INFLATION // DEFLATION
2019
A participatory piece exploring the Highland myth through a study of iconography, printing techiques and performance.
Inflation / Deflation is a process-led and participatory piece that explores the ways in which place-identity in Scotland builds upon a reductive, romanticised conception of the Highlands and how this might be subverted to find a more nuanced understanding of Scotland’s physical and cultural landscape.
One of the earliest ‘correct’ and ostensibly ‘neutral’ maps of Scotland is overprinted with a collage of Scottish iconography collated from postcards. The process of collaging this iconography — romanticised depictions of glens, lochs, bagpipers, thistles, stags and highland cows — mirrors the merging together of various political discourses that have come to inform the Highland myth over time.
The act of then printing the plate under pressure onto the ‘neutral’ map mimics the process of impressing the myth onto the collective imagination. The resulting graphic is of a territory consumed by its own myth, for, as Roland Barthes and Edward Said have theorised, myths can come to replace the very thing they purport to portray.
Onto the ‘myth map’ a second map is then printed, this time showing the location of various industries and land uses across the country. The map forms the surface of an inflated, cushion-like form; a reflection on the dominance, or overinflation, of the romantic Highland narrative. Into this inflated cushion participants poke pins at specific points of industry. By pin-pointing places of industry — and by extension recognising narratives in the Scottish landscape beyond picture-postcard beauty — the map, and the myth, deflate.
