Feature by Giles Sutherland
Ruth Macdougall: Taking the Elephant Test
13 Oct 2010 in Highland, Visual Arts & Crafts
GILES SUTHERLAND reflects on the work of artist Ruth Macdougall in Sutherland.
“At the heart of my work is the engagement and participation of those communities amongst whom I live. As a primary source of information and guidance, I rely on evolving relationships and subtle collaborations to arrive at a work that not only tells a story but also characterises the community that tells and retells that story.” Ruth Macdougall
Elephant Test Poster
THE ARTIST Ruth Macdougall was born in Glasgow in 1981, and studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Art (ALBA) and Universidad Catholica de Chile in Santiago before graduating from Glasgows School of Arts department of Environmental Art in 2004. In 2007 she was appointed to a two-year residency at Timespan Heritage Centre in Helmsdale, Sutherland, where she worked with local young people under a programme entitled Ours, as well as developing her own practice.
Previous to her Timespan residency — which was funded by Partners and The Paul Hamlyn Foundation — Macdougall worked in the community of Skerray, on the north coast of Sutherland, as an artist-in-residence under the auspices of the Mackay Country cultural project. She has also worked in Zambia and China. She is, therefore, not only well-travelled, but also well-positioned in her ability to contextualise her own art in relationship to local, national and international practices and standards.
Elephant Test (Photo - Ruth Macdougall)
The term “elephant test” — which may be unfamiliar to many readers — is defined as “a situation in which an idea or thing is hard to describe, but instantly recognisable when spotted”. Macdougall has used the curious phrase as a title of a book which documents her Timespan residency.
Although the term is apparently applied most frequently in legal contexts, it has been appropriated by Macdougall to describe the peculiar mixture of happenstance and circumstance which led to her undertaking an almost undefinable, consciously indeterminate art project based around a mythical elephant journeying across the mountain ranges of north-west Sutherland.
The basis for such an unlikely happening was a series of photographs uncovered by Macdougall in the Timespan archive. Much of the archive itself is derived from donated material, often with unknown or incomplete provenance. The photographs, taken by an anonymous photographer in Helmsdale around the turn of the 19th century, show a llama, a camel and an elephant — all in a setting of incomparable incongruity.
Elephant Test (Photo - Ruth Macdougall)
In one of these images, the elephant, Bosko (as he was subsequently discovered to be named), can be seen approaching two children — one, an older boy, is laughing. In the tip of his trunk the animal holds a shimmering disk — perhaps a plate or even a mirror. In the background (which also appears to show both the camel and the llama), can be seen the beast’s shackles — for he is tethered to a post.
Quite by chance Macdougall discovered the identity of the elephant and the travelling circus which was responsible for bringing him to Helmsdale from a guest at an event in Timespan. Mitchel Miller, editor of the The Drouth magazine, was taken aback to see images of his great, great grandparents’ circus, Pinder Ord’s Royal Number 1. This travelling show had plied the highways and byways of the Scottish highlands, stopping in Helmsdale on its route north.
Such a strange co-incidence prompted Macdougall to follow her instincts and to adapt a previously conceived artwork — which had not come to fruition — in favour of this new deus ex machina. The unrealised work, putatively entitled Coracle, involved Macdougall fashioning the eponymous boat-cum-shelter from local ash and hide and traversing the county of Sutherland, from coast to coast, in a more-or-less straight line, crossing whatever obstacles lay in the way.
Bosko the Elephant
Such an approach had been gleaned from Macdougall’s training in environmental art, originating from an exercise known as dérive. This technique consists of drawing a circle on a map and following its route, ‘on the ground’, precisely; the object is to require the participants to negotiate access to public and private space, thus fulfilling one of the basic tenets of environmental art.
As Macdougall explains: “…my artwork is socially engaged…involving people and other artists, collaborating with them, getting them to participate, fostering a sense of co-authorship. Most of my work is ‘site-specific’ so…I am working in somebody else’s space, in contexts which are particular to that area and are quite personal to a lot of people….that is an element which has run through my work since art school…environmental art is public artwork … you are working outside the gallery space in other peoples’ territory, so there is always a negotiation of space…”
Macdougall’s final work, Escaped Circus Elephant Lives the Dream, is documented as a short, eight-minute film and can be described as a site-specific intervention, part-spectacle, part-happening, with roots in the history of performance art, Absurdist theatre, and even, perhaps, commedia dell’arte.
Just as Joseph Beuys used the ‘canvas’ of Rannoch Moor in which to create part of his Celtic Kinloch Rannoch Scottish Symphony in 1970, so Macdougall uses the ancient flat-topped mountain Arkle as the backdrop and setting of her film narrative.
In a loose narrative structure we follow the ‘elephant’s’ escape (from the Helmsdale Icehouse, for all the world like a prison dungeon), and subsequent free wandering high up on the mountainside. The elephant’s golden mask and poncho were made by Macdougall herself — in themselves important pointers to Macdougall’s evolving practice which, increasingly over the two-year term of her residency, has involved her at a physical level with the making of objects.
Helmsdale Ice House
Such an approach to art – although well accepted in the European and international mainstream – remains, by and large, alien and vaguely threatening to most communities. Here discussion and exposure to the ‘avant-garde’ is often limited, if encountered at all. Such are the obstacles which any ‘non-traditional’ artist is required to overcome if he or she wishes to engage in meaningful dialogue about their own work as precursor to wider communal artistic involvement.
It is part of Macdougall’s significant achievement that slowly and reassuringly she overcame prejudices and doubts to involve local young people (they came to be known collectively by the ironic title, Spanners) in fruitful, collaborative work, using the practices and methodology of environmental art as the foundations for their efforts.
Part of this process involved the gradual exposure of the Helmsdale young people to her own work. Macdougall’s choice of Bosko, who had many years previously visited the village, was key to her success – a local event with local personality made identification easier and more direct.
Macdougall initially gained the young people’s support, trust and enthusiasm (during out-of-school hours) by establishing a film club, in which she allowed them to choose the features they wished to view and discuss. This led on to a film-making workshop, other projects and, ultimately, group visits to other parts of the county as well as different venues in Orkney.
One such project, which took place at a time of slow decline in the retail sector, involved the Spanners in a collaboration with local shop-keepers in what Macdougall describes as a “vinyl intervention spanning the length of Helmsdale’s main street”.
Macdougall adds: “The kids wanted to do some kind of installation and environmental art project. By this time they were aware of what this meant because I had given them a presentation on my work and the work of other artists and they were really up for it. It was a Christmas-themed piece of work… based around Santa Claus and his reindeer. Each child chose a window on the main street and they also chose a deer…The kids had a meeting with the shop owners to get to know them…The whole thing was very positive.
“The kids were making friends with each other, sometimes with other kids with whom normally they would have had nothing to do…they were collaborating. None of these projects were about the kids working by themselves to take something home to their parents…. It gave everyone something to be proud about and brought the community together. The shop owners asked for the vinyl to remain after the project had finished.”
Another unique outcome in Macdougall’s two-year period in Helmsdale was the restoration of the Icehouse and its transformation into a viable space for exhibiting art. Working with the sculptor and metal-smith Sam Barlow as well as the Helmsdale youth arts group participants, Macdougall transformed this unusual structure, which is situated adjacent to the old Telford bridge on the south side of the river, opening up access, installing electricity and fashioning a decorative, functioning doorway and window.
The building, which is owned by Sutherland Estates, had been part of the community for decades, was given a new lease of life, as a valuable space for arts-based activity. As such, it forms a lasting and valuable legacy of Macdougall’s residency
It is arguable that such exposure to multiple and various arts-related experiences and the consequent rich pedagogical outcomes could not have been achieved through any other methodology. Macdougall’s view is clearly an expanded concept of art and its practices and outcomes – what Joseph Beuys labelled ‘social sculpture’. While Macdougall’s type of residency is by no means unique, its relative rarity in the Highland context makes it a model on which to build successfully for the future.
(Ruth Macdougall quotations are from an interview with this writer in September 2009).
© Giles Sutherland, 2009
