Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, January 2009

Kate Whiteford

THE ART of Kate Whiteford, OBE, RSA, concerns itself almost exclusively with the land. In her paintings and prints, she creates seemingly abstract images from observations of the contouring shapes of lines scratched upon the earth or, from another perspective, an approximation of the pictures painted in caves by early man. Her land art, meanwhile, blows this technique up to a larger scale, treating grounds in a manner which considers both aesthetic and archaeological points of view.

With these new Super 8 film works, Whiteford in many ways combines these two sides of her practice, bringing an almost painterly aesthetic to real footage of the land. The key works here are A’Mhointeach/The Moor (2007) and A’Bheinn/The Mountain (2008), each filmed in the Hebrides (the former on the Isle of Lewis, the latter around the Isle of Skye, Raasay, and North and South Uist). This diptych becomes a triptych with a reel of rushes from A’Bheinn/The Mountain, showed alongside the other two films along one wall of flickering light.

In the background, an unspecified soundtrack drones away, sounding like one long, deep cello note drawn out to doomy effect, with some half-heard chatter of Gaelic voices and rushing water in the background. The soundtrack to A’Mhointeach/The Moor (which nevertheless encroaches on the space of the other works), takes us back to a time before language, when the sound of nature was the predominant vocabulary.

Likewise, the three films are largely free of human intervention. Their treated, grainy, sepia tone suggests these are relic visions from a time before technology could have even provided for their filming, and the eerie contrast of light rivers against sandpaper-rough hills, of water lapping against an indistinct, cropped-off coast and of peaks made small against an oppressive sky celebrate – in subtler terms than invoking such a cliché suggests – the poetry of nature.

In a real sense, the poetry of the region runs through these pieces. Shot from the air, A’Mhointeach/The Moor details a flight the Glasgow-born Whiteford took into Stornoway after many years away, and is influenced by Murdo Macfarlane’s poem ‘Chunnaic mi uam a Bheinn/I Saw at a Distance the Hill’.

A’Bheinn/The Mountain takes its cues from the works of Sorley Maclean, Mary MacLean and Donald John MacDonald, while the other part of the show – a series of five watercolours collectively entitled Ag eadar-theangachadh no Mona/Translating the Peat – emerged from walks across the moors of Staffin with the poet Myles Campbell, whose piece they are named after.

White lines across black backgrounds, they could be abstract aerial photographs in negative. Or perhaps, if you squint a little closer, intended designs which hint at the basic functions of life; hands lying together, a pair of sperm, a carrier for water.

© David Pollock, 2009

film,visualarts,highland,westernisles