making a kilt

I did this once.  It was quite hard.

scots wae hae

Kemnay, Aberdeenshire. postcard, circa 1980, but unchanged for a century

The main street of Kemnay: the flinty buildings and people of northeast Scotland found in A Scot's Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon.  

My grandmother's grandfather, Robert Reid, was a shoemaker there. In the tradition of atheist, radical, autodidactic Scottish shoemakers, he read and wrote Greek, taught Classics to his bright little grand-daughter Nellie, skipping over his own romantic daughter and her Tennyson.

The lapidary 99%, then as now, was much more complex than a number.  Much is made of the lack of social mobility in Victorian Britain: emigration was the only way to really get ahead, but how many people in our relatively wealthy and privileged society would teach themselves to read and write Greek today, or any difficult language, sitting in some small isolated town with no university courses within miles, no online lessons, just the texts?

The shock of leaving Kemnay for Albert Park, a flimsy town that served surrounding farms east of Calgary, was total.  No one ever really recovered from it.  Kemnay and picnics on the grounds at Ballater, the 'Earl of Mar's children who only get half an egg for breakfast so be thankful you have a whole egg to yourself', the rosewood piano, tea with the Bruces – such things became golden, truly a lost Elysium, compared to 'getting ahead' in Albert Park, which along with the rest of the prairies was experiencing both a wheat boom and a real estate bubble: everyone was building houses, everyone lost their shirts.  

The excavation in the photograph below was about getting rid of a hill in Albert Park to make way for houses.  Some things never change in Calgary. 

Albert Park, 1912. Glenbow Archives NA 2087 1

A man's a man, for all that

Not sure who is singing this, perhaps Graham Duncan who put the video together, but it is a gentle version.  compared to Paolo Nutini.  

As this is the week of all things Scottish, can't help think of Nana – Nellie Bruce, born in 1896 in Kemnay, Aberdeenshire and who was brought to Canada at 14 by her family, and for whom even the thought of eating haggis was a shocking insult, it being some sort of horrible boiled sausage thing eaten by peasants in bothies.  Of which, needless to say, she was not one.  

Her mother wept for six months with shock at leaving her little stone village for the wind-swept prairies and forever after quoted great reams of Tennyson and her favourite, Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, mournful and melancholic: 

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.

No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
–The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!

You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.

'To-night will be a stormy night-
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow.'

'That, Father! will I gladly do:
'Tis scarcely afternoon-
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!'

At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a faggot-band;
He plied his work; – and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.

Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.

The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.

The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.

At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.

They wept – and, turning homeward, cried,
'In heaven we all shall meet';
– When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.

Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;

And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.

They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!

– Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.

This too is a Scottish immigration experience.  It isn't all kilts and bagpipes you know.

DJ Mehdi, Tonton du Bled

from Chloé Roubert's site: chloecollects.blogspot.com

DJ Mehdi and core-periphery relations

summer solstice wreaths of Latvia

from the archive of Adolf Cops. Camp Sidabarene, Milton, Ontario. Celebrating summer solstice in the 1950s. Solstice, or Jani, is still celebrated each year in Sidrabene.

Zile Liepins wrote in On Site 24: migration about a summer camp at Milton, Ontario, built by Latvians who left Latvia in the 1940s, emigrating to Canada.  This was in the context of a larger discussion of Latvians who stayed, dreaming of life somewhere not Latvia, while in Canada, especially at the summer solstice, they dreamt of the Latvia they knew.  The picture, above is from Zile Liepins' family, taken in the 1950s and shows the wreaths of wild flowers the women wear for the solstice.

This video, below, is from Latvia, taken in 2006 and shows the making of the wreaths – flowers for women and oak leaves for men, accompanied by much singing, singing, singing, which is also what they are doing in Zile's photo. 

Vivienne Koorland

Vivienne Koorland. Close Your Little Eyes, 2010. Oil on stitched canvas 31" x 27" inches (79 x 68 cm) Collection the artist

Vivienne Koorland works in New York, is currently showing in London at East Central Gallery and grew up in South Africa, leaving it before the end of apartheid.  Her mother was a hidden and smuggled child in Poland during WWII, ending up in a Jewish orphans home in South Africa in 1948.
 
Koorland's work is characteristically complex where everything from the kind of marks made, the material they are made with, the canvas or burlap or bookcovers they are made upon is heavy with historical memory, from her own conflicted childhood in Africa to her mother's loss of childhood and family to her own exile and homesickness for an impossible childhood that cannot be revisited.  
It is not just Germany, or just the holocaust, or just apartheid, or just the unfairness, or just the loss of material goods, or talents, or love; it is all these things, constantly jostling on the crowded historical surfaces of her work.  Letters, writing, ledgers, sheet music, popular songs, maps – they all lie together.  

Her working method reuses her own rejected drawings and paintings, burlap rice bags are stitched together to make a full canvas, their printed labels worked into the content.  Her work is constantly being remade and re-referenced.  
Although nominally about the past, it is the present that is often discussed: a magnificent gold map of Africa is so simple, yet so complex in reference to gold mining, to a shimmering beautiful potential and a hateful process of extraction.  This is work that sinks in complexity rather than skimming on a too easily grasped surface. 

Vivienne Koorland. Gold Africa, 2010. oil and pigment on stitched burlap. 68.5 x 61 inches (27 x 24 cm) Private Collection, London

cab calloway and minnie the moocher

Right, it is the beginning of a dreary month, a storm is raging outside, the ferries can't run, the east is blanketed in snow, the international news is truly ghastly and Gillian Findlay's documentary last night on police actions during the G8/G20 in Toronto last summer was altogether too shocking. 

Here is a little diversion:

A rather more adult version of Dorothy and Toto.

Amazing to think this sort of thing was standard children's viewing in the 1950s.  From 4-5 each afternoon was old cartoons, serialised David Niven movies and Gene Autry.

This explains everything about the baby boom lot.

Paul Robeson: Ô mon cher Canada

un canadien errant

Un Canadien errant,
Banni de ses foyers,
Parcourait en pleurant
Des pays étrangers.
Un jour, triste et pensif,
Assis au bord des flots,
Au courant fugitif
Il adressa ces mots
"Si tu vois mon pays,
Mon pays malheureux,
Va, dis à mes amis
Que je me souviens d'eux.
"Ô jours si pleins d'appas
Vous êtes disparus,
Et ma patrie, hélas!
Je ne la verrai plus!
"Non, mais en expirant,
Ô mon cher Canada!
Mon regard languissant
Vers toi se portera..."

Ireland Park

Kearns Mancini Architects, Ireland Park Foundation, 2007Paul Whelan has written about Ireland Park in the new issue of On Site.  It commemorates the huge wave of emigrants from the 1847 Irish famine.  Incredibly, over a six-month period, 37,000 immigrants washed through Toronto, population 20,000, on their way to both inland and to the United States. 

Walls with names seems to be a necessary memorial component now: these names of people who died on the voyage or shortly after, about 20% of the total, are inscribed in the interstices of a rough difficult craggy cliff. 
And, also necessary it seems, are the figurative statues, in Toronto's Ireland Park part of a set, the other half being in a park in Dublin: the wraiths who left, and if they didn't die, arrived in North America. 

Migration stories: is there a point at which oral history – the journeys, the reason for emigration in the first place, the subsequent struggle to re-establish a life –is lost?  And is that when we start to build memorials?  

onsite 24: migration

Marianna de Cola. Travelling the south shore of Newfoundland, 2010

This is one of the beautiful images sent to us by Marianna de Cola, from her study on migration and relocation in outport Newfoundland.  We used it for the cover of issue 24 because there is something so complete and yet so slow about leaving home by boat.  Where you came from recedes, is lost in fog, or over the horizon; your line of travel always marked by the wake scrolling out behind you.

prairie landscapes

Greg Hardy. Distant Rain Across the Marsh, 2008. Acrylic on Canvas, 32" x 64"That carving out a little corner of the wilderness in which to live, seen in colliery and garrison towns and which Margaret Atwood's Survival, her thematic examination of Canadian literature, discusses in depth, has never really been how Canadian prairie artists have seen the landscape and their part in it. 
Perhaps this is because settlement of the prairies, much later than that of eastern Canada, was facilitated by the CPR which didn't carve out settlements, but rather overlaid the great plains with the Dominion Survey Grid, charting the land with a system that made everything equal in importance. 
The land, indifferent as ever to ill-prepared settlers, was, by virtue of its abstract delineation, made to seem disinterested in the people living on it.  The relationship between town and land was not precise: the Homestead Act clustered services at the grain elevator and around the railway tracks.  The land was simply the surface upon which such things occurred. 

Compare this Greg Hardy 2008 painting with the 1962 L S Lowry painting, Hillside in Wales.  Lowry is looking at the land and human occupation, Hardy is looking at the weather.  Lowry's horizon is up near the top of the frame, Hardy's is at the bottom.  This is what I mean about the indifference of the land on the prairies to our little struggles: it floods, it dries out, it freezes, it is hailed upon— all these things would happen whether we were there or not.  Yet the mindset of the early immigrants to the Canadian west had developed in the impacted landscapes of Britain, where centuries of manipulation of the landscape had occurred.  One is constantly driving over surprising hills that turn out to be fragments of Hadrian's Wall or some such thousand year old installation.  People and their activities, their material culture, their animal husbandry, their system of fields, crops, stone walls and complex hedgerow cultivation – all that was irrelevant here.  Wind-scoured fields hundreds of acres square was how the prairies were farmed, and how they are still painted.


Marilyn Bowering

Marilyn Bowering. Visible Worlds.  Harper Collins 1997
Paterson Ewen.  Halley's Comet as seen by Giotto, 1979.

Most memorable image of this book is of a woman skiing over the North Pole from Russia to Canada.There are twins, in a Winnipeg immigrant family, one joins the Nazis in Germany, the other is locked in a struggle with something – I'm not sure – but he does think a lot.  And then there is Nathaniel Bone.  This is a book in the wide-ranging tradition of Canadian literature where the story covers an enormously complex world of multiply connected and layered stories.
Bowering is a poet, first, and her writing although prose is a long, beautiful extended poem where time and narrative are endlessly fluid.  Meanwhile Fika checks her bearings and moves on after chipping ice from her skis.  She is the background, her epic journey, to everyone else's complex histories of emigration, loss and displacement.
Richard Bingham, the cover designer, but a Paterson Ewen painting on the cover.  Ewen is a strange fellow, most of his very large paintings are made by grinding lines in sheets of plywood with a router, then painting over the sheet, routing a few more lines, adding some paint.  They are like huge wood blocks after much printing.  The work is passionate and muscular, magical and haunting.  It is a good tough accompaniment to Bowering's poetic, detailed complexity.

After-War. Kristina Norman

Terker

Kristina Norman is a visual artist and documentary filmmaker in Tallinn, Estonia.  Her 2009 video, After-War, which was part of a larger installation shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale, revolves around a Soviet WWII memorial, Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn (from Nazi Germany).

In  2007, Soviet soldiers' graves were exhumed and, with the large bronze Soviet soldier in the monument, taken from their original location in the centre of Tallinn to a cemetery on the outskirts of the city.  

With the collapse of the USSR, the former eastern block countries that had acted as a buffer between Russia and the west, including the Baltic countries – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, embarked on a program of de-Russification.  In the construction of a postcolonial identity including language, customs and political structures the former occupiers are either expelled or demonised.  Of course this is very difficult, much intermarriage and cultural hybridisation has occurred and identities and allegiances become hotly politicised.  For seventy years Russians had been relocated to all the Soviet republics, occupying the top levels of bureaucracy and power.  Just as Zimbabwean white farmers cry, 'But we've farmed here for generations; this is our land, our country', so do Russian Estonians.  The removal of the heroic statue of a Russian soldier to the margins of Tallinn and the periphery of history caused riots, now known as Bronze Night.

After-War documents this divide between nationalist Estonians and Russian-speaking Estonians.  It is available on her website www.kristinanorman.com  Scroll to the bottom, it is about 10 minutes long.  It helps if one spoke Estonian of course, which I don't.  However, it is so clearly an interrogation of the politicisation of war memorials.

Is there any generosity in the postcolonial state that would herald any kind of reconciliation of the past?  There must be sometimes, otherwise the whole world would be full of Rwandan-like massacres, or the bloody and painful battle for borders and ethnicity in the former Yugoslavia.  South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its faults, still stands as a model.  Kristina Norman's video is humorous, moving, troubled.  Her art tackles the problems of reconstructing a national identity by taking the statue as a kind of tragic monolith, mute, clumsy and vulnerable to appropriation by political interests.

Kristina Norman, After-War. Golden replica of the bronze soldier Image Kristina Norman, © Courtesy Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia

For a really nasty example of what Kristina Norman is mediating with After-War, try this video from EstonianTV.  Yes it is a riot, yes it stems from the removal of the Soviet war memorial, but the commentary, so anti-Russian, is shocking in its racism and violence.  Clearly the bronze statue was a match to the tinder of post-USSR ethnic resentment.  Surprising too how many references there are to WWII, and the Soviet liberation of Estonia from Nazi occupation.  WWII continues.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg8329uIKcw