'What is contemporary Gaelic culture?

OK, I promise I will stop doing this: pasting entire articles from the Scotsman Journal.

But this one was really interesting.



HEADLINE:

'What is contemporary Gaelic culture? I do not have a clue any more'

Andrew Eaton



Nursing a red wine in Glasgow’s Tramway, Kasia Zych looks anxious. It’s easy to see why. The young photographer only graduated from the city’s art school two years ago and yet, to the envy of friends, she is curating and co-starring in a show in Tramway 2, one of Europe’s biggest contemporary art spaces.



As if following in the footsteps of Douglas Gordon and Christine Borland wasn’t daunting enough, Flower of the West is so open to misunderstanding that discussing it is like negotiating a series of trapdoors. It was commissioned by An Lochran, a charity set up to promote Gaelic culture - specifically, to establish a Gaelic arts centre in Glasgow - yet none of the six artists involved speaks Gaelic. It is named after a Runrig songbook, yet the organisers seem oddly reluctant to mention the band in press releases. Zych’s attempts to shed light occasionally do the exact opposite. "We’ve had a lot of discussions about what contemporary Gaelic art is," she frowns. "I don’t have a clue any more." Asked about Runrig’s absence from the publicity, she says blushingly that it might "put people off", before hastily saying lots of nice things about the book. I’m guessing she’s not a fan.



Then again, this is what happens when you break rules; and, in that respect, Flower of the West could be a fascinating show. What is it? According to An Lochran, it will "develop a contemporary dialogue about Gaelic culture" and consist of work by six artists - four from Northern Ireland, one Scottish, one English but based in North Uist. It will explore "issues of place, belonging, territory and cultural identity", and tie in with a gig later in the year at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, also inspired by the Runrig book. The exhibition was supposed to be there too, but was later moved to Tramway.



The difficulties begin with that word "contemporary". Zych worries a lot about what "contemporary Gaelic culture" is, and whether she’s representing it properly. While the artists use many modern methods - film, video projections, photography - all, she says, "have quite a personal relationship to landscape. There’s also a strong element of history and belonging." Most of the six grew up in remote places before moving on and, Zych says, "there’s quite a nostalgic, romantic layer to a lot of the work". Her own contribution will be an hour-long film in which fishing boats slowly appear on the horizon of an otherwise featureless ocean. "It had a lot to do with my childhood, waiting for my dad (a fisherman) to come home. You’d wait until the dots appear and try to guess which boat was his." The sea features heavily elsewhere in the show: Shauna McMullan will build a 22-metre long sculpture of a coastline; Maria McCavana will contribute abstract drawings of beach scenes. Zych says everyone was amazed to discover how well the work fits together.



It probably helped that much bonding was done during a pre-show group outing to North Uist (the show travels there, and to Skye, after its Glasgow run). Zych grew up in County Down, and shared her stories of getting a bus over the Irish border "to get to the most awful nightclubs", only to get turned away because she was underage. "There was probably a better place ten minutes’ up the road, but no, we had to get on a bus," she laughs. "All of us had these same experiences. And what did we end up doing on the first night in North Uist, but take a bus to a ceilidh that took an hour to get there?"



• Flower of the West is at Tramway, Glasgow, 14-23 January



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