Hallaig Page 3
Hallaig continued.....
This tapestry, ’Hallaig’ was inspired by the poem of that name by gaelic poet Sorlay Maclean (footnote 1). I first came across the poem as a soundscape on 'Bothy Culture' a music album by the late Martyn Bennett ( footnote 2). The poet reads his work in a landscape of evocative sounds. The first listening reduced me to tears for the lost world remembered with such passionate longing within the poem. It seemed to capture exactly what I sense but can’t quite express when I walk in similar abandoned villages in my area of the Highlands. I often found myself walking in the hills reciting sections of it or puzzling over the shifting layers of meaning behind the words. This is exactly the kind of trigger that moves me to make my tapestries. The poem haunted me for at least a year before I decided to use it as design source material. I had made a few collages and layered images to illustrate the poem without thinking of them in terms of a tapestry, but this was somehow unsatisfying. I then decided that I would make a series of small tapestries to illustrate different themes from the poem but I gave up after several unsuccessful attempts. The poem vibrates with powerful emotions and has entwined themes which I simply can't begin to express on a small scale.
To help me get started with the design, I decided to focus on one particular stanza which talks about the arrogant strutting plantation pines outgrowing and swallowing up the native birch trees and how the author longs for the birch wood to return. I had spent a long time imagining this landscape before I realized that the view from my studio window of native hardwood trees against a backdrop of plantation pines, is the landscape of the poem. This immediately brought a second more personal layer of meaning into my design.
'The window is nailed and boarded through which I saw the West and my love is at the burn of Hallaig, a birch tree.' The first line of the poem gives me the broad compositional structure for the tapestry. I have used a darker frame round a lighter rectangle with a slim horizontal band of dark blue at the top. The whole composition is divided by a much lighter narrow vertical strip. This simple vertical/horizontal structure quotes woven structures of warp and weft and is like part of a tartan or checked cloth. The frame denotes a sense of the boarded up window. The inner rectangle represents the past and the outer frame the present. The light vertical slash is the young love, likened to a young tree, who haunts the whole poem.