The Silent Weaver (16 page)

It was inevitably a controversial project. After the Barlinnie Special Unit's closure in 1996, Mike Nellis of the school of social work at the University of Strathclyde wrote: ‘To some it was a legendary institution, which, through the use of creative arts enabled the rehabilitation of some of Scotland's most violent prisoners, particularly [the convicted gangland murderer] Jimmy Boyle, but which, after his departure in 1980, became a mere shadow of its former self, and a lost opportunity to reform the wider penal system. To others its early years represented a moment when penal authority was inadvertently ceded to critical and manipulative prisoners – Boyle especially – and their unduly liberal champions in the social work and arts communities, which was fortunately retrieved, never allowed to happen again and considered best forgotten.'

Encouraging inmates to involve themselves in the creative arts was central to the work of Barlinnie Special Unit, as it was at the Ross Clinic and at the old Deeside sanatoria. It was no coincidence that following his release the infamous Jimmy Boyle became a sculptor, author and playwright. Joyce Laing was perfectly attuned to the ethos of the Special Unit's promising early years.

And while working there, she took to wandering down for a coffee at the Third Eye Centre in Sauchiehall Street, where one day in 1977 she met Tom McGrath after his return from Switzerland, and where she agreed to embark on a search for Scottish outsider art.

They decided that she needed a photographer on her trek. Tom McGrath introduced Joyce Laing to Jim Waugh, a contemporary of theirs, and another Glaswegian jazz enthusiast who had in the mid-1970s completed a joint honours university degree course in art, history and English literature as a mature student. (Waugh would move into Scottish journalism
before becoming best known as Radio Clyde's jazz broadcaster ‘Nighthawk'.) Jim Waugh could use a camera. He happily consented to join the expedition. It was decided that ‘we'd start at the north of Scotland and work our way south. So Craig Dunain was our first call.'

Early on a November morning in 1977, Joyce Laing drove from her mother's home in the East Neuk of Fife to meet Jim Waugh off the Glasgow train at Perth station. ‘But it was a horrible, wet, dreich day,' she said,

and I was fed up with the thought of driving all the way to Inverness, and said, ‘We'll get the train, it's so much easier.' So he came off the train and I said, ‘We have to get back on the train.'

I say that because when we got off in Inverness we had to get a taxi out to Craig Dunain.

We got into the taxi at Inverness Station, about ten or eleven o'clock in the morning, and I said to the taxi driver, ‘Do you know where Craig Dunain is?'

And he said, ‘I should, I was a male nurse there for 20-something years.'

So we sat back, fine! Then I thought, this guy was a male nurse, he might know. So I said to him, ‘Do you remember anything so strange, so unusual made by a patient that you've never forgotten it?'

And he said ‘Oh, lots of them paint and make things.' There was an art therapist there by then.

I said, ‘Was there something quite strange, that you haven't forgotten?'

Just as were coming into Craig Dunain he jammed on his brakes. We literally fell forward.

He said, ‘There was a man made things out of grass.'

I said, ‘Name?' He couldn't remember the name.

I said, ‘Ward? I need the ward.' He couldn't remember the ward.

So I said, ‘Well I'm going in to see doctors and nurses, they'll know.' And we spent the whole day. There were thousands of pictures – interesting therapeutically, but not l'Art Brut. We'd given up. None of the doctors knew the man who made things out of grass. I thought he must be dead.

I started asking the older staff, ‘Do you know what this “things out of grass” is? What is that? It sounds right, for l'Art Brut, what is it? What does he make?' They couldn't remember. So I'd been asking all the older nurses about it. Absolutely nobody had heard of it.

And I thought, well, he's dead and gone and the stuff's gone, and that's it.

And I was just walking with a young nurse down towards the door, and she said, ‘Have you had a good day?'

And I said, no, I was disappointed. We'd heard there was a man made things out of grass, and nobody knows anything about it.

She said, ‘Do you mean old Angus?'

I said, ‘Where is he?'

She said, ‘You won't have found him because he's on the farm ward. The doctors don't bother with them because they're all physically fit.'

So we walked down to the farm ward. To my surprise the door was locked. In the 1970s, directors of hospitals had an open door policy. That was the medication of course, you could take your patients without locked doors, they were very proud of that.

But here was a locked door. I rang the bell and this young male nurse came to the door and said, abruptly, ‘What do you want?'

We said, ‘We've come to see a man called Angus who makes things out of grass.'

And he looked at us and said, ‘Don't move. Just stay there. Just stay there. Don't move.' And he shut the door. He didn't lock it, he shut it on us again.

I thought, ‘This is a nutty place, I'm going to get out of here . . .'

And then the door's opening again and there's a charge nurse, an older man, and he said, ‘What do you want?'

We said, ‘We want to meet Angus. He makes things out of grass, we've been told.'

He said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah. You'd better come in.' He took us into the duty room. We discovered afterwards the young one thought we'd escaped out of one of the other wards and were a couple of maddies on the run.

So the older man took us into the duty room, and he said, ‘Come up to the window. If you want to see what Angus does you'll have to walk down the field, and in the holly and rhododendron down there you'll find his work underneath the bushes.'

It was beginning to get dark, it was about three o'clock, in the winter. But well, you know, we'd come a long way, so off we went down and started to go under bushes.

Jim came out of the bushes first. He said, ‘My god, there's a boot!'

Then I came out with another one and said, ‘One's left, one's right – it's a pair of grass boots!' With laces and everything – they were just superb. Eventually when I got back to the clinic in Aberdeen I was silly enough to show them off, and the doctors had them on their feet, running up and down. I let them do it, too. Ooooh . . .

I don't even remember what else we pulled out, I was so excited, but we pulled out jackety things, coats, trousers, lots of these pouch things were hung on twigs. They were recent – they were still green.

As far as the charge nurse was concerned we'd got it just in time, because the gardeners burnt it every six months. That was his attitude to it, and of course he was amazed that we were interested in it.

The charge nurse came down and said, ‘Is this what you're looking for?'

And we said, ‘Yes, this is wonderful, this is l'Art Brut.'

He said, ‘You'll want to meet Angus. He's out in the fields.'

Angus's job then was to look after the pony – they were quite good in that way, they'd caught on about the horses, and that he was good with animals. The pony picked up the turnips and cabbages and things. Angus looked after him and led him up and down.

The charge nurse said, ‘Of course he never speaks. He absolutely never speaks to anybody. Not to anybody.'

We said, ‘When does he do this work?'

He said, ‘Oh, as soon as he's had his food he's out doing it.' The others at clinics, they just fall into a chair and half sleep. But not Angus. Angus was always at it. In Dubuffet's description, he was compulsive. So of course we got more and more enthused about the whole thing.

The young male nurse was sent to go and find Angus in the field and bring him in. That was the first time I met Angus. He was wearing a grass hat. He was a six foot tall, handsome-looking man. He had to wear the outdoor clothes for farm work. Just a rough jacket and breeks. But he had the grass hat – like a fisherman's peaked cap. And he was wearing a muffler made from sheep's wool, and a wool handkerchief with the triangle showing from his top jacket pocket. He got that from the fences. The charge nurse was telling us that he pulled the wool from the fences. He said, ‘We don't allow him to take the grass into the ward.' You couldn't blame them for that.

They stood there in the fading light, with grass boots, coats and trousers on the ground between them. Joyce Laing told Angus MacPhee that she admired his work and wanted to take some of it away to exhibit in a Glasgow art gallery, and hoped that he would agree. ‘He just ignored us – seemingly ignored us, but you knew he was taking in everything.'

She asked the charge nurse if Angus was unhappy with her suggestion. ‘If he's not pleased,' said the charge nurse, ‘you'll soon know. He's accepting what you're doing or you would soon know.'

Joyce Laing explained that she needed Angus MacPhee's signature on a release form before she could remove anything. The charge nurse shook his head and said that he did not think that Angus could read or write – ‘We see to all his needs, so he never has to write or sign for anything.'

Joyce Laing took out the release form and handed it to Angus MacPhee. He looked at it. Then he took her pen, knelt on the ground and rested the sheet of paper on a flat piece of earth. In exactly the right space on the form he wrote, in an educated, copperplate hand, the words ‘Angus MacPhee'.

Joyce Laing and Jim Waugh carried away what they could in hospital laundry bags. ‘I went back with my car a week or so later and started collecting more,' she said. ‘I was silly enough to think, we can't take all of this guy's stuff, even though he did sign for it. It'll be important to him. I hesitated about taking everything. I regret that now. I should have taken everything I got my hands on. But you're still a therapist, you know . . .

‘So that was the discovery of Angus.'

Shortly afterwards Joyce Laing wrote a letter to Angus MacPhee at Craig Dunain Hospital, thanking him for his grass and wool creations and telling him of her plans for their exhibition. Angus did not reply. The charge nurse wrote back, saying that from time to time Angus, sitting on the edge of his bed, would take out her letter and read it.

‘He wouldn't go. I asked him if he would like to go over to Taigh Chearsabhagh when it was showing. He just laughed. He thought it was very, very funny that anybody would want to see his work.'

The work of Angus MacPhee was first exhibited in Glasgow in 1978. On the rest of their journey around Scotland Joyce Laing and Jim Waugh had uncovered several other outsider artists – or ‘artists extraordinary', as Laing was beginning to describe them.

At Sunnyside Hospital in Montrose – coincidentally the first posting of the nineteenth-century collector of psychotic art, Dr William A.F. Browne – she found the stone carvings of Adam Christie. A Shetland island crofter who was admitted to the Montrose asylum in 1901, Christie had died there at the age of 82 in 1950. During his half-century in the institution he taught himself to chisel stone with a six-inch nail and a heavy old file. He then turned rocks found in the hospital grounds into enigmatic human faces and figures, like miniature Easter Island statues. Adam Christie's work and memory
was preserved after his death by Ken Keddie, the consultant psychiatrist at Sunnyside Hospital.

On the west coast of Scotland they found the vivid, hyper-real watercolour landscapes of the former forester Lachlan Kilmichael, and the ‘fantasy underworld of flowers and fauna' created by Mrs McGilp. They uncovered the powerful modernist images of Robert A. All of those artists were prolific and all of their work was visually startling. They were compulsively creative. Mrs McGilp had once been asked to colour some coat hangers for a hospital sale. Having coloured them, she could not stop there. She decorated the bright, newly painted wood with flowers and petals.