Angus MacPhee

Angus MacPhee (1915-1997) was born in Nettlehole, a small town fourteen miles east of Glasgow in 1915. His father Neil was a ploughman on a farm and his mother Ellen was Irish. There were three other children in the family, an older sister and two younger sisters. Unfortunately this young family lost their mother when she died aged 43 when Angus was just seven years old.

Their father took his young family to Balgarva in South Uist and brought them up there with his sister Anne. The children went to school in lochdar. They lived on a croft and were kept busy with the necessary work of providing food for themselves and caring for their animals.

In September 1939 a group of fine young men in army uniform left South Uist. The young men of the Western Isles were leaving to go to war once again. Amongst them was a tall shy man, Angus MacPhee aged 24. Before the end of the war Angus returned. War had broken him and he shut himself away in a secret silent world where even those dearest to him couldn’t communicate with him.

For the next fifty years, while in Craig Dunain Hospital near Inverness, this ‘tall silent man’ spent his time creating a huge number of fascinating articles, amongst them clothes, boots, horse harness, hats and caps – from marram grass, sheep wool, flowers and leaves. He would then burn them or leave them to rot.

After a mental health art therapist called Joyce Laing discovered the marvellous work created by Angus MacPhee and some were carefully preserved by her as part of her Art Extraordinary collection. The art he made had went largely unnoticed and certainly uncollected until Laing visited the hospital in the 1970s to ask the staff if anyone made art there. A nurse recommended the woven grass works and with Angus’s permission, she begun to collect them. He signed a document consenting to the collection which surprised the hospital staff because it showed that although silent for so long he understood what was being said and could engage with people.

Laing celebrated Angus’s art of weaving using grasses, leaves or sheep’s wool picked from barbed wire fences that he kept creating during his 50 years in hospital.  He chose not to speak but compulsively wove goods from grasses which he stuck under hedges or left on the lawns as soon as completed. Some of these such as horse harnesses and feeding bags recalled his homelife, time crofting and his fondness for horses.

In the 1990s, as part of the movement to return psychiatric patients to the community, Angus was moved back to South Uist. He lived at Iochdar again until his death in the Old People’s Nursing Home in Daliburgh. Joyce Laing remained in touch with him and In April 2000 curated an exhibition for the Taigh Chearsabhagh Art Trust in Lochmaddy featuring her collection of Angus’s art.

The art and Angus’s life story inspired more creativity, some of which you can view in our gallery page. In 1997 the Mackenzie Sisters included a self-written song ‘A’fighe le feur’ (Weaver of Grass) on their first album Camhanach, sung in Gaelic. The English translation of the opening is ‘Have you ever heard a stranger sound than Angus MacPhee knitting with grass?’ In 2004 Donnie Munro (ex-Runrig) included his song ‘Weaver of Grass’ on his album ‘Fields of the Young’. In 2004, an award winning documentary was made of his life by Nick Higgins: Hidden Gifts: The Mystery of Angus MacPhee . This includes some home-movie footage of Angus back in Uist, towards the end of his life.

In 2011 a new book entitled The Silent Weaver by Roger Hutchinson was published, the fullest and best researched account yet of MacPhee’s life and his place as an artist. The poet Miles Campbell, inspired by the book, wrote the poem ‘The Silent Weaver‘ which you can watch a recital of in both English and Gaelic in the gallery. Angus’ story has also been developed as a theatre production, called ‘Angus – Weaver of Grass’, by Horse and Bamboo Theatre which has toured extensively in the Highlands and Islands during the summers of 2012 and 2013, also appearing in London, Oxford and Lancashire. The Caithness artist, Joanne B Kaar has worked alongside Horse and Bamboo Theatre on their production, and directly with Joyce Laing. In the process she has rediscovered the techniques used by Angus MacPhee and has recreated some of his garments both for the theatre production, for the collection in Pittenweem, and for Scottish Museums.

In 2011/2012 artist Mike Inglis incorporated textures and outfits directly influenced by the stories and artefacts of Angus into his 65-metre permanent Public Art wall installation in Inverness and developed a body of work entitled ‘Chasing the Ghost of Angus McPhee’ supported by Creative Scotland and University of Edinburgh research grants which further develops themes surrounding Scottish identity and culture.