The Silent Weaver (17 page)

Those pieces and others were set beside that of Antonia Jabloner and Angus MacPhee. Antonia Jabloner was the woman whose sketches, paintings and brilliant embroidery in an Aberdeen psychiatric ward had in the 1960s first allowed Joyce Laing to make a connection with Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut. An Austrian by birth, Jabloner was found wandering in the north of Scotland early in the Second World War. She was apparently alone, was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and was taken into psychiatric care in Aberdeen. There, ‘she began to produce a vast array of paintings and drawings of landscapes . . . Nurses would allow her to have scraps of old bed sheets and gave her embroidery threads, and without any prior drawing or pattern she would sew some exquisite embroideries.'

Angus MacPhee's grass clothing and accessories – his tunic, his boots, his gargantuan trousers – were hauled, along with their fellow exhibits, up three flights of stairs to the Glasgow Print Studio on the top floor of a Victorian building on Ingram Street. Half a mile away at the Third Eye Centre on Sauchiehall Street, Tom McGrath showed ‘Another World', a
sample selection of Art Brut imported from the Château de Beaulieu in Lausanne.

‘There was a lot of interest at the time in that kind of work, with the two exhibitions,' said Calum MacKenzie, the Print Studio's director. The Glasgow Print Studio had been established six years earlier, in 1972, ‘as an artist-led initiative providing facilities and workshop space to artists using fine art printmaking'. The printmakers made a poster for the first full exhibition of Scottish outsider art in Scotland. Beneath the words ‘Art Extraordinary' it showed a green tree blooming in a fecund, overgrown garden. Imposed upon the tree was a large red keyhole. The keyhole was a reference to an expression by the Austro-Canadian chemist and art collector Dr Alfred Bader. ‘We are only allowed to look through the keyhole into the mysterious garden of these artists,' wrote Dr Bader. ‘We can come away. They are forever locked in.'

‘I was a bit worried about it being on Ingram Street,' said Joyce Laing. ‘It became part of the fashionable Merchant City, but in 1978 it was a pretty rough area. I thought these rough Glaswegians would touch my collection! I was chatting to the psychiatrist in Barlinnie and said, “I'm a bit worried about that stuff on Ingram Street, what'll happen to it.” He said, “Have you told Jimmy?” Jimmy Boyle. So I told Jimmy, “I'm worried about my exhibition on Ingram Street, I don't want anybody touching it.” “Oh aye,” he said. Then I knew it was safe.'

Laing had devised the term ‘Art Extraordinary' for her collection because she thought ‘outsider art' was both derogatory and inadequate. ‘In my own search for this form of art in Scotland,' she would write, ‘I soon felt handicapped by the use of the term “outsider”.

‘Following the repeated utterances of viewers to whom
I showed examples of this art, I began to call it “art extraordinary”. People would react with gasps of amazement, often they were particularly fascinated by these artists' use of materials, not normally associated with art work. The exclamation “extraordinary!” seemed to belong to the works I had discovered . . .'

Later Joyce Laing would refine her terms.

Art Extraordinary refers to visual art forms created by an artist, usually with no formal art education or training, whose works arise from an inner necessity impelled by intense personal vision.

They paint, sculpt, weave, draw or build because they are obsessively engaged by a need to express this vision in a way which is unique to the individual and hence unconstrained by adherence to any artistic convention. As such, the works do not tend to be created for commercial gain.

Except that they are thus compelled, visionary artists may often be ordinary people from all walks of life, although many are within the care of institutions or have become isolated on the margins of conventional society. Others may be elderly, disabled or have mental health issues.

In several respects, the grass-weaving and wool-knitting of Angus MacPhee fell outside the categories first established by Jean Dubuffet. Angus did not suffer from the worst kind of psychosis. His illness was serious, but he was a simple rather than a paranoid, hebephrenic or catatonic schizophrenic. In his usual condition, ‘delusions and hallucinations are not evident, and the disorder is less obviously psychotic than the hebephrenic, paranoid, and catatonic subtypes of schizophrenia'.

Nobody will ever know the moods and mechanisms of
Angus MacPhee's mind, but insofar as it was reflected in his weaving he was relatively untroubled – the qualification ‘relatively' is, in discussing schizophrenia, vitally important. He made no images of screaming, haunted men. He did not depict his environment in violent, paranoid colours. He showed no signs of the desperate spiritual yearning that was evidenced in the art of some other seriously troubled schizophrenics. He opened no window – or keyhole – through which psychiatrists might peer into the schizophrenic brain. The work of many schizophrenics might illustrate the contention of Arnulf Rainer that ‘madness is the thirteenth muse', but Angus MacPhee had other inspirations.

His imagination was unique and his means of expression was unparalleled. He did not work for money or fame, and he put no artistic or financial value whatsoever on his creations. He laboured far outside the cultural mainstream. In those ways he slotted perfectly into Jean Dubuffet's school of Art Brut.

But Angus MacPhee's weaving of grass had a heritage. That was at least part of its appeal. It did not arrive from nowhere, out of the distant recesses of a troubled mind. It was the last – and possibly the most remarkable – expression of a craft which had been alive since humans first shared the shores of the North Atlantic Ocean with clumps of marram grass, but which would slip within a single lifetime through the careless fingers of the twentieth century. It had an historical and cultural family tree. If Angus MacPhee had stuck to making horses' halters and baskets from grass, he would have remained a traditional craftsman. When, with time on his skilled hands, he turned the craft to making spectacularly useless objects such as swallow-tailed coats, tricorne hats and boots fringed with spring flowers, he raised it to a form of art.

In 1937 Adolf Hitler said of the ‘degenerate art' of Paul Klee that it appeared to have been ‘produced in some Stone Age ten or twenty thousand years ago'. Joyce Laing said that only in 1991 did she realise the true perspective of Angus MacPhee's work. In that year two German hikers discovered high in the Italian Alps the mummified and frozen body and belongings of a man who had died 5,300 years earlier. His cloak was made of woven grass. His boots were lined with grass inner-socks and had laces made of plaited grass. His flint dagger was kept in a twined grass sheath. On a ledge near his corpse lay a long grass-fibre rope . . .

Whether or not Angus MacPhee understood that he was responsible for the last florescence of an ancient tradition is a valid question to pose. The probability is that in disturbing circumstances he turned to a familiar and comforting exercise. He found solace there. Weaving grass proved to be of immense therapeutic value to him. As his dexterity improved and he mastered the old skill – as much as or more than anybody had ever mastered it – his imagination took flight. He had no reason to make practical working items from grass: the horses on Kinmylies Farm came already equipped with leather halters. So he fed his fantasies, and satisfied his intelligent Uist humour, by making things from grass that no sensible person had ever previously considered making from grass. An innate sense of shape, balance and beauty provided the rest: the fringes and highlights of small wild flowers, the leaves and the changing patterns.

Whether or not Angus MacPhee understood that he was paying homage in its twilight to a millennial talent is irrelevant to any appreciation of his art. He was doing so, and that is enough. It gave his weaving depth as well as mystery and
wonder. After hearing traditional unaccompanied polyphonic singing one Christmas Eve in the late 1940s at a chapel in the Corsican mountains, the writer Dorothy Carrington said that it sounded like the music she had waited all her life to hear. ‘I had the impression of hearing a voice from the entrails of the earth,' she wrote later. ‘Song from the beginning of the world.' The impact is comparable.

Joyce Laing tried to return to Craig Dunain at least once a year after 1977.

I saw him work. He'd make six-foot long ropes before he started to make the garments, he'd have a lot of six-foot long ropes. They weren't perfectly round. He would plait. He had no tools, just fingers. So he knitted on his fingers.

His mind must have been, ‘Right, I'm making a jacket.' So presumably he started from the hem upward, which you would if you were knitting. The interesting thing about the big famous jacket is it's got a basque, and a big hem in a different stitch. That means he'd worked out that the end's going to have a slightly different stitch to it, and then when it was the main body bit – you get that in a jumper or sweater – he was on to the plain sort of knitting. And then the cuffs, the huge cuffs, had the same different stitch as the basque. But the neck was a polo neck. It was just very thick. I couldn't quite see how he did it. His hands were just going like this, so quickly the whole time.

I would think it took him a day or two to make one article. Probably several days. Once I said, ‘I want a hat, Angus. Make me a hat.' And of course he ignored me as he always did.

I went away and had lunch and so on, went back and he wasn't there. He'd gone away somewhere in the grounds. But he'd left what he was working on, and there was this Davy Crockett hat . . .

He also made a cat at one point, like a child's cat. I think he had a wit, he thought it was funny. The cat had a big long tail and whiskers, it was just a funny cat. And I thought the same about the Davy Crockett hat, that there was a wee bit of wickedness about him.

And the staff at Craig Dunain hardly seemed to notice or care, although art people like me were considered a bit nutty anyway. I would take black bags with me when I went to see him in the '80s. I'd drive my car as near to the ward as possible. And I'd go into the bushes – I knew where he worked – and I would drag things out and put them in a bag. And the staff would stand at the window of a ward and watch me. Never did they say, ‘What are you doing?' Never did they come out and say, ‘Can we help?'

Angus MacPhee saw the heyday of the Kinmylies Farm adjunct to Craig Dunain Hospital. The asylum's home farm was at its biggest and busiest in the middle of the twentieth century. After that time its function deteriorated. The overall number of patients continued to increase, but fewer of them had agricultural backgrounds. The nationalised Northern Regional Hospital Board began to buy its food and other provisions out of central funding from wholesalers. From the 1960s onward Kinmylies Farm was steadily reduced. Thirty acres of it were turned into an extension to Inverness Municipal Golf Course. A brand new, 229-bed ‘mental deficiency hospital' called Craig Phadrig was built on the eastern slopes of the farm and opened in 1969. New housing developments for the rapidly expanding town covered acre after acre of arable and grazing land and steadily engulfed the old agricultural premises.

In the 1980s the farm was run down to closure. Angus MacPhee was moved ‘up the top', to the back wards and the gardens of the old asylum.

‘He told me there wasna the same grass up there, at the Craig Dunain hospital,' said the farm manager Jock MacKay.

‘The farm was closed and he had to move to a ward in the big hospital,' said Joyce Laing. ‘That's when he couldn't get the grass. I don't know why he couldn't go back for the grass, but that's when he started using beech leaves . . .'

Angus MacPhee's leaf creations were deliberate experiments in a different medium. Whatever he told Jock MacKay, he could and did still obtain and weave grass, despite its comparatively inferior quality. He began to use leaves as well, because he wanted to.

He chiefly deployed the sea-green, diamond-shaped leaves of the native European beech. Using grass as a foundation material, he constructed a workable pony halter from leaves, a series of small horn-shaped pouches, and a pair of large but perfectly functional beech-leaf sandals, with a flat sole and a single grass foot-strap.

‘He took and overlapped the stems of the leaves, leaf by leaf,' said Joyce Laing. ‘Of course, they've gone so brittle with time. You can imagine what they were like – the lovely pale lime of beech leaves, but they've gone dull. He made satchels, he made quite a lot of satchels which I suppose people used to take in the peats, or carry tools. When I found them in Craig Dunain, he'd put wild flowers in around the borders. Of course they didn't last – they didn't last as long as grass.'

His delicate beech-leaf constructions were almost purely artistic expressions, if it is possible, as Jean Dubuffet proposed, to create art without an artistic ego. There is no tradition of utilitarian leaf-use in the Western Isles of Scotland. Apart from anything else, there are very few trees of any kind in the Uists. When he wove grass, Angus was drawing on centuries
of native craft. When he wove leaves and grass together he was striking out on his own into a form which was recreational and decorative. Angus MacPhee did not see his work in that way, but Angus MacPhee was not like other men. He was neither ashamed nor proud of his creations; he merely disregarded them. That did not make his constructions accidental. Everything he fashioned from leaves or grass was as carefully planned and deliberately executed as the work of a professional sculptor. He just perceived it in a different light. Once it was finished, he had no further interest in what he had made. His focus was then wholly transferred to his next project.

It would therefore have been of little interest to Angus MacPhee to learn that when he made flip-flop sandals or mysterious deep pouches from leaves, he was foreshadowing the work of reputable commercial artists. Andy Goldsworthy grew up in the West Riding of Yorkshire. As a teenager in the 1960s he often worked as a farm labourer. Although Goldsworthy studied fine art at Bradford College of Art and Preston Polytechnic, he would later credit such bucolic experiences as picking potatoes with the inspiration for his ‘environmental art'.