I was commissioned by Renfrewshire District Council to design a sculpture garden for a senior citizens residence in Paisley. This video tells the story…
But if you were to visit the senior citizens residence in Paisley today hoping to see the garden for yourself, then I’m afraid you’d be disappointed, because it was never built. What happened was that I made this model…
…Then one day at the senior citizens residence everybody gathered to see the model and listen to me describe the project. BBC Scotland cameras were there, and that evening we were all on ‘Reporting Scotland’. But eventually the money could not be raised for making the actual garden.
Thoughts (2020) about the Garden of Reminiscences 1988…
writing
In 1988 I was commissioned by Renfrewshire District Council to live and work for one week with the residents of a Senior Citizens residence in Paisley, and the text of the video describes briefly what each sculpture in the garden would have symbolised. In these descriptions I have been careful to avoid using the word signify and have always rather used the word symbolise. My rationale for this is that whereas signs merely signify what the object is, symbols also symbolise how something came to be an object. In other words, objects rely for their existence on being part of a language, or signified in that language, whereas symbols deal with things outside language – before they become a signified object (if they ever do.)
So for example, if we had wished simply to communicate that J&P Coats was the largest thread manufacturers in Paisley, we could have stuck a sign in the ground to that effect, and to passers-by it might have seemed a bit odd but nevertheless linguistically understandable. The object would have been achieved in a common tongue.
But reminiscences don’t work as simply as that. In the first place, after a week of listening to different versions of things in and around Paisley, no one story is written down, but rather an amalgamation of narratives are churned around before resurfacing in symbolic form. And then, underscoring these narratives are all the social and emotional aspects of the saying by one person to another of meaningful things. And finally there is the infinitely greater overlay of contexts that come to bear in one way or another upon the symbol. Symbols are not created in linear time, but rather they are the evidence of some linguistic struggle to comprehend actuality and make it real. (This is what we do in dreaming.)
So it was with our symbol of thread making in Paisley. As the residents explained, thread making had been so important to the town that people used to say that ‘Paisley hung by a thread’. And as the Coats company had been the largest manufacturers of thread, I made these four coats hanging by a thread as a symbolic ‘drawing together’ of the different threads of the story.
The coats were to be as it were, ‘drifting past’ a rough wooden crate, to contribute a feeling of industrial production. Various things were inscribed on the crate – the names of other heavy industries in and around Paisley that in some way contributed to the running of the Coats Mill. But although all this happened over thirty years ago, I distinctly remember writing somewhere on the box, the words ‘The Witches of Paisley’ and I assume that it was because I was told of some connection between witches and thread manufacturing. But other than that I could remember nothing until I recently made some inquiries.
In 1696, Christian Shaw, the 10 year old daughter of the laird of Bargarran saw a woman servant steal a drink of milk and told her mother. The woman cursed the girl who, after meeting another local woman (reputed to be a witch), fell ill and supposedly began to vomit up trash, pulling out of her mouth balls of hair, coal, chicken feathers and other items. The laird and the local minister believed that his daughter’s illness was caused by witchcraft, and they appealed to the authorities that they arrest those people named by his daughter for supposedly tormenting her. In the event, thirty-five local people, ‘who were probably just ordinary country women and men who used ancient herbal remedies, and forecast the weather by studying natural phenomena such as the flight patterns of birds or the behaviour of cattle’, were arrested. Seven of them were sentenced to death in a court comprised of local ministers, wealthy land owners and government officials. Six people were executed for ‘witchcraft’ in 1697 by being garrotted on Gallows Green in Paisley – one having already taken his own life by hanging.
Some years later, Christian accompanied her mother to Holland where they saw fine thread being made industrially. They brought back some equipment and set up Bargarran Threads – which company was later on bought out by the Coats family. In that way, the whole of Paisley’s industrial heritage was founded by Christian Shaw and her mother. So the lives of those seven country folk whom the family had accused of witchcraft, also in a way ‘hung by a thread’.
I want to offer the thought that ‘witchcraft’ is an ancient world view based on the love for and respectful acceptance of the awkwardness of things around, and that it is a manifestation of human relatedness, more female than male. This loving view of the world sees the relatedness of all things as the symbolic interplay of things known and unknowable. Compare this with the quest for knowledge that accompanied the industrial revolution, and which to this day puts the stamp of reason on every dominated object.
This struggle for power over the old ways was reflected in their different paths to the deity. On the one hand the ‘via negativa’ embraced the unknowability of a god that could not be approached or understood by any means other than through love, both spiritual and corporeal. On the other hand the ‘via positiva’ argued that it was possible to understand God and to attribute to him positive qualities such as ‘God is good’. I would argue that the via positiva is a sanitising path to perfection which reduces the deity to an object that can be comprehended, and which by so doing reduces the opportunities for creative inquiry.
I want to return now to the young girl who inspired her father to make the accusations of this supposedly evil ‘witchcraft’ against so many county folk. Whether they knew it or not, they were caught up in the struggle between the old and the new deity. It seems to me that by naming his daughter ‘Christian’, the laird was making a statement about the positive standards of Christian goodness that she would have to live up to. On the other hand being a female, she might well have had some understanding of and sympathy for the ancient ways of being that related her with all the things around her. In other words, Christian Shaw may herself have been a so-called ‘witch’. If that were the case, then she would almost certainly have been conflicted between her natural empathy and her father’s expectations of her, perhaps even disturbed enough to place objects in her mouth, which she then regurgitated?
In the end, she was instrumental in founding Paisley’s industrial heritage, but hidden in the sculpture, in the folds of the Coats and in the three the spaces between those coats is a facetted symbolism through which we encounter these witches, martyred for their ancient beliefs.