Fatty Foods & Woollen Goods: Selling Scottish Heritage

A presentation/performance at an event in Tobermory, on Mull as part of Rachel Maclean's exhibition, 'The Weepers', at An Tobar/Comar. I discuss my long history of work interrogating this paradigm and performed a series of Scottish songs, selected from the last 300 years. "From Tartan and tweed to sheep souvenirs and see-you-Jimmy hats, a panel of speakers will explore historic and contemporary efforts to package and present Scottish Heritage. What effect has this had on the people of Scotland and their national identity? How do we differentiate an 'authentic' Scottish experience from an 'inauthentic' one? And from National politics to local tourist industry - from our arts and culture - what is at stake in selling Scottish heritage?" An evening event that takes as its starting point the new film by Rachel Maclean, The Weepers, commissioned by Comar. Exhibited at An Tobar, Maclean's film draws from tropes of Gothic Horror fiction, medieval settings, ancestral curses, supernaturalism, dream visions, and descension into madness. Yet it also plays to a prevailing romanticism of the Scottish Highlands and the much caricaturised Hebridean figure - red haired and drenched in tartan; hospitable to the last; pragmatic, comic, yet bound up in deep-rooted superstition.