Rachel Maclean: My Kingdom for a Gift Shop

Scotland is a land well known for its patriotism. There’s never really a time when it’s not flying the flag, in one way or another. One might almost wonder naïvely how expressions of Scottish identity could possibly become any more central within contemporary culture than they already are, as part of everyday life. But with the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, of course they will.

With a solo show at Edinburgh Printmakers during Edinburgh Art Festival, Rachel Maclean will be plunging her hyper-glowing, ‘monstrously alluring’ grotesquery of Scottishness right into the heart of the capital and the debate on Scotland’s future. Her work has frequently explored Scottish identity in larger-than-life parades of kitsch, but this show, I HEART SCOTLAND, will also make particular reference to contemporary political debate.

“I was quite keen to play with the more romantic, more abstract, semi-fictional, semi-historical narratives but also to bring in independence,” says Maclean. When we meet, she isn’t far off finishing the new commissions – the results of an amazing two-year slog. As with her videos, she has produced the new digital prints through a hugely time-consuming and labour-intensive process involving making costumes, photographing herself, and hours and hours of post-production. By means of extensive Photoshopping and green screen, she plays every character in the work – even, in this show, warping her facial features to resemble a cartoon thistle.

The show will premiere two series of four large-scale digital prints, two individual prints, and will also screen a film. Titled Our Future and Our Past respectively, the two series bring together figures and events from various periods in Scottish history, uniting them in vividly imagined tableaux. For instance, a chaotic scene featuring characters in Disney princess-style dresses made from football strips and the Loch Ness Monster simultaneously makes reference to the Highland Clearances, Donald Trump’s controversial golf course, football as an abstract motif for Sectarianism, and the biblical Massacre of the Innocents paintings which have previously inspired Maclean’s LOLCATS work.  

One of the prints in the series Our Future is The Baptism of Clyde – Clyde being the cartoon thistle conceived as the official mascot of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. Set on a golf course, the print depicts Clyde flanked by various surreal figures. A queen sporting Union Jacks takes a rest from putting, while a be-suited figure with a Donald Trump-style barnet and a face painted as the Saltire anoints Clyde with North Sea oil. Kneeling in worship in the foreground are two green-skinned maidens wearing dresses made from Celtic football strips.

The scene is recognisable at a glance as referencing the composition of religious icons, but it takes a moment to register that the subject of worship here is actually a cartoon thistle in a flowerpot.

“It’s based on The Baptism of Christ [by Leonardo da Vinci], but I’ve called it The Baptism of Clyde, explains Maclean, laughing at the look on my face. “It’s one of those ideas where I was like, ‘It’s quite funny but should I actually do that? … Yeah!’”

North Sea oil also features in The Lion and The Unicorn, the film Maclean is showing in addition to the prints. Shot in the stately surrounds of Traquair House in the Borders, it shows the titular heraldic characters drinking the golden substance from Jacobite Crystal goblets. In the digital prints, the oil acts as a thread running through the series, along with the humps of the Loch Ness Monster, which emerge out of the oil.

“It’s more a mythical substance than reality,” says Maclean. “But I like the idea of having the oil – that’s the pragmatic backbone of independence, at least as far as Alex Salmond is concerned. That’s going to be what is supporting us economically.” She mimes incredulity. “It’s a finite resource!”

The narrative progresses through the series, coming to a head in a busy scene with multiple characters wearing the football strip dresses.

“I was perplexing various women in charity shops by buying both Rangers and Celtic football shirts,” Maclean laughs. “‘I just can’t decide, I like them both so much!’ I started adding the strips to the dresses, and it was quite fun. But I also wanted the idea of Scotland not being united in itself, not being one unified identity in the first place, and I guess it’s slightly jokey, playful, that they’re all to a certain extent based on religious painting.”

The style of the dresses and the characters’ poses are also inspired by 1950s musical film and paragon of bad taste, Brigadoon. “God knows what Brigadoon costumes are based on,” says Maclean. Filmed entirely in a Hollywood studio, the film hopelessly romanticised the idea of the Scottish Highlands.

An enthusiastic consumer herself of kitschy gift shop tat, Maclean’s images take all the merchandised aspects of Scottish culture and highlight them in a fantasy landscape while simultaneously trashing them through grotesque caricature. So seductive is her Fantasy Art aesthetic, though, it seems likely that those who are fans of experiencing Scottish heritage merchandised and flogged wholesale on Edinburgh’s high streets will enjoy them in Maclean’s work – trashed and ironic as they are – all the more.  

She muses on how her audience at Edinburgh Printmakers during the festival will differ to the art crowd in Glasgow, where she is based. “I think the theme of the work does bring it into a wider context. Not the work so much as the theme. Independence is something you have to make a decision about unless you’re just not going to vote. You’ve got to think about, what does it mean to be Scottish? Now if you make work about anything to do with Scottish identity you play into that.”

Relieved at having the end of the work in sight – she often has a massive rush to get it finished – Maclean is now considering how to decorate the gallery walls. Well, with her super-saturated aesthetic and ‘Baroque disdain for emptiness,’ we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the work won’t be restricted to the confines of its flamboyant gold picture frames. Apparently the gallery will be something like a mini National Gallery cum shop-bought Victorian castle.

The show will also overflow the gallery in the form of an artist talk, a costume workshop and a symposium on the theme of re-thinking identity in contemporary Scotland, as part of Parley, the festival’s public art discussion programme. As for the opening night, Maclean will be dressing up in the Old Firm football strip costumes. Which one? I ask.

“Both! I can’t just do one. You could only have Rangers AND Celtic.”