Three Scottish Surrealists: Sulter, Douthwaite, Flannigan

The legacy of Scotland’s engagement with Surrealism can be seen in the work of many recent and contemporary visual artists whose practices embody both the key characteristics and defining features of the Dada and Surrealism while simultaneously symbolising aspects of Scottish culture and identity. In art, film and literature, ‘Scottishness’ is frequently bound up with associations of absurdity and dark humour, a cultural tendency towards interdisciplinarity (fostered by George Davies’ notion of the ‘democratic intellect’), and, in terms of subject matter and imagery, a fixation with the Glaswegian psychiatrist R. D Laing’s notion of ‘the divided self’: of the Scots as both enlightened and savage, the inventors of the modern world in thrall to base instincts and subconscious desires. This paper will consider the work of three women active in the late twentieth century and beyond: Maud Sulter (1960-2008), a Scots-Ghanaian writer and photographer and two figurative painters, Pat Douthwaite (1934-2002) and Moyna Flannigan (1963 -). Of the three, only one (Flannigan) studied in Scotland, and the ways in which the individual works intersect with Surrealism are quite distinct in terms of style and form. But what unites these apparently disparate artists is a concerted interest in the representation of women and the use of Surrealist visual tropes to critique and destabilise conventional approaches to portraiture: the use of collage / montage; depictions of often disturbing and decontextualized objects and images; dream-like, irrational narratives, often exploring ‘transgressive’ sexuality; and fantastical, exquisite corpse-like juxtapositions, sometimes pairing elements of African and European art. The work of these iconoclastic, latter-day Surrealists are both feminist riposte and homage to their art historical precedents. This paper seeks to trace some of the artistic intersections between Surrealism and Scotland through a discussion of key works by Sulter, Douthwaite and Flannigan.