The Half Life of Dark Relics and Fox Fables

Architectural ruins and dematerialised art objects share their sense of potential with the archaeological traces of dùn (fort), suidhe (seats), temples, cup-and-ring marked rocks and shieling. These dark relics have offered poets and artists mytho-poetic conspectus to conjure new-and-yet-older Scotlands. For instance, the landscape installations, performances and projections created by Angus Farquhar’s NVA are ambitious projects that riff off Neolithic Scotland – Half Life (2007), The Storr (2005), The Path (2000) and Beltane (1988–) are spot-lit Celtic technicians of the sacred whose sublime skylines have a hotline to Ossian. Marking a broader shift, NVA have turned from spectacle towards rooted green consciousness, creating The Hidden Gardens (2003) in Glasgow, and planning a new landscape and architecture scheme for St Peter’s Seminary (2017–).

– Alec Finlay ‘a year or more of darkness, a few hundred years without day’, Afterall 45, Spring/Summer 2018

One night they met a bulldog
He said, “What you doing here, then?”
They told him of the redcoats, of their fallen, hunted brethren
They said, “There is no going home now
The land we love is cruel”
The dog said, “Fuck off back to Foxland
These streets are fucking full”

There’s no rest however far we roam
Somewhere in this earth, we will find home

– Arab Strap ‘Fable of the Urban Fox’, from ‘As Days Get Dark’ (2021)