Stories and Old Stones is the third joint exhibition for husband and wife duo Alice McMurrough and Neil Macdonald, focusing on exploring the narrative of nostalgia. After both had graduated from Glasgow School of Art, they met and later married, developing their own separate yet thematically-linked artistic careers: as they say, ‘Our interests often echo each other’s, we share enjoyment of travel, music, history and politics.’
Alice McMurrough is renowned for her theatrical paintings intertwining personal memories with fairy tales, cultural myths and religious fables: ‘the gap between innocence and experience’. Animals are often seen as metaphors, with foxes, birds and dogs frequently appearing as protectors, omens, or witnesses to secret human dramas.
A charismatic view of family heritage is portrayed in Anticipation, in which a young girl carefully polishes a wine glass beside an intriguing collection of ornaments, a bowl of cherries, a vase of flowers, candlesticks and curiosities. The patterned tablecloth becomes a stage for these carefully arranged still-life objects beside a toy dog-on-wheels, symbolising children growing up, presents and parties. In this homely scene, McMurrough evokes a magical meditation on reminiscence and treasured possessions through inherited stories from absent generations.
Flight unfolds like a dark fairy tale caught between fantasy and escape. A mysterious young mother, akin to Red Riding Hood, clutches her baby as they travel by carriage pulled by wolf–men in red trousers, translating a familiar picture-book image into a strange surreal scene. Wolves are usually symbols of attack, but here the creatures she fears have been harnessed to carry them to safety. Above the thick green forest, heavy rain clouds gather ominously to suggest that whoever or whatever she is fleeing from has not entirely disappeared. Is this a flight from fear, or from the past towards the uncertainty of freedom? This haunting illustration reflects the lurking sense of danger all around, refuge and the fragile hope of a new life.
The most introspective portrait of Marthe, focusing on the sitter’s unwavering gaze, draws us into her quietly composed yet enigmatic expression. Her pale skin contrasts with neatly brushed, raven black hair, giving the face an almost spectral luminosity. Her modest Victorian dress, high collar and string of pearls reinforce the rigid formality and moral code of the period while the subdued, monochrome palette gently shimmers in tone.
In melancholic mood, staring straight ahead, she is neither smiling nor openly sorrowful, but suspended in a private thought. The intimate, softly-sketched style gives Marthe the stillness of an old sepia-tinted photograph, while the glistening sparkle of her eyes makes the past feel uncannily present and alive, through faded memory.
Neil Macdonald is drawn to Scottish locations with strong historic and mythical presence; castles, churches, villages and harbours for narrative landscapes in which ‘topographic accuracy is replaced by an imaginative response to reveal the unique poetry of place.’
Long Shadows, Stromness illustrates the ancient town on the Orkney mainland as an eerie, almost dreamlike place. The narrow, empty street is transformed by the series of angular, figure-like silhouettes of the tall houses as the blank windows appear like silent witnesses to the passage of time. Pale façades glow against the sombre, darkening sky, while the steep roofs, chimneys and distant church spire are crafted with a striking vertical rhythm.
‘The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples, lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon’.
– George Mackay Brown, from Hamnavoe
Hamnavoe, ‘safe haven’, is the Old Norse word for Stromness where Mackay Brown lived all his life. There is something wonderfully surreal about this scene. Devoid of people, the distorted architecture along the narrow, sunlit lane, feels suspended between past and present. Macdonald captures the mysterious atmosphere where its cool Celtic and Scandinavian heritage seems to linger in the elongated shadows.
Gardenstown is a quaint coastal fishing village on the Moray Firth, Aberdeenshire. In this abstracted seascape, the houses crowd tightly together in a claustrophobic cluster at the foot of the steep hillside, perched on the shore. Such a precise juxtaposition between the jagged, geometric, grey roofs and the graceful, wide sweep of the bay surrounding the flat calm surface of the sea.
This lyrical landscape of simplified forms and muted tones strips Gardenstown of everyday activity (apart from one boat), as a lost community caught in a moment of stillness. The tranquil quality of light across the vivid, visionary perspective depicts a place both sheltered and isolated behind the curving wall of high cliffs. Macdonald creates a study of permanence, where the present-day seems to have paused and echoes of the past remain quietly alive.
Old Stones, Pitscottie captures a rural setting shaped by wind, weather and memory. The grasses sweep across the foreground in restless waves, the branches of the trees bend sideways by the force of the wind as a thick balloon of cloud floats across the translucent sky. Withstanding the gale, the long, low farm building, dark and solitary, seems totally abandoned yet stubbornly enduring: part of the roof caved in, the central doorway curiously illuminated by lamplight and the tumbledown shack.
Pitscottie is a village near Ceres, between St. Andrews and Cupar, Fife. It was the home of Robert Lindsay, who wrote The Historie and Chronicles of Scotland in the 16th century; a place resonating with ancient tales. The painting’s title gives the old farmstead a deeper significance: this is not simply a ruined croft, but a quiet repository of lives once lived within its walls. Macdonald’s brooding landscape suggests that although the previous inhabitants have disappeared, the grey stones remain as guardians of the past, preserving their stories against the relentless passage of time.
Next door at the Open Eye Gallery, Blue Remembered is a showcase of paintings by Saul Robertson, who depicts places through a lens of imagination which he describes as ‘combined fragments of observation, memory and invention. Motifs recur and accumulate as a sort of personal vocabulary.’
Blue Remembered epitomises an escape to a sunny, yet desolately empty, beachfront paradise. The vintage caravan is more like a residential home on the shoreline, looking out at the calm blue sea. A couple sits closely together on the sand dune while their dog waits at the doorway – small signs of companionship and contentment within this secluded world. This is a scene as if recalled though rose-tinted glasses in the way people look back nostalgically at their youth or the past. The seascape is transformed into a delightfully-observed fantasy of wanderlust, where ordinary life seems blissfully far away.
A rather absurd vision of a hotel suspended precariously on the cliff edge is wittily illustrated in The Afterword. The neat, red-tiled building and dramatic setting seem almost like a film set, prepared for action, but frozen in anticipation. Robertson turns a restaurant with sea view into an enigmatic dreamscape: one solitary diner is reading a book, while a discarded bottle of wine on the other white-clothed table, suggests that previous guests have just departed. The title hints at what may happen next, the unanswered questions of an emerging plotline and what might follow.
With gentle lyricism, Saul takes the viewer on a painterly journey with a subtle sense of nowhere-ness, glimmering with illusive, chimerical vision.
These two inspiring, immersive exhibitions are beautifully curated to express the artists’ complementary themes of flights of fancy and lost landscapes of the mind, through a romanticised vision of nostalgia.
With thanks to Vivien Devlin for contributing this review.
