Alaistair Mclennan

I spent the morning talking to lovely technicians about how I can modify my approach to accessing workshops. Until I meet with the disability services I will have to use the stools that are available in each workshop. Hopefully a saddle stool will become available when I can have my assessment.

Everything takes so much time. I spend an hour travelling to college, it is completely worthwhile just to exchange thoughts and ideas with the others and go to the library, nevermind all of the other resources in the building but the downside is the energy it takes to arrive and walk about. I need to get cannier about my planning.

Before lunch we set up in the empty room ready for a chat with Alaistair Mclennan. I have watched several films from the archive

https://amaclennan-archive.ac.uk/2020/11/30/drawing-remains-drawings-remain

I am transfixed by the rythmn and the pace of words accompanying drawings. Drawing remains, drawings remain is poignant and evocative. It reminds me that the very act of slowing down to look with care and to listen fully is in itself to change everything.

When we arrive the lecture hall is packed. We are introduced to a gentle barefooted man who paces and speaks quietly. He considers each word as it is spoken. Alaistair talks us through several extensive bodies of work;- Hand to And, N Ireland 2015, Body of (D)earth, Alc

hemist 2010 (in which he brings alive a text by

Michael Scott a 12th century Alchemist. He talks about his work as a rejection of the binary split and the binary notion of coming together.

Afterwards we meet in the room with our work on the walls. There is a gap between where he is and where we are. It isn’t helped by the woman who is looking after him. She is treating him as a celebrity. He is certainly a wonderful human being with huge knowledge experience and skill and a lot of wisdom to share. It is the atmosphere that the elevation creates which is unhelpful for the conversation. Afterwards when we are talking in the studio, we realise that we should not have presented our unformed beginnings of work on the wall. AM is sensitive and careful in his approach- it would have been more intimate and more productive if we had sat around the table as in a kitchen with a cup of tea. He asked us to sit at the table several times, our work was already on the walls. I am dwelling on the impact that the atmosphere had on our conversation because I am realising more and more how my current work is precisely about capturing the atmosphere of the moment in which I am drawing. My relationship with the land and all that lives here is more full of wonder when I slow down and look and listen in exactly the way that Alaistair Maclennan is advocating.