Art reviews: Landmarks: Border Voices | Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival

An exhibition showcasing the three-way collaboration between artist Alexander Moffat, poet Alan Riach and landscape painter Ruth Nicol makes a strong case for the importance of the Borders in Scotland’s cultural development, writes Susan Mansfield

Landmarks - Border Voices: Alexander Moffat, Ruth Nicol, Alan Riach, Hawick Museum ★★★★

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, various venues, Hawick ★★★★

Hawick can seem a long way from anywhere to the driver stuck behind a tractor on the A698. But the importance of the Borders in Scotland’s cultural development is strongly argued in Landmarks - Border Voices, the new iteration of the three-way collaboration between artist Alexander Moffat, poet Alan Riach and contemporary landscape painter Ruth Nicol.

Central to this show is a trio of figures, Hugh MacDiarmid, who grew up in Langholm and spent his closing years at Brownsbank near Biggar, Hawick-born songwriter and composer Francis George Scott, who taught MacDiarmid at Langholm Academy, and painter William Johnstone, Scott’s cousin, who grew up on a farm near Selkirk. All three, together and separately, were important figures in the Scottish cultural renaissance of the 1930s which was intertwined with the stirrings of the movement for Scottish independence.

Courtesy of the artist

In paintings and poems, Moffat and Riach call them “the Border Guards”: “three on the line,” Riach writes, “defending the border”, shoring up Scotland’s own version of modernism which made its own independent links with the rest of the world. In Moffat’s paintings, Border Guards I and II, they seem to merge into (or emerge from) the mountainous landscape, taking their place in the nation’s mythology.

This is Moffat’s wider project, which continues with portraits of MacDiarmid at home in Brownsbank, and with Scott and Norman MacCaig, and in works like his monumental group portrait, Scotland’s Voices, bringing together those most associated with the folk revival.

Riach’s poems, which accompany the paintings, add more detail: MacDiarmid, living in a cottage with no indoor running water, corresponding with Yevtushenko and Ginsberg.

Nicol’s paintings add another dimension as she explores in her own way landscapes around Langholm, Hawick, Selkirk and Ancrum. Nicol works in a particular way, painting expressively, then drawing over it using strong, graphic lines. Her work is strongest when she’s able to work at scale and explore textures; the largest work here is a huge diptych, Minto Hills and Farmland form Ancrum to Denholm. In other large paintings like From Denholm to Ancrum and Summer - The Roman Road to Brownsbank Farm from Brownsbank Cottage, she describes a patchwork of richly coloured fields and narrow roads, rising to hills in the distance.

It’s particularly interesting to see two paintings by Johnstone himself: Ploughed Field (c. 1963) and his portrait of MacDiarmid, as fresh and alive as anything here. Working in a style akin to abstract expressionism decades before Jackson Pollock, he is one of the most interesting Scottish artists of the 20th century, who lived and taught in London and in the US, though his visual world was shaped by the landscape of the Borders. A larger exhibition of his work - if any gallery could rise to such a thing - would be well worth seeing.

A still from Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film | Courtesy of the Alchemy Festival

Meanwhile, in early May, the town of Hawick briefly becomes the epicentre of the world of artists’ film, as it hosts the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. Now in its 15th iteration, Alchemy, under the direction of Michael Pattison and Rachael Disbury, offers thoughtfully curated programmes of short films, selected features and an impressive group of film-related exhibitions over a long weekend.

Alchemy has an egalitarian approach which doesn’t hold much truck with premieres, but one of this year’s hot tickets was the world premiere of On Weaving, a festival commission by Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn, surely the closest Scotland has to an artists’-film power couple. They focus on High Sunderland, the modernist house designed by Peter Womersley for fashion designer Bernat Klein and his wife Margaret in the hills above Selkirk, now home to architecture and design historians Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton.

As the 16mm camera captures gorgeous light filtering through its floor-to-ceiling windows, blurring the boundaries of inside and outside, we see Juliet and Paul working, learning Hungarian, setting the table, talking about the Bauhaus. These gentle, free-associative sections are juxtaposed with footage shot in one of Hawick’s remaining knitwear factories, all mechanised buzzing and clacking.

While part of its work supports films made locally (this year’s festival began with a preview of Mark Lyken’s Rum an Milk, a feature about Hawick’s Common Riding) Alchemy is also determinedly international. Venezuela was a focus this year, with a selection of works by Adriana Vila Guevara and a screening of Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 film Araya, about workers in the country’s salt mines.

Kamal Aljafari’s A Fidai Film is a reconstruction of Palestine’s film archive after the Palestine Research Center in Beirut was plundered by the Israeli army in 1982. Meditating on the loss of an archive, Aljafari began to collect and stitch together fragments of found film through the lens of what he called “the camera of the dispossessed”. It’s a moving, at times harrowing, watch, written through with anger in its edgy soundtrack and blood red redactions of captioning added by the Israelis.

In the exhibitions programme, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s The Diary of A Sky reflects on how the airspace above Beirut has been regularly violated by Israeli drones and aircraft. During the pandemic, when skies fell silent around the world, the roar of jets over the city became so commonplace it became part of ordinary life. His film essay reflects on this noise pollution, documents flight hours and tries to sift the truth from the conspiracy theories: all the metaphorical noise about the subject. When relative silence arrived in 2023, he points out, it was only because the same aircraft were now bombing Gaza.

Several of the short films capture vividly the sense of another country: Weipeng Huang’s Happy New Year contrasts the large-scale state-run celebrations for Chinese New Year with the modest festivities of his own family; Jolene Mok offers a fresh vision of her home city of Hong Kong in black and white, and Arjuna Keshvani-Ham’s Radicle City offers an impressively nuanced exploration of the colonial legacy in Bangalore through the story of its gardens. Hope Strickland’s film, A River Holds A Perfect Memory, shifts between Lancashire and Jamaica, taking a remarkably poignant look at the histories of industrialisation and enslavement.

A still from A River Holds a Perfect Memory | Courtesy of the Alchemy Festival

Finding ways to relate to or explore one’s ancestral homeland, family or cultural history was a recurring theme. Cumha, by Elena Horgan, is a beautiful exploration in words and images of the artist’s shifting relationship to the Irish language. In Adura Baba Mi (My Father’s Prayer) Juliana Kasumu started off exploring her parents’ connection to their native Nigeria through their church, The Celestial Church of Christ, and ended up with a more intimate story than she expected.

Jules Leaño’s Inheritance is a letter to her Filipina mother exploring the difficulty of putting together the puzzle of the past, particularly across different languages and Lithuanian artist Martyna Ratnik takes a gently surreal approach to a similar theme in She’s Waiting for the Sunset.

In a piece titled for the first words of a dream world, Scottish filmmaker Bobbi Cameron brings together elements of her own Celtic shamanic practice with landscapes from the beautiful Isle of Seil and her experience of caring for her elderly grandparents. Her film was shown at last year’s Glasgow International, as was Owain Train McGilvray’s Seeing Red, a psychedelic tribute to a now-vanished queer bar in North Wales.

Michael Hanna’s Once A Blue Always A Red, based on conversations with Merseyside taxi drivers about football, was both telling and funny, as was Beth Fox’s 12 Lemons, about being a Deliveroo courier during the pandemic. Isabel Barfod’s How Much Air Lungs Can Hold is a thoughtful deep-dive (no pun intended) into Blackness and swimming.

Other films linger in the memory: Yuyan Wang’s Green Grey Black Brown, about the construction of worlds and the destruction of environments accompanied by a mesmerising slowed-down version of Yes’s prog-rock hit, Owner of A Lonely Heart; Crimson D M Lily’s trippy Tai a Mynyddeodd, made entirely in Welsh, with Welsh-speaking band Adwaith; Louis Scantlebury’s charming sock puppet in Seek Beyond; Olive Jones’s See and Don’t See, a vulnerable exploration of young single motherhood.

From carefully narrated film-poems to the wordless and abstract, digital, analogue and mixed format, from a tale of Algerian mountain spirits to a nine-minute single shot of parrots in flight, Alchemy celebrates film which pushes at the edges of content and form - with not a little magic along the way.

Landmarks - Border Voices, until 23 June; Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, run ended.