The intent of this Masters research project was to explore and represent my identity as a Scottish-Australian through the visual means of collage and printmaking. I investigated diaspora and displacement, the notion of a hand-me-down homeland and an imagined place-based identity. The topic looks back to my grandparents’ arrival in Australia a century ago and considers the adherence to Scottish culture pursued by the following generations.
Through appropriation of a pictorial language common to the Scottish Diaspora I interrogated the role played by romanticism, myth and metaphor in the picturing of a Scottish homeland by the descendants of immigrant Scots and their descendants. I dissected and deconstructed the attributes and handed down aesthetic tastes of Scottish culture. Tartanry – the kitsch in Scottish culture, and Scottishry – the authentic, was discussed in this exegesis in relation to the printed body of work and to yield insights on how attachments can be made to quite false aspects of Scottish history or culture. I examined and visually interrogated the cultural legacies, the photography and artefacts, histories, family narratives and spoken stories, romantic literature, poetry and song, high and low art forms, and passed down skills: all these played part in my imagining and image making. By steeping myself in this imagery, I found that much of my inheritance was a part of a consistent set of tropes and
symbols, readily understood by my demographic.
From the outset of the project, Scottish romanticism was a source for my image making, and I unpacked the various components of it: the home, the noble generous peasant, the sublime, the wild, the perseverant. I worked my compositions to
juxtapose these components and the resulting pictures took on a surreal logic, such that subconscious aspects of diasporic experience were permitted to form new associations. Romantic tropes such as sentimentality, a sense of nostalgia and
melancholy exist in many of the works; so too depression, as plain as the blackness of the ink. Yet there is also a sense of hope and comfort figured in the warmth of an occasional sunrise or sunset and there is a security in the familiar textures of my childhood. There is a sense of contemplation and reverence, also a sense of play, with humour shown in the puns, the compositions, the juxtapositions, albeit a dry and
quiet type of humour. Permeating the works there are truncated fragments of stories made visible. The works are autobiographical, but, they also reflect the Scottish diaspora, my own imagineering working as example of what Basu suggests is part of a diasporic ‘shared imagining of its homeland.’ (Basu 2007 p.92)
There was timeliness to this project. On a personal level a string of family
anniversaries led me to reminisce. There was the marvellous gathering of family in Haddington. There was acknowledgement. A family museum archive now exists and there was a staggering amount published about the Cranstons of Haddington aside from cousin Stuart’s novel. Familiar Ground contributes to this arena by providing the pictorial agglomeration of numerous narrative threads, to bind the relation between landscape, narrative and identity.
The timeliness is also apparent from what I have argued is a contemporary state of revisionism in regards to Scottish art and a current re-emergence of conversation in regard to Scottish identity, brought to the fore during the 2014 Scottish
Independence referendum. This position was supported by reference to the writings of anthropologist Paul Basu and historian Tom Devine. It was clearly defined by the nature of Kelvingrove’s identity exhibition that sought to accept the romanticism but debunk the myth. The revisionism in the Ballarat exhibition shattered colonial myths by presenting a diverse collection of categorized Scottishry to support their claims of the Scots being the makers and shakers of Australia’s colonial past. Most relevant to this research was the dialogue about how ‘a Scottish gaze’ influenced the traditions of landscape portrayal in Australia. As in the Kelvingrove and Ballarat exhibitions, my research has dismissed myth: many of my works clearly pinpoint the particular myth involved, whilst still appreciating the sentiment enormously.
In the Field Research series, I weighed the over-romanticised Scotland of my
imagination against the actual home ground experience. In this suite of works, I gave form to my own revisionist stance. While the Familiar Ground seriesemploys the uneasy juxtaposition of collage, the Field Research works depict a more integrated pictorial plane, to configure a balance between psychological and material realities. The ‘Scottish gaze’ as a psychological construct is most evidently a filter for the Field Research art response.
My concluding stance on my printed work is that my gaze, my identity, and perhaps much of my world, is of Scottish invention. Formed from cultural legacy, imagined home and homecoming, Familiar Ground adds to contemporary research into the diasporic condition, the Scottish diaspora and post-colonial Australian art.