Book review: The Silent Weaver

Confined to a mental hospital for 50 years, Angus Macphee produced striking examples of outsider art in his mysterious grass sculptures

The Silent Weaver

by Roger Hutchinson

Polygon, £177pp, £8.99

They are amongst the most haunting and mysterious works of contemporary Scottish art: coats, hats, bridals and shoes all made out of woven strands of grass. In some ways they resemble something naive, even childishly innocent; from other angles they seem like impossible relics from a lost pagan past. For objects so clearly perishable, they seem to have a timeless quality. The “grass sculptures” of Angus Macphee are perhaps the best known works of what has been called “outsider art” in Scotland; and the story of their creator is as haunting and mysterious as his creations. Roger Hutchinson, in this well-researched biography, does a fine job in giving the reader the outlines and backgrounds of Macphee’s life. It is also a book with a gaping silence at its heart.

Macphee was born just outside Glasgow in 1916, and grew up on South Uist. His father was an agricultural worker who had left the island looking for work: family tragedies necessitated him returning to Uist, and to a Gaelic culture which had barely changed in a millennium. By all accounts, Macphee thrived on the island. He spoke Gaelic, he worked with the farm animals and was remembered as a polite, clever young man.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Lovat Scots, the last mounted regiment in the British Army. He was stationed in England – and had to sell his horse when it became evident that the new, more technological form of warfare rendered such a regiment an anachronism. The regiment was then moved to the Faroe Islands, politically controlled by Denmark but occupied by the British during the war to counter German naval operations. And something happened to Macphee.

Retrospective medical diagnoses – especially psychological ones – are a hazardous business, and Hutchison is right to stick with what was diagnosed at the time: schizophrenia. Macphee became almost catatonic. He refused to speak and seemed incapable of choice or action.

He was eventually transferred to the mental hospital in Inverness, Craig Dunain, in 1946, and spent nearly the next 50 years there. It was in the grounds of the hospital, and on their therapeutic farm, that he started to weave the strange sculptures on which his fame now rests.

The discovery of Macphee’s art was pure chance. Joyce Laing – who would go on to found Art Extraordinary in Pittenweem – with Tom McGrath, the founder of the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow and a collaborator with Jimmy Boyle, were touring Scotland to look for examples of “Outsider Art”. The term had been coined by the French collector and art-theorist Jean Dubuffet. His phrase was “art brut” – literally “raw art” – and he applied it to the work of individuals with no formal art training who had an almost pathological need to create.

It was a natural development from the “anti-art” theories such as Futurism, Surrealism and Dadaism propounded by Marinetti, Andre Breton and Tristan Tzara. Dubuffet looked at work from primitive cultures and by children, but found the most exceptional works in the paintings and sculptures created by patients confined in asylums.

Macphee’s sculptures lack the manic energy and disturbing imagery of the work by Adolf Wolfli and Aloise Corbaz, collected by Dubuffet, or visionaries like Henry Darger or William Kurelek, but are clearly parallel. The most telling similarity is that Macphee clearly did not think of what he did as art. Many of his creations were burnt or left in compost heaps – often by Macphee himself.

As one would expect from the author of Calum’s Road, Hutchinson is excellent on the island culture that formed Macphee. The crofters of South Uist were experts at weaving marram grass to tack their horses, and it becomes obvious that in Macphee’s sculptures there is a vein of utter homesickness. At the same time, he changes a pragmatic use of local materials into a supremely useless, completely aesthetic technique. Likewise, Hutchinson is extremely good at conveying the desperate state of mental health provision in the Highlands and Islands of this period, as well as the military background that precipitates Macphee’s crisis.

The material on the wider “outsider art” question could perhaps have been expanded. Macphee was not a unique phenomemon, and although Hutchinson mentions artists like Adam Christie, it would have been enlightening to extend the discussion into artists like Scotti Wilson, and even lesser known figures, such as James Beveridge, who made the bizarre “Concrete Menagerie” near Flodden. Hutchinson does make a compelling claim that Macphee’s work is comparable to the decorative fantasias created by Flora Johnstone, merging the island’s new industrial ruins with traditional crafts. Indeed, it seems very close to works such as the Owl House created by Helen Martins.

The Silent Weaver is a fascinating, poignant read but there is an insoluble problem at its core. Hutchinson does not speculate on the causes of Macphee’s breakdown. It is perfectly intellectually acceptable for a biographer to hold that such speculation is fruitless and even invasive, but it should perhaps have been made clear that this was the decision taken. Why did Macphee fall silent? It seems to me, especially given the detailed work that Hutchinson provides on Macphee’s family background, that a genetic disposition to a disorder can be more or less ruled out. This leaves trauma as the trigger for his collapse of will. When I saw Nick Higgins’ wonderful film about Macphee, Hidden Gifts, it seemed to suggest that villagers found it difficult when he came back from the military hospital that he acted like a horse, wearing a bridle and pulling the plough. Was the trauma connected to the horse? Again, Hutchinson allows us to rule this out. Macphee did not see his horse killed in warfare; it was sold before they went to the Faroes.

Was it something on the Faroes? There was little military action – a German plane was shot down and there were some pro-Nazi islanders. Commonly, trauma occurs as a result of violence (either witnessed or suffered) or sexual violence. What caused Macphee to turn in on himself and shut out the outside world will be a perpetual mystery, but Hutchinson has at least limited the possibilities.

One of the most affecting moments in the book is when the reader realises that, magnificent and eerie as the sculptures are, we are only seeing a shadow of them. The originals were knotted through with wild flowers. The desiccated remains suggest a profound grief. The originals must have been luminous – and maybe even hopeful.