On 2 September 2015, ahead of the debate on the new Land Reform Bill, a group of Our Land campaigners gathered on the steps of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Their message to the Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) was clear and concise: ‘Be Brave’. Over the past few years, members of the Our Land campaign and of more formal organisations such as Community Land Scotland, which, since its inception in 2010, has been committed to promoting community land purchase and supporting land reform, have repeatedly urged the Scottish government to take strong action and break with the land ownership system that has barely been reformed since the mid-sixteenth century and that has 432 landowners (comprising Scottish lairds, ‘sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates’) account for half of all Scotland’s privately owned land.1 There are few issues as fundamental and volatile as that of land ownership and open access, particularly when set against the backdrop of Scotland’s recent political and cultural re-examination, be it before or after the Scottish independence referendum. An exercise in participatory democracy, the issue has been on the agenda for over two decades. Scotland has seen increasingly pressing demands for a fairer redistribution of land, a remarkable increase in community buyouts since the 2003 Land Reform Act, and the commercial success and widespread media coverage of publications such as Andy Wightman’s Who Owns Scotland (1996) and The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got It (2010), and the Isle of Eigg Trust Founder Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (2001). It should come as no surprise that both these authors, along with other renowned land reform campaigners including the journalist Lesley Riddoch and the prominent historian Jim Hunter, were either founders or active supporters of the Our Land campaign.
Wightman argues in his blog that land certainly ‘matters’, but so do words and rhetorical modulations, especially in a context where the territorial issues in Scotland have become so sensitive. The ‘Be Brave’ injunction carries a less than oblique reference to Disney’s 2012 computer-animated film Brave and to the epic movie Braveheart, which, however much it was derided for its historical inaccuracies, earned Scotland millions in tourist revenue and triggered a worldwide interest in Scotland’s history and natural heritage. As for ‘our land’, the expression abounds in the rhetoric of land reformers and open-access land campaigners in the UK: see, for instance, Marion Shoard’s 1987 book This Land is Our Land, or the founding of the land rights campaign The Land is Ours by George Monbiot in 1995. In devolved Scotland, the possessive adjective has also flourished in the rhetoric of pro-independence campaigners and in government publications, the media and public art.2
The debate over the redistribution of Scottish land does not just take place amid a political and economic struggle over territory, land use, wildlife management and agricultural tenancy. It has also forced MSPs, lobbyists, campaigners and members of the general public to consider spatial and self-representation issues, starting with the very semantics and glossary of land classification. Beyond the ‘their land/our land’ dialectic, one example that is particularly enlightening is Rob Gibson’s suggestion, when he was Scottish National Party (SNP) MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross and parliamentary convener of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment committee, that ‘the core areas of wild land and outstanding natural beauty’ mapped out by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) in 2013 should instead be labelled ‘Clearances country’. This reclassification would make them potentially available not just for resettlement and community re-empowerment but also for the provision of renewable energy through wind power in the Highlands. The proposed shift in perception from ahistorical, apolitical and featureless ‘wild lands’ to that of a political entity (a ‘country’) exemplifies the need for a comprehensive rethink and reappraisal of the geography, of the way it is perceived and, more specifically, of the translation of Scottish history into landscape. In his closing address to the Community Land Scotland annual conference on 22 May 2015, Gibson continued to refer to these areas as ‘the abnormal landscape of the shooting estates and sheep clearances of the past 200 years’. Likewise, Magnus Jamieson argued in the June 2017 issue of the online magazine Bella Caledonia that ‘[l]and cleared by the rich is not wild, it is hoarded. Ancient, empty farmland is not wild, it is neglected’.3 Clearly, the use of adjectives such as ‘wild’, ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’ versus ‘abnormal’, ‘cleared’, ‘hoarded’ and ‘neglected’—with these last three terms suggesting human intervention—indicates that land too is in the eye of the beholder.
The much-contested territory of Scotland’s ‘Core Areas of Wild Land’ have thus sparked heated debate among those in favour of ecological restoration, conservation, rewilding or repopulation. However, the debate is long-standing, and the question of whether or not the preservation of Scotland’s landscapes (including in the areas that were forcibly cleared of their inhabitants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) should prevail over land use practicalities has been a matter of concern for decades. Ever since the early 1940s and the bitter ‘Hydro’ debates, it has been argued that the different perceptions of landscape—and of landscape amenity—in Scotland are directly related to an outsider versus insider experience. In other words, that Scotland’s ‘outstanding natural beauty’ and so-called ‘wilderness’ are only the by-products of an industry that has removed the Highlands from social change and technical innovations in order to turn ‘Natural Scotland’ into a pastoral theme park fantasy for nature-loving visitors—much to the satisfaction of the tourist industry and the successive Scottish governments.4 The cult of the romantic Highlands is still going strong both within and outside Scotland, and the theory remains easily verified. When the Scottish Government declared 2013 as the ‘Year of Natural Scotland’ and entrusted the organisation of all related events to SNH, the official discourse reinforced the notion that Scotland was and remains ‘an invigorating natural playground’.5 There is virtually no mention of the Clearances in SNH’s promotional rhetoric. In his introduction to the Scottish Land Festival of 2015, Director of Common Weal Robin McAlpine argued for ‘nationalised land for national use’ and called for a reimagining and a re-viewing of Scotland as a whole:
Scotland could be a growing, making, building, doing and living country, not just a shopping, drinking, working, sleeping one. But we’ll never be that if we view the land on which we stand as something alien to us, something owned by someone who wants us to stay away. I’m tired of the endless braying sound of the super-privileged complaining that any form of justice for the people of a nation is a ‘Mugabe-style land grab’. The only land grab I can see is the colonisation of the land of our imagination, a land in which Scotland could rebuild itself using its soil and its space as a resource for a better life for its people and a better world for us all.6
Of course the terms ‘nationalised’, ‘national’ and ‘colonisation’, when used barely a year after the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, were meant to be provocative; yet there remains the idea that the people of today’s Scotland are still deprived of the ability to ‘view’, ‘see’ and imagine ‘their’ land, and most importantly to imagine themselves as part of it. Historians and intellectuals have likewise endeavoured to break away from pastoral landscape representations to restore the idea that the vast expanses of Scottish land are ultimately, as argued by Fiona Mackenzie, ‘places of possibility’ (Mackenzie 2013), a land to reclaim—McAlpine might say ‘decolonise’—through imagination first.
This book is committed to looking at how Scotland-based artists work at doing exactly that: rethinking and reimagining the land by reviewing its discursive and aesthetic construct in the broad context of early twenty-first-century Scotland. It seeks to find out if and how the specificities of devolved Scotland—its historical, territorial and political issues, among which the lasting impact of the Clearances, the devolution, the Land Reforms, the referendum on Scottish independence—may shape the way the artists represent themselves and their social group in that space or land, whether through words, actions or pictures. In particular, it enquires into who—or what—the first-person singular can encompass, and how it intersects with the postcolonial stance or, conversely, how it departs from it. To do so, this book looks at how artists undercut the discourses that have supported the myth of a ‘wild’ or ‘Natural’ Scotland and, in either case, the dream of primeval vacancy and imagery of emptiness that have become Scotland’s trademarks. The fact that ‘Natural Scotland’, as it is extensively advertised by the Scottish Tourist Board, resulted from the forcible removal of its inhabitants will certainly have a considerable impact on the artists’ responses to their physical world and the way they interact with it. In the early twenty-first century and in the light of Scotland’s political circumstances, any form of sanctification of a Scottish ‘wilderness’ would appear anachronistic, and any signs of wilful cultural amnesia would seem oddly out of tune...