Calum Colvin has prepared a group of large scale photographs inspired by James Macpherson’s eighteenth-century ‘translations’ of Ossian. These images are created as constructed sets, painted with iconic subjects, decorated with symbolic references and finally photographed. The photographic images are subsequently digitised and presented on canvas. Sculpture, environment, collage, painting, photography and computer-art combine in a paradoxical and fantastic vision. Here, the conundrum of Macpherson’s original project is appraised and its relevance to contemporary life assessed, in the most imaginative of creative projects.

There is an extraordinary parallel between Calum Colvin and James Macpherson that stretches across the two and a half centuries separating their art. Macpherson (1736-1796) was the ‘discoverer’ of Ossian, the Celtic bard and epic poet of the third century A.D. who was hailed throughout Europe and in America as a northern Homer. He was, as it were, one of the first artists to exploit ‘the found object’, and he is known to have manipulated and transformed these finds in order to construct a unique and fascinating work of art. Likewise Colvin is recognised as an arch-manipulator; a discoverer of objects, an appropriator of symbols, a shape-shifter who magically transforms the commonplace and the exceptional into the most intriguing and beguiling images.

Significantly both Colvin and Macpherson have worked with fragments. Macpherson first published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760. Herein he declared his ‘discovery’ of ancient Scottish verse, collected during his sojourns in the Highlands and Islands and ‘translated’ from the original Gaelic and Erse languages. Acclaim for these finds was instant and the success of Ossian was overwhelming. Encouraged, Macpherson quickly published Fingal in 1762 and Temora in 1763. Together these epics conjured a world of heroic northern warriors whose savagery was tempered by distinguished codes of honour, affectionate sentiment, and a recognisable morality. Colvin, in parallel, collects the fragments of contemporary culture and society to weave these into a pattern of elliptical associations that explores the complex character of modern life.

Recognising these parallels Colvin selected the story of Macpherson’s Ossian as a parable of his own creative endeavour in particular, and an allegory concerning Scottish culture in general. Importantly, the story of Macpherson’s Ossian is not the epic tale of the ballads and sagas in themselves. Rather, it is an intriguing fable concerning cultural ambition, the problem of ‘authenticity’ in respect of art, and the slippery nature of a Scottish national ‘tradition’.

In the final third of the eighteenth century Ossian came to represent a symbolic re-statement of Scottish cultural, and national, integrity. The idea that there had existed, with Fingal and his comrades, an heroic warrior clan of virtuous disposition re-asserted a sense of unique national identity in the face of incorporation into a British state. Equally the notion that Fingal’s son, the blind bard Ossian, had produced epic verse of a Homeric quality established a view of a deep-rooted cultural tradition that was the equivalent of the Classical world. This vision became a recognized cult throughout northern Europe, and in America, and it is well documented that the Ossian epics were deeply influential across the range of the arts. However, the view persists that the epic of Ossian was a fraud; a constructed translation, devoid of any meaningful source in Gaelic culture, and consequently a wholly manufactured history and poetry.

It is at this point that the parallels between Macpherson and Colvin become evident. Macpherson, it now seems clear, gathered together some fragments of Highland and Irish verse and utilised these as the root of his Ossianic ballads. He was a ‘translator’ of these tales in the specifically eighteenth-century sense that he firstly borrowed, then adapted, amended and embroidered the sparse originals. He did this as a Romantic poet responding to the social, political and cultural upheaval that had traumatised Scotland. In a similar way Colvin has come to explore the cultural ambiguity, intellectual ambivalence and moral relativism of the modern world. His images, ‘translated’ from everyday items, synthesised from ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, glossed with the icons of the Scottish cultural tradition, are a fantastic kaleidoscopic mirror of contemporary life.

A central group of nine images, Blind Ossian I – IX, sits at the heart of Colvin’s recent work and is remarkable for its melancholy. Remarkable, for Colvin is often viewed as an artist who embraces the comic. Historically, his images have appeared joyous, infinitely decorated with a kitsch symbolism, and replete with a ribald humour. In fact, there has consistently been a dark core to Colvin’s photography. His photography has, almost unfailingly, described landscapes in decay, a world littered in ambiguity, and a humanity sated by doubt and uncertainty. The cycle of images at the core of this Ossian project are, perhaps, the starkest testimony of this vision.

Robert Burns (1759-1796) was a contemporary and an admirer of Macpherson. He also admired the poems of Ossian. His comic piece the tale of The Twa Dogs consisted in a dialogue between two dogs, one ‘o’ high degree’ and the other ‘a ploughman’s collie’, and concerned issues of class and virtue in human society. It typifies Burns’ fascination with the comic, the vernacular, and with the subjects of social justice and human folly. The dogs, however, are named ‘Caesar’ and ‘Luath’. ‘Caesar’, of course, represented the Classical world and was palpably ‘nane o’ Scotland’s dogs’. ‘Luath’, on the other hand, was named ‘After some dog in Highland sang, / Was made lang syne, lord knows how lang’. In fact this was a reference to Cuchullin’s dog in Macpherson’s Fingal. Moreover it was the name Burns gave to his own favourite collie, and his respect for Macpherson’s invention was at least evidenced in this homage.

Colvin takes these associations as a starting point for his Twa Dogs, but reinvents the idea in terms of a more contemporary dualism. At the most obvious level Colvin’s Twa Dogs represents the unresolved conflict between ‘Celtic’ and ‘British’ identity in modern Scotland. In this respect the image connects with the duality of Highland and Lowland culture and the two languages of Scotland, Gaelic and Scots. By extension a further series of dualisms are exposed, most notably the notion of corporate competitiveness symbolised in the Nike and Adidas training shoes that hang on each side of the domestic fireplace. These sports shoes lead to the core conflict in the photograph, the near primordial hostility between Rangers and Celtic football clubs. In consequence Burn’s two dogs, those articulate commentators on the absurdity of social class, have become representatives of tribal factionalism. So, in the Twa Dogs Colvin has created a complex dialectic with thesis and antithesis competing against one another, but each united in a common paradigm. This, then, is the wretched bequest of Ossian’s dream, a world of unresolved conflict and perpetual despair.

Nevertheless, inside this darkness Colvin has searched for light and hope. If his Twa Dogs represents the least attractive dimension of Scotland’s culture then the portrait studies that accompany this series provide its glorious apotheosis, not least the portrait of Robert Burns. Colvin has created an iconic image of Burns, replete with symbolic references to his finest poems and intimately linked to the fragmented world of the Ossianic landscape. It is evident that the head of Burns is painted onto the fractured landscape already witnessed in the photographs of ‘Blind Ossian’ and ‘Scota 01’. The carved and broken stone is set down on a foreground of scattered rock, distressed images, and charred bone. And like these images, this portrait of Burns is a cryptic puzzle full of suggestion and discreet quotation and even freer association; a form of visual riddle that is echoed, too, in his portrait study of Sir Walter Scott from this complex series.

At this point Colvin looks to complete his gallery of symbolic portraits.Throughout the series the ubiquitous ‘Maori’ head is shadowed by a kitsch ornament, a comic plaster head; in fact, a junk-shop cast off comically representing an archetypal ‘Highland Laddie’. This grinning, inebriated, caricature is the subject of Colvin’s coda to the Ossian series. Conceived as the antithesis to the ‘Blind Ossian’ figure, this distant relative of the bard is represented in a sequence of photographs showing his transforming and fading features, a series of images tentatively titled Blind Harry.

Here, in the emblematic ruined landscape, rests the detritus of this complex cultural landscape. And, painted on the screen, drapery and mirror at the centre of the set there is the head of a cartoon Highlander; the transmogrification of Blind Harry. Colvin has affected a full transformation with this photograph. He has turned his kaleidoscope of forms and figures such that the various personas of cultural identity meld and mutate. Simultaneously the symbols of national character and distinctiveness reveal their diversity and universality. Hence, the figure of ‘savage’ Ossian folds into the ‘noble’ Maori, Burns and Scott become twin to Blind Harry who is himself composite poet, entertainer, cartoon. And all are kin and companion to the mysterious, controversial figure of James Macpherson. With the series of transforming photographs of ‘Blind Harry’ Colvin has completed is journey into Scottish culture, a trail littered with heroes and phantoms.

The leitmotif of this entire project has been Calum Colvin’s fascination with the figure of Ossian; a spectral figure, part myth, part ‘construction’, part ‘manipulation’. But Ossian is real in the sense that his legend has become an intimate part of the national culture, identity and even ‘psyche’. In some degree, then, it is through the mythology of Ossian that Scotland comes to recognise itself, and Colvin has sought to explore the indeterminate nature of this recognition.

Ossian, then, is a mirror image, but a mirror clouded with uncertainty, ambiguity, and fantasy. It is these half-seen features that Colvin has looked to examine; the shadowland between reality and illusion. In consequence all of these photographs present a dark and mysterious landscape haunted by spectres. Each of the painted heads, and even the subject pictures, is ‘translated’ from established works of art or from junk-shop icons. Moreover they are re-interpreted in a phantom form, they each appear as apparitions within the stony landscape. With this device Colvin has sought to accent the contingent nature of these subjects. They are ‘known’ through a glass but darkly, they are the icons of cultural identity left open to translation, mediation, and manipulation. In this way Colvin recognises the conditional, and indeed provisional, nature of culture. That is, its dependence on history, on social needs, and on political circumstance.

There can be little doubt that in this work Colvin is reflecting on the ethos of the contemporary world. His study of this ‘historical’ subject is a critical commentary on the here and now, and a challenge to experiment. It is this challenge to experiment that is the positive dimension of these extraordinary photographs. They are images replete with vigour and vitality, decorous charm and riotous wit, provocative argument and stimulating insight. Where he suggests that the essence of culture and identity is unknowable, and ever changing, Colvin offers a landscape of unending possibilities, open and inviting.