Many people of Angus MacPhee’s generation,’ said the gallery’s manager, a North Uist man called Norman MacLeod, ‘who came from a crofting and fishing background in the islands were able to weave grass with their hands. What makes Angus extraordinary is the question of what went on inside his mind when he created these works of art, and why he created them.
‘They baffle some people. When we had the first exhibition I had to insure the exhibition in transit from Joyce Laing. The insurance company could not get their heads around insuring grass. Eventually we came to an agreement that it was an art object and not just grass that we were insuring.’
To accompany the 2000 exhibition Taigh Chearsabhagh published a collector’s item in the shape of a short, lavishly illustrated book by Joyce Laing about Angus MacPhee’s work titled Weaver of Grass. ‘Angus MacPhee,’ concluded Joyce Laing, ‘has become a legend of our time.’
In 2003 Joyce Laing opened her own permanent exhibition at Pittenweem in Fife. The Art Extraordinary Gallery contained the fruits of her collection since that winter’s day in 1977 when, at the prompting of Tom McGrath, she had caught the train to Inverness and been told by a taxi driver that there was a man in the hospital who made things from grass. Adam Christie’s stone statuettes were there, and Antonia Jabloner’s many swirling shapes and colours, and Lachlan Kilmichael’s psychedelic landscapes, and the innocent flora of Mrs McGilp, and the work of a score of other original and wholly unpretentious artists.
At the back of the Art Extraordinary Gallery, louring over the other exhibits like a friendly ogre, hung the work of the first and finest of them all – the polo-necked grass tunic of Angus MacPhee, in the company of his trousers, his boots, his pouches and all the other creations which Joyce Laing had succeeded in saving from the bonfires at Craig Dunain.
In 2004 the film-maker Nick Higgins, having read Joyce Laing’s Weaver of Grass, made a haunting 25-minute documentary about ‘the quiet big man from South Uist who wove clothes from grass’. It was titled Hidden Gifts, The Mystery of Angus MacPhee and won international acclaim. Hidden Gifts was nominated for a Royal Television Society Programme Award, was an Official Selection at the 14th Parnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival in Estonia, was an Official Selection at the Monterey International Film Festival in Mexico, and won the award for the Best Documentary Film at the Britspotting ’05 Festival in Germany and Switzerland.
In 2006 the people of Switzerland had the chance to see Angus MacPhee’s work. It was flown by Swissair to the place where it all began, to join for a short period Jean Dubuffet’s seminal collection at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. ‘They did an exhibition of textiles by outsider artists,’ said Joyce Laing. ‘A lot of Angus’s work went. The big tunic, the boots, vests, halters, pony things, satchels . . . I went to the opening. Everything was of such beautiful quality. There was an amazing wedding dress made of string by a woman in a mental hospital. And when Angus’s material was returned, it was so perfectly wrapped and packaged. They know what they’re doing in Lausanne!’
Joyce Laing once commented that other artists, working in all media, responded viscerally to Angus MacPhee’s work. In 1997 Eilidh, Fiona and Gillian MacKenzie, three sisters from the largest Hebridean island of Lewis who formed the Gaelic folk group MacKenzie, released their first album, Camhanach. It contained a song called ‘A’ Fighe le Feur’ (‘Knitting Grass’):
Buachaille o-ro, buachaille o
Hi-ri-ri o hi u a hu a ho-ro
Buachaille o-ro, buachaille o
Hi-ri-ri o hi u a hu a ho-ro
Fuaim as neonaiche na cuala sibhse riamh?
Aonghas Mac-a-Phi a’ fighe le feur.
Figh na lion ’s glac run diamhair
Aonghais Mhic-a-Phi a’ fighe le feur.
Le bioran ‘fas nas maoil’ is d’inntinn ‘fas nas geur’
Aonghais Mhic-a-Phi a’ fighe le feur.
Sealladh as boidhche na chunna sibhse riamh?
Aonghas Mac-a-Phi a’ fighe le feur.
(Have you ever heard a stranger sound
Than Angus MacPhee knitting with grass?
Weave the web and trap your secret purpose
O Angus MacPhee knitting with grass.
With your needles growing blunter and your mind growing sharper
O Angus MacPhee knitting with grass.
Have you ever seen a more beautiful sight
Than Angus MacPhee knitting with grass?)
In 1998 the Scottish poet Brian Johnstone wrote the following poem inspired by the life and work of Angus MacPhee, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was subsequently published in Edinburgh Review.
Outsider
These were his ordinary shoes,
this his ordinary vest, this shirt
he could have worn this rough
and fibrous on his skin, each
woven blade, each seed head, stalk,
each thread of root replacing loss
with need. You realise it was his life.
No measure could exist to take
that sleight of hand from fingers
that had known it, such as these.
And these his ropes twined;
seasons, days and hours sown in
like bits of leaf or bark, their spirits
stitched about him, worn until
he laid them on the ground.
This ordinary creel, that harness
hanging by the wall, each one
an offe
ring, an ordinary thing
from hands that plead, insist
they have none else to give.
And give this ordinary gift.
In 2004 Donnie Munro, who had by then left Runrig to pursue a solo career, released his own song, ‘The Weaver of Grass’:
They took him here from another place
Where the machair’s sweet winds fold upon the face.
Silent turmoil rolls across his eyes.
A changing world, a troubled heart
The spirit’s freedom broken from the start,
Youth forever lost in Europe’s lies,
The weaver of grass is coming home.
A young man’s frame with an old man’s hope,
The painful journey, the turning of the rope,
Bound, forever tied to childhood’s dreams.
The Lovat days now in the past,
The mounted pride that was never meant to last,
In a warring world where women sighed.
The weaver of grass is coming home.
The wind blows cold on the Black Isle’s fields,
This silent world where he touches what he feels,
Held forever still on the outer line.
The darkened room, a night of sighs,
The world defined by the regimented minds,
Oh for the coloured nights of a Uist sky.
The weaver of grass is coming home
The hands still turn a desperate weave,
To search the freedoms of the open field,
Where nature’s healing measure finds its way.
By the hanging tree and the windblown fence,
His darkened eyes turned inward in defence
Of a world that only he could ever dream.
The weaver of grass is coming home
The homeward road, the familiar shore,
The peewit’s cry that will cry forever more.
Down through a people’s line he was sure had gone,
And in this drift of a world unchanged
His weave is strengthened in the passing of his days,
So late we came to see him in his pride.
The weaver of grass is coming home.
‘On one occasion,’ said Munro, ‘while I was introducing the background to the song at a live show in Aberdeen, a voice rang out from the depth of the audience shouting “He was my uncle!” Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to meet up with the source of that cry.’
Craig Dunain Hospital was closed down at the very end of the twentieth century, after 136 years of operation. In 1999 and 2000 the Highland artist John McNaught was commissioned to produce a published visual archive to mark the end of the institution. ‘The book uses 12 stories or anecdotes and uses linocut to illustrate, all printed on Japanese paper,’ said McNaught.
It was called ‘Mind Your Head’, after a sign above a low door just inside the entrance to Craig Dunain. It was an amazing experience to have access to the building in its final year. We were interested in the effects of the closure on the Highland community, and the archive was as much about the culture of the Craig as it was hard facts. The written archive was produced by a nurse, Jim Neville, with artwork by myself, and photos by Craig MacKay. Our archive project was featured as part of a Gaelic TV programme in 2001.
I did one print about Angus MacPhee, and this was about his apparent understanding or ‘way’ with animals. He is said to have calmed a rampaging bull in the grounds of the hospital. The print was called ‘Brothers in Grass’, as both Angus and the bull in their different ways had an interest in the grass.
Recently, I was asked to do some work on the history of the hospital with Muirtown Primary School, who have some community woodland just above the Craig. One of the images was about Angus and we were able to use a pair of his knitted boots, which the children were fascinated by . . .
Early in 2011 another artist named Mike Inglis was commissioned by Highland Council to paint a large mural on a retaining wall in the old centre of Inverness. ‘Some of the designs [in the mural] were influenced by items woven from grass and leaves by former Lovat Scout Angus MacPhee,’ reported the BBC. ‘Textures and patterns in the wall art were inspired by Mr MacPhee’s weaving.’
‘Scotland is so slow,’ said Joyce Laing in the Art Extraordinary Gallery at Pittenweem. ‘It took them 60 years to appreciate Charles Rennie Mackintosh. They’ll discover Angus MacPhee, in time . . .’
In a corner of the Art Extraordinary Gallery there is on permanent display an assortment of sea-shells from South Uist.
Anybody who in the 1970s turned into Iochdar from the main Uist arterial road was almost immediately confronted by an astonishing apparition. On the left-hand side of the township road, a few yards from the old school which Angus MacPhee had attended, stood a small thatched crofthouse and an old motorbus. Both of them were covered with a complex mosaic of sea-shells.
They glittered in the sun. They were a fantasy brought to life, like a fairy coach and palace in the practical Iochdar crofting landscape. They were the work of Mrs Flora Johnstone. Their provenance and context were as curious as their appearance.
Metal machinery and motor engines were late arriving in the Hebrides, but once they got there, they stayed there. The same transport difficulties that delayed their appearance, and prolonged the life of the island horse culture, meant that machines had exceptional importance. The fact that until 1964 there was no car ferry to any port in the Uists led to those cars, buses, tractors, ploughs and harrows which did get hauled and hoisted from the decks of ships onto an island pier being treasured and hoarded, reconstituted and recycled well beyond the term of their natural lives.
A combination of crofter thrift and the bald fact that there was nowhere to send broken tractors, cars and machinery – who was going to pay to put a wrecked Morris Minor back on the ferry to Oban? – led to almost every croft having its own small scrapyard, and to some crofts becoming small scrapyards. When tourists from the south began slowly to discover the Western Isles in the second half of the twentieth century, they were frequently appalled and almost always surprised by the quantity of rusted metal that the inhabitants left lying, apparently heedlessly, about the primeval countryside. The rear end of cars stuck out of peat bogs; dilapidated whole cars were used as hen houses; lorry axles lay in ditches; corroded drive shafts leaned against megalithic standing stones; 1930s motorcycles were terminally parked in the shelter of Pictish brochs. In the twenty-first century the architecture critic Jonathan Meades celebrated those features of Hebridean life in a documentary called Island of Rust. Meades recognised that the rust was there from necessity rather than aesthetic preference, but he suggested that it had achieved a kind of rough integrity as landscape art.
So it was that Mrs Flora Johnstone came by her omnibus. It was a simple little 1950s single-decker country bus with a streamlined Art Deco front and room inside for perhaps 20 or 30 passengers. It had probably served its time on the arterial road, motoring dutifully up and down from the south of South Uist to the north of Benbecula until some fatal mechanical failure occurred, or until the new car ferry brought a superior model which forced it into early retirement.
For time-honoured reasons the little country bus would not be returned to the mainland, and there was no scrap-metal merchant in the Uists. It had to be found a new home, and hopefully a new purpose. The Iochdar crofthouse of Lachlan and Flora Johnstone was small. They adopted the redundant bus and parked it next to their home, where it was converted into an extra room. There was a symmetry to that: when the couple married in Glasgow in 1925, Lachlan had been working as a tramcar conductor.
Lachlan Johnstone died in 1968. As their children grew up and went away, Flora Johnstone found that she had less use for the extra room in the bus on the croft. She turned it into a greenhouse. Before long the inside of the old bus was a riot of herbiage. But the exterior paintwork and aluminium flashing were showing their age. It was beyond the inclination or ability of Flora Johnstone to giv
e the bus a respray, so she hit upon an alternative. She collected sea-shells from the shore – all sizes and varieties of shells, but chiefly the ubiquitous cockles and whelks – and glued them in circular patterns to the inside of large tin lids.
She then glued the tin lids, sea-shells outwards, onto the outside walls of the bus. Before long, hundreds of sea-shell tesserae covered the bus from roof to mud-guards. The windows full of greenery were bordered with smaller shells. Flora Johnstone had created a magic bus.
Then she moved onto her house. The stone walls of the cottage got the same treatment as the metal panels of the country bus, and within a few years it too was coated with molluscs beneath the shaggy fringes of the thatch.
Flora Johnstone made keepsakes and souvenirs from shells, which she sold to tourists who stopped to admire her house and bus. She sent the proceeds to a multiple sclerosis charity. Visitors were often invited inside the sea-shell house for a cup of tea and a chat. On one occasion, she said, she entertained a man from the Evo-Stik adhesive company who discussed featuring her work in a television advertisement.
By the end of the 1980s Flora Johnstone’s impeccable ornamental cottage and bus had deteriorated in the unforgiving Hebridean climate. By the twenty-first century the shell-lids had fallen off or been removed from the walls of the house, leaving only shadowy circular traces of their glorious past. The bus was hauled away, leaving only a few flakes of rust behind in Iochdar. All that could be exhibited of Flora Johnstone’s transient accomplishment were some surviving shell-covered lids, a few of her charity souvenirs and a handful of photographs.
She had no mental illness whatsoever. Equally certainly, Flora Johnstone had, like Angus MacPhee, created an unforgettable form of raw sculpture which unconsciously or otherwise echoed features of Uist life. Shellfish from the shore had been part of the starvation diet of the Hebrides during famine years. The arrival of the internal combustion engine concurred with the end of true penury in the islands. If the work of Angus MacPhee celebrated the old, that of Flora Johnstone rang in the new. Neither of them intended their years of skilled and dedicated labour to deposit a permanent, let alone profitable, legacy.
The Silent Weaver Page 15