The Silent Weaver (20 page)

In the early 1990s Donnie Munro was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. ‘At that time,' he said, ‘I first came into contact with Joyce Laing. I had links with the Talbot Rice Centre, and some knowledge of the art and music therapy work which was taking place through Edinburgh University Settlement – the social action centre that works for disabled and disadvantaged individuals.'

So it was that this famous Gaelic singer first saw Angus MacPhee's work when it was exhibited in Edinburgh.

I walked into the main exhibition area in the company of Joyce Laing and was confronted by these incredible creations suspended in glass cases like a surreal archaeological find.

They were, indeed, as something of an archaeological revelation, like artefacts from another age, the intricately
woven garments uniquely fashioned using rough grass, wool and beech leaves to create human garments of mythological proportions.

Angus MacPhee created, said Munro,

out of the natural found materials, work of incredible intricacy and power, the techniques which would have been learned in his Uist boyhood surfacing like an archaeology of the mind, a point of contact, a realism of nature, amidst the uncertain truth of mental illness.

The objects were in themselves visually powerful as they invited enquiry, searching and a sense of wonderment at some greater space, a world where the ordinary was elevated to greatness . . .

Angus MacPhee's work is a powerful evocation of a world which, in his life, was fast disappearing, the love for the horse, the rough rope, the harness, the mythology of the gigantic heroes of a Celtic past, the powerful omnipresence of man and nature locked in struggle and permanent partnership.

There is filmed footage of people looking at Angus MacPhee's woven objects. Their faces suggest that most of them share Donnie Munro's wonderment. Their first response is to stop still and gape. Their second response is recognition, at which point they smile knowingly, often secretly to themselves. Their third is to examine and admire.

The main garments – the tunic, the trousers, the boots – can only be appreciated in person, in real time. Still or moving film does not pass on their power. The sheer size of them is compelling. Baggy and misshapen with the passing of the years, they nonetheless convey a strange conviction. They are unmistakably what they are – a tunic, trousers, a pair of boots – but equally obviously not those things. Tunics are made
from wool, trousers from cloth, boots from leather. Outside the extraordinary world of Angus MacPhee, none of them are made from woven grass to fit a well-proportioned eight-foot man.

If they first provoke the question of what on earth they are, which is relatively quickly answered, they secondly insist that the viewer discovers how they were made. That takes more time, and is full of surprises. Finally and most lastingly, they make the watcher wonder why. There is no single answer to the final riddle. Their creator made them because he needed to make them. They fell into his head from the sky, and he could not relax until they had been given form. We know where they came from. They came from an ancestral tradition of weaving marram grass and heather. But we do not know where they were going, and neither apparently did Angus MacPhee. He was occupying and amusing himself. If he incidentally amused and intrigued you too, he was an unassuming man who had no objection to that.

The art establishment is equally uncertain – almost as uncertain as was Angus MacPhee – about the status of his work. It is still argued that unconscious art cannot be art; that art may only be created by an artist who sets out to make art. Angus MacPhee proves that to be a dubious assertion. Angus MacPhee might not have called his discipline art, and certainly placed no material value on it, but he knew what he was doing. He plucked grass, flowers and leaves deliberately, to make them into tunics, hats, sandals or swallow-tailed coats. As they were not made for exhibition – as they were entirely disposable – they were never given the polish of a professional. His leaf creations are unlike the leaf creations of Andy Goldsworthy partly because they have faded, and partly because they are not
addressed to a gallery audience. In skill, craft and imagination they are equal.

They are at least equal. Angus MacPhee had natural artistic ability and artistic vision, or the terms have no meaning. He was not trained by an art school to finish and treasure his work, and he operated out of doors in the grounds of a Highland mental hospital rather than in a studio. He had only his fingers and a piece of fence wire, some snagged wool, leaves and grass, but he worked as best as he could for 50 years.

His own opinion of what he did is interesting, but should not define it. Others are allowed to make their own judgements. If we are free to recognise as being dreadful much of the art which is self-consciously created by people who call themselves artists, the converse is possible. Good art may be created by somebody who never thought of himself as an artist, not least because his sense of self was shattered by illness. He will not give us neat and pretty work. As Jean Dubuffet said, he will give us raw art.

Three years later, in 2000, Angus MacPhee's objects were exhibited again at Taigh Chearsabhagh in North Uist. ‘Many people of Angus MacPhee's generation,' said the gallery's manager, a North Uist man called Norman MacLeod, ‘who came from a crofting and fishing background in the islands were able to weave grass with their hands. What makes Angus extraordinary is the question of what went on inside his mind when he created these works of art, and why he created them.

‘They baffle some people. When we had the first exhibition I had to insure the exhibition in transit from Joyce Laing. The insurance company could not get their heads around insuring grass. Eventually we came to an agreement that it was an art object and not just grass that we were insuring.'

To accompany the 2000 exhibition Taigh Chearsabhagh published a collector's item in the shape of a short, lavishly illustrated book by Joyce Laing about Angus MacPhee's work titled
Weaver of Grass
. ‘Angus MacPhee,' concluded Joyce Laing, ‘has become a legend of our time.'

In 2003 Joyce Laing opened her own permanent exhibition at Pittenweem in Fife. The Art Extraordinary Gallery contained the fruits of her collection since that winter's day in 1977 when, at the prompting of Tom McGrath, she had caught the train to Inverness and been told by a taxi driver that there was a man in the hospital who made things from grass. Adam Christie's stone statuettes were there, and Antonia Jabloner's many swirling shapes and colours, and Lachlan Kilmichael's psychedelic landscapes, and the innocent flora of Mrs McGilp, and the work of a score of other original and wholly unpretentious artists.

At the back of the Art Extraordinary Gallery, louring over the other exhibits like a friendly ogre, hung the work of the first and finest of them all – the polo-necked grass tunic of Angus MacPhee, in the company of his trousers, his boots, his pouches and all the other creations which Joyce Laing had succeeded in saving from the bonfires at Craig Dunain.

In 2004 the film-maker Nick Higgins, having read Joyce Laing's
Weaver of Grass
, made a haunting 25-minute documentary about ‘the quiet big man from South Uist who wove clothes from grass'. It was titled
Hidden Gifts, The Mystery of Angus MacPhee
and won international acclaim.
Hidden Gifts
was nominated for a Royal Television Society Programme Award, was an Official Selection at the 14th Parnu International Documentary and Anthropology Film Festival in Estonia, was an Official Selection at the Monterey
International Film Festival in Mexico, and won the award for the Best Documentary Film at the Britspotting '05 Festival in Germany and Switzerland.

In 2006 the people of Switzerland had the chance to see Angus MacPhee's work. It was flown by Swissair to the place where it all began, to join for a short period Jean Dubuffet's seminal collection at the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne. ‘They did an exhibition of textiles by outsider artists,' said Joyce Laing. ‘A lot of Angus's work went. The big tunic, the boots, vests, halters, pony things, satchels . . . I went to the opening. Everything was of such beautiful quality. There was an amazing wedding dress made of string by a woman in a mental hospital. And when Angus's material was returned, it was so perfectly wrapped and packaged. They know what they're doing in Lausanne!'

Joyce Laing once commented that other artists, working in all media, responded viscerally to Angus MacPhee's work. In 1997 Eilidh, Fiona and Gillian MacKenzie, three sisters from the largest Hebridean island of Lewis who formed the Gaelic folk group MacKenzie, released their first album,
Camhanach
. It contained a song called ‘A' Fighe le Feur' (‘Knitting Grass'):

In 1998 the Scottish poet Brian Johnstone wrote the following poem inspired by the life and work of Angus MacPhee, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was subsequently published in
Edinburgh Review
.

In 2004 Donnie Munro, who had by then left Runrig to pursue a solo career, released his own song, ‘The Weaver of Grass':

‘On one occasion,' said Munro, ‘while I was introducing the background to the song at a live show in Aberdeen, a voice rang out from the depth of the audience shouting “He was my uncle!” Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to meet up with the source of that cry.'

Craig Dunain Hospital was closed down at the very end of the twentieth century, after 136 years of operation. In 1999 and 2000 the Highland artist John McNaught was commissioned to produce a published visual archive to mark the end of the institution. ‘The book uses 12 stories or anecdotes and uses linocut to illustrate, all printed on Japanese paper,' said McNaught.

It was called ‘Mind Your Head', after a sign above a low door just inside the entrance to Craig Dunain. It was an amazing experience to have access to the building in its final year. We were interested in the effects of the closure on the Highland community, and the archive was as much about the culture
of the Craig as it was hard facts. The written archive was produced by a nurse, Jim Neville, with artwork by myself, and photos by Craig MacKay. Our archive project was featured as part of a Gaelic TV programme in 2001.