Rachel Maclean: The Weepers

Artist Rachel Maclean reinterprets Scottish folk tale in this darkly comic solo exhibition, exploring themes of fantasy, gender, heritage and horror.

Central to the show is a new short film commissioned by Comar, the artist’s first scripted work with multiple actors and shot in various locations on Mull. With painstakingly detailed costumes and transformative make-up, Maclean presents her take on the legend of the Bean Nighe or Washer Woman, a monstrous spirit tasked with ringing out blood from the grave-clothes of people who are close to death.

In Maclean’s hands, however, the Bean Nighe is rendered half-sheep, a muttony wretch who sobs in the castle dungeons that she might be saved by an interloper from the Lady Maclean, the last remaining (human) inhabitant of the island with a disturbing penchant for sheepy knickknacks and knitwear. But whose death does the ‘Weeper’ portend?

The work draws from tropes of Gothic horror fiction: medieval settings, ancestral curses, supernaturalism, dream visions, and descension into madness, for example. But it also plays to a prevailing romanticism of the Scottish Highlands and the much caricaturised Hebridean figure — red-haired and drenched in tartan; hospitable to the last; pragmatic, comic, yet bound up in deep-rooted superstition. Maclean’s intelligent, satirical and colour-saturated, exaggerated style is at home here as she presents back to us funny, twisted visions of heritage and stereotype that are at times uneasy, if not chilling.