Hallaig Page 4
Hallaig Continued/4
'In Screapadal of my people, where Norman and big Hector were, their daughters and their sons are a wood going up beside the stream.' The poet recalls place names and personal names, calling up memories of communities and people who are no longer there. Especially poignant is the image of the young people, the lost future of that community, turned to trees. I describe this in the central panel as faint outlines of houses and field walls overlaid by birch trees.
'Proud tonight the pine cocks crowing on the top of Cnoc an Ra, straight their backs in the moonlight - they are not the wood I love. I will wait for birch wood until it comes up by the cairn, untill the whole ridge from Beinn na Lice will be under its shade. If it does not. I will go down to Hallaig to the Sabbath of the dead, where the people are frequenting, every single generation gone'. This stanza gives me the main narrative content of the tapestry and fills in more visual detail. It gives me the plantation pine trees of the present in the outer portion of the composition. It gives me a horizon and the shapes of the treetops against the night sky. It introduces the birch wood as a metaphor for the lost populations of the central section and vain hopes of their return, but the birches can't compete with the pines that enclose and outgrow them. The last line evokes the constant theme of the whole poem, a sense of a present inhabited by the past.
Having more or less fixed the visual form of the composition, I wanted to see how I could heighten the emotional and magical aspects which come so strongly through the words. I eventually decided to use surface texture to denote these extra sensory perceptions. I doubled the warps and used much thicker weft for the foliage of the trees to give an intaglio quality to the surface which I hope invokes the altered reality of moonlight through trees...of sensing rather than seeing the branches in the darkness, the need for heightened perceptions, stealth and perhaps an awareness of danger. Under the pine trees I have added strands of black linen and natural flax to the surface to create the scratchy texture of the heather which covers the ground in pine plantations and to somehow evoke the sound of walking over it. More subtly I have used the harder materials of linen and cotton for the birch tree trunks to increase the contrast with the background wool. Because the tapestry describes night, the colours need to be muted. The palette is limited to the greens of the trees, brown-purples of heather and the dark blue sky. Only the birch trunks are pale.....the ghosts of the people, the sons and daughters standing by the stream.