Peter Culley
The Ghost Whisperer: Myfanwy's Time in the Woods
- Myfanwy MacLeod: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
- Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
- 20 January to 19 March 2006
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.1
For an artist as acutely conscious of (and thus, perhaps, more acutely subject to) the tropes of popular culture as Myfanwy MacLeod, her three month Glenfiddich-sponsored residency in the semi-wilds near Dufftown north of Aberdeen in Scotland was a ready-made scenario, impossible to avoid—an artist “in the midst of life’s journey,” seeking Thoreauvian “simplicity” beyond the brutal machinations and stratifications of her home turf, moves into a landscape which turns out to be populated with ghosts. Less a Stephen King novel than a movie of the week circa 1973, with Suzanne Pleshette or Shirley Jones pecking out a novel in pastel wine country while Satanists (Ernest Borgnine, Mildred Natwick) gather in nearby barns. The first of these ghosts is, of course, the one both tourist and hermit seek to escape, the immovable self with its crochets and endless, muttered, banal narrativizing, represented photographically in MacLeod’s installation both as a sheet-covered Halloween ghost self-portrait and a pair of floating grey eyes, warily peering through a mail slot. Abjectly standing on a plinth in a gallery the last-minute Halloween ghost reflects perhaps an understandable impatience with the dual personae of funny girl and second generation Vancouver conceptualist which, even if true, would certainly benefit from having a veil drawn over them for a few months, with the possibility of new selves road-tested against the artificial but blankish backdrop of a “residency.” But the mail-slot eyes peek both into an abode of fear and slightly to the right of a gallery audience, which may or may not be willing to tolerate such metamorphoses, however temporary. To MacLeod, the realm of the dead and the art world are alike: filled with hungry spirits, offstage whispers, and clammy, invisible hands.
For the first week, whenever I looked out on the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. 2
The Scottish landscape, too, is full of ghosts, and not only the bogies and sheela-na-gig ’s of legend; the dirty little secret of the single malt-and-shortbread imbibing, kilt-wearing “Highlands” is that it is the invention of a triumphant nineteenth-century Lowland/English aristocracy, the by-product of the displacement of millions to make way for sheep. In order for the “landscape” to be produced, its actual inhabitants had to be removed. The process was so comparatively sudden and complete—the processes of recovery so slow—that great tracts of northern Scotland still bear visible scars. The treeless moors dotted with picturesquely abandoned buildings are (like most landscapes—just look out your window) the visible record of a series of financial calculations as pitilessly detailed as a ledger book. But Macleod’s evocations of “nameless” dread in the images of a ruined cottage close to where she was staying—ominous corners, half-open doors, an overall sense of premature and hasty abandonment—seem generated by psychological drift, by dread itself, as much as any urge to point out the destructiveness of capitalism’s “hidden hand.” And although the meticulous orange drawings—derived from a “public service” website—of BC marijuana “grow-ops” in the next room depict an economy as radically transformed as was the Highlands (only its prized high-end consumer intoxicant is “BC Bud” instead of single-malt), it is significant that the guttings of bourgeois space they depict have left their exteriors carefully untouched. It is as if the ruins of the New World are chiefly hidden, interior, the suburban dream outwardly all smiles, bright siding covering inner rot. Just visible beneath MacLeod’s stylization is the original images’ drug war invitation to regard the faulty wiring, bent pipes and mould with a mixture of horror and forensic glee, the better to turn in our neighbours before land values sink. On the gallery wall opposite the drawings there even seems to be some mould growing, in unwholesome rusty flakes, as if, spore-like, crime could spread from anonymous basements into the spaces of art by the power of association. In MacLeod’s anti-pastoral the contagion is universal, an itch just under the skin. Grow-ops, Scottish ghosts, and cast-off personae can be suppressed but never eradicated. Abandoning things in the country just doesn’t work. Like pets, objects find their way back, and they’re different.
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About this Article
The Ghost Whisperer: Myfanwy's Time in the Woods was first published in Fillip 3 in Summer 2006. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Notes
image: Myfanwy MacLeod, Ghost (2006), costumed mannequin
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