HEALING WOUNDS

Performance/installation at Marginalia – 6 hours non stop.

18 October 1984

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MacLennan adorned the gallery with an expanded cast of dead animals and their parts – chickens, chickens’ feet, black birds, skinned lambs. A hospital ward of sorts, some lay on bandages on a row of partially dismantled chairs, others were nailed to precarious wooden supports or hung from the walls. MacLennan walked around the space, his head and eyes wrapped in bandages, half a butchered lamb hanging from a rope around his neck.

‘The supports, like chairs and false teeth, were unreliable: the chairs came apart, and were left in different stages of collapse or rebuilding. Judging from the collapsing and rebuilt “supports” it is the healing and its failures that lie at the centre of this work.’

Text from ‘Alastair MacLennan: Is No’, ed. Stephen Snoddy, 1988.