The Silent Weaver (21 page)

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 give 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.

It was a coincidence that they both came from Iochdar, but it was not a coincidence that they both came from South Uist. They were among the last practitioners of a demotic Celtic art which, if it was to be found anywhere in the twentieth century, would be found on that island.

Celtic fantasy, and the art that it produced, were rooted in the patterns and cycles of the natural world. The Celtic imagination wrestled with the infinite implausibilities of life. The Celtic ascendency of Roman and pre-Roman Britain, whose metalwork, illustrations and sculptures have become regarded as their islands' most sublime contribution to the art of the world, dealt chiefly in abstractions. They were more than capable of representative art, but representative art did not adequately illuminate their vision. They were too mysterious for the modern world, and sometimes too mysterious for their own good.

‘You must not laugh at us Celts,' wrote the Breton philosopher Ernest Renan in 1883.

We shall never build a Parthenon, for we have not the marble; but we are skilled in reading the heart and soul; we have a secret of our own for inserting the probe; we bury our hands in the entrails of a man, and, like the witches in Macbeth, withdraw them full of the secrets of infinity. The great
secret of our art is that we can make our very failing appear attractive. The Breton race has in its heart an everlasting source of folly . . .

It is impossible to give an idea of how much goodness and even politeness and gentle manners there is in these ancient Celts . . . The unselfishness and the practical incapacity of these good people were beyond conception. One proof of their nobility was that whenever they attempted to engage in any commercial business they were defrauded. Never in the world's history did people ruin themselves with a lighter or more careless heart, keeping up a running fire of paradox and quips. Never in the world were the laws of common sense and sound economy more joyously trodden under foot.

The Celtic race, said Renan, ‘has worn itself out in mistaking dreams for realities.'

‘Balance, measure, and patience,' the sensible English writer Matthew Arnold had proposed to Renan,

these are the eternal conditions, even supposing the happiest temperament to start with, of high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had.

Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness, patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and emotions.

The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of measure; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing.

In the comparatively petty art of ornamentation, in rings, brooches, crosiers, relic-cases, and so on, he has done just
enough to show his delicacy of taste, his happy temperament; but the grand difficulties of painting and sculpture, the prolonged dealings of spirit with matter, he has never had patience for.

Responding in 1897 to both Renan and Arnold, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats wrote:

Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine and changeable.

They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness.

Quoting the medieval Welsh legends of the Mabinogion, Yeats drew closer to the world and work of Angus MacPhee: ‘“They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect”; and one finds it in the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful, they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame.'

The people who came to share the British Isles with the Celts, who pushed those wanderers to the western seaboard and islands of the archipelago, who produced artists such as William Shakespeare and John Keats – those people also regarded the natural world, said W.B. Yeats. But ‘they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts.

‘They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten the ancient religion.'

Renan, Arnold and Yeats were agreed upon at least one indisputable fact. Celts were not classical Greeks or Romans. Whatever their respective merits, Celtic art was not part of the representative Graeco-Roman tradition which for two millennia monopolised European culture even within the old Celtic territories. Regardless of the mental condition of its creators, Celtic art was antithetical to the classical ethos from which Jean Dubuffet and scores of his illustrious contemporaries struggled to extract themselves. Celtic art had its disciplines, its measure and its balance, but they were not strictures. They did not dictate the form; they were subordinate to the form. Celtic art derived from a less sensible and unregimented human reverie. It honoured the colours and shapes of dreams.

However Angus MacPhee viewed the wind and rain, the sun and racing clouds, the tumultuous ocean, the bent grass, the leaves and the small, brave flowers of his surroundings, it was not with ‘the affection a man feels for the garden where he has . . . thought pleasant thoughts'. His instincts, and those
of his perennially independent people, were impulsive, witty, inventive and frequently fantastic.

He was out of his time in the second half of the twentieth century, but he won back the past. He translated vegetation that had flourished in the Highlands of Scotland before any human civilisation into cultural artefacts which by his lifetime were manufactured mainly from rubber, leather, plastic, metal and artificial fibres. His motives for making his burning tree were unfathomable, but make it and burn it he did.