Calum Lawrence
Statement
My name is Calum Smith Lawrence and I participated as a painting mentee participating with the An Lanntair Artist Support Programme. Working from the start of March 2021 I produced a series of paintings entitled Feoil (Flesh). I was fortunate to receive mentorship through this process from the eminent artist Calum Angus Mackay. Please permit me to elaborate regarding myself, my practice and my experience of the mentorship:
I paint as a means to enter into the subconscious of the character of the Lamb within a novel manuscript I have written entitled Byre Dogs. The aspect that lends this narrative its unique resonance is that the slow decline of The Lamb is embedded within the marginal society of the Gaeltachd communities of The Outer Hebrides. This is the severe landscape of isolated villages, unending moorland and sea lochs that has forged the psyche of The Lamb. The austerities of this Island life define the domain where the Lamb must reconcile the ecstasies of being out of his head on junk in Town on a Saturday night with the submission to God demanded in reading from the family bible with his Father on the Sunday morning. The duality of The Lamb allows him to occupy this margin between the sacred and the profane. That Island life allows The Lamb to feel both transcendent and degenerate in the same moment, whether it be sharing in the ritual of burning back the summer heather with his Father or drinking his way through the empty Sabbath. Byre Dogs presents an uniquely unvoiced perspective on contemporary Hebridean society. The experience of The Lamb in its transgressive nature gives an insight into the complexity of individuals who are uniquely sustained and held captive by that society. These islander like the Lamb are compelled to integrate the sacred and the profane. It is to this narrative that my painting sequence Feoil is a corollary.
Biography
My education is in English Literature, Celtic Studies and in Architecture therefore narrative structure has always impacted upon me. However I am not formally a painter, I have never had work shown or received any structured tuition in art. My sole achievement is that my work has been showcased on the An Lanntair website by the writer Kevin MacNeil one of its featured contributors. My engagement with painting has adhered to a more marginal path and it is this exclusion that I believe empowers the work I have created.
I originate from one of the Gaeltachd communities on the Island of Lewis. I am convinced that this legacy has marked me in all that I am. This initiated me within a particular religious, cultural and linguistic context. Life in this dispersed system of isolated, interdependent villages could be appreciated as being narrow but deep. The network of rigid correspondences where individuals integrated into extended schemes of blood lineage and social obligation was manifest to all. The profound aspect within this Island life was that it sustained an environment where communal identity was dominant in that the village rituals of communal peat cutting and marking the sheep compelled everyone together. However significance was also assigned to the individual. Each person was seen as standing alone with their tally of sins and virtues before God’s judgement. The limiting aspect was that the individual was constrained by the austere behavioural dictates imposed on them by Island society. These aspects framed me as both mired and elevated by spirituality, as reinforced and repressed by community and as muted and enhanced by language. It is against these contradictory impulses that any Islander must reconcile themselves. This reconciliation may at times render the individual a drunk or a penitent. It may make someone mad with drink on the last minutes before closing time on Saturday night in Town and filled with contrition in their family’s row in church on the following Sabbath. This is the ceaseless cycle of opposites that is contained within the Island psyche. It was this sense of an enduring yet shifting subjectivity, of a warring divided self that nurtured my art.