Eternal Surging: Consciousness and the Sonorous Gaelic landscape

This essay presents a network of interconnected ideas that underlies the development of the artworks featured in the visual essay. Related themes of sonorous landscape and the Gaelic oral tradition emerge from an initial discussion around Shaw’s audio-visual installation “Highland River” and associated “Sonorous Map” drawings, elucidated by references to Gaelic psalmody, the mythic world of Ossian, and William Blake. Further analysis of the “Sonorous Map” drawings involves a brief discourse on the fundamental unity of subject and object and the primacy of consciousness, supported by ideas of quantum physics and new idealist philosophy. An exploration of the employment of imagery of whirlpools and vortices as metaphor in the work of David Bohm, Bernardo Kastrup, and Gilles Deleuze links these ideas to spiral motifs in Celtic art of the Late Medieval period, Neil Gunn’s writing, and Shaw’s artworks. The final section revolves around Meg Bateman’s evocation of Celtic fractality and mystical unity in the context of Shaw’s drawings, concluding with a discussion of a collaborative text-image project by Bateman and Shaw that explores aspects of the legacy of Saint Columba.