Pulp! Issue 5, January 2024

The Re:Dress Magazine

January 2024

SHOWTIME

RE:DRESS 23

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTISTS Denise Zygadlo Silvy Weatherall

EARTH STORIES

Morag Macpherson

ONE TO WATCH Sadie Worrall

IN PROFILE

Nelson Brown

@thecircleshop

www.etsy.com/CircleShopGallery

Ed

NELSON BROWN

DANNY MACK

Award winning international fashion hair stylist. www.nelsonbrown.co.uk Instagram: @nb.hair.education @nelson_brown_hair

Daniel McKinnon.

Art Director. The UPs. Instagram: @supermodernsadness

MAGGIE MACK Marie Martin McKinnon.

Styling, photography and creative direction. The UPs. Instagram: @ismissmarie

RE:DRESS HAIR TEAM: Nelson Brown, Joyce Money, Katie Maxwell, Mark Anderson, Marta Doering, Tracy Lee Wells, Sarah Geddes

RE:DRESS MAKE UP TEAM: Alanna Barszczynski, Sadie Worrall, Alice Parry, Larissa Macwell

ALANNA BARSZCZYNSKI

KATIE MAXWELL

Make Up Artist Instagram: @illuminate.by.alanna

Hair stylist at Nelson Brown Hair, Dumfries Instagram: @katie_nb_hair

RE:DRESS 23 PHOTOGRAPHERS CPA, Centre for Practiced Arts Instagram: @cpadumfries Euan Maclean Instagram: @madmac3 Lauren Burr Instagram: @lauren_burr_ Mhairi Muir Instagram: @mhairi_am

Cover Image: Joanna Le Vin in Marly Merle at Re:Dress 23 photo by CPA @cpadumfries With thanks to: Ronnie Galloway Photographer Circle Vintage Vintage clothing store.

Online & by appointment.

Instagram: @thecircleshop AC A writer of fables

Re:Dress Scotland is an award-winning environmental organisation championing creativity in sustainable fashion, and providing platforms for young talent in the arts www.redressscot.co.uk

The Scottish Slow Fashion Festival

The Scottish Slow Fashion Festival

Backstage Pass

ONE TO WATCH

SADIE WORRALL

Clothes: Models’ own Hair: Nelson Brown assisted by Katie Maxwell Photos: Maggie Mack

CREATIVE SPOTLIGHT

Morag Macpherson

He was beautiful, the prince of the small village within the enormous city. With hair of spun gold and eyes that held the sky in their wonder, he moved with effortless grace and occupied the present with a promise of future fulfilment. Truly the gods had blessed him as though one of their own. Captivating, charming, with the future at his command, his potential was boundless, and greatness seemed to be assured. What caused this not to be, was never known. Some said he left for the love of a beautiful woman who then abandoned him and broke his heart. Others said he left because he had to escape the consequences of his actions, but what those actions were, or what the consequences might be, would change depending on whoever was gossiping at the time. The more fanciful amongst the small village within the enormous city, said he had been spirited away by his father. Although who his father actually was would change with each telling. Oftentimes his father was an ancient god from past times, sometimes a hero of an epic story, sometimes a notorious villain from a powerful family, and some even claimed that his father was a spirit wolf that came in the night, in dreams. Truly, what was known was not fact, what was known was his impact. He evoked a lupine quality that made him hauntingly memorable; once you had met him, his presence lingered. Indeed, the only fact that was ever known about him was his love of nature and his desire to explore remote and beautiful places. Beyond this, he existed as an intangible presence, a beauty which could not be grasped, quantified or defined.

However, leave he did. He travelled through countries of different landscapes, speaking in different tongues; always moving forward, always leaving questions behind him.

Eventually, he arrived at the kingdom by the sea. The kingdom was flanked on one side by a steep wooded glen with a rushing river and cascading waterfalls. The other side by the sea that stretched to another continent. The centre of the kingdom was formed around a square courtyard, many hundreds of years old, where nothing of note had happened in a very long time. It was possessed of a sort of

dissatisfaction, and the natural beauty of the place was consumed by constant criticism that had become hewn into its very bedrock.

The young and the old were part of a continuum, where the present’s future and present’s past gazed at the reflection of their once and future selves. Friendships and enmities would shift with ease. However, a strong belief in who belonged, and who did not, bound them together. Into this discontented ennui, the prince of the small village within the enormous city strode with confidence. There is a moment in life in which the potential for every outcome exists, and at this point in time there was the potential for the prince to become part of the kingdom’s community. Certainly, to begin with, they looked at him with fascination and awe; however, beauty that transcends the ordinary can provoke the greatest resentment in those who seek to possess it. The self-appointed matriarchs of the young and the old clucked together, rounding their expansive backs and folding their oblong shaped arms whilst they eyed his lupine confidence with suspicion. Quickly they weighed and measured him as not one of them and determined that they would ensure his removal.

The prince’s beauty was a charm though, and many of the visiting young and older maidens would gaze on him with thoughts they would not confess. Instinctively aware of this, the more masculine section of the community would not welcome him, rather they invented criticisms of him that were repeated without evidence or corroboration. This prince would not be allowed to dwell. He was, however, equally unflustered by the desirous or critical attention he received.

He walked his own path, making his way through the wooded landscape, seemingly content with his own company. Day after day he would explore and never give an indication as to where he went or what he did. When asked about his intentions, he would laugh and say, “everything I do is romantic.” When confronted with a threat, he would allude to past adventures and trials that made any present threat pale into insignificance. Thus, because he was unknowable, unable to be possessed,

defined or categorised, he was unconquerable.

Or so it seemed.

The prince became of interest to a group of young women who would gather as a flock and gaze on him with eyes fringed with spiders and framed with slugs. They would lounge on the pathways displaying their tangerine skin, each one convinced of her own pre-eminence, each pushing for a place within their unspoken hierarchy. The group was led by a young matriarch-in-the-making, who had already developed the disapproving look of resentful judgement, and her lieutenants who would curry favour by doing her will. With a face contorted as though stung by an angry hornet, the young matriarch would gather her followers and they would gaze on him with mounting resentment.

His beauty and independence became a thorn in their collective side. To begin with, they invented rumours about him, mean-spirited gossip. The prince, however laughed off such obvious bile, and when, in response, their barbs increased to false accusations, this too, he treated with derision. In mounting resentment, they attempted to garner more support amongst the community, continually finding fault with him, alienating anyone who spoke with him in a friendly way.

Collectively their bitterness blossomed, bore fruit and festered until it poisoned their blood and then their hearts.

Blinded by their hatred, one night the women decided to follow the prince to find evidence of all that they believed about him. Into the wooded glen they tracked him, working together to stalk him as he climbed up the banks of the rocky burn to the height of the glen where three waterfalls converged into one momentous cascade. As he reached the topmost height of the tumbling water, they spread out, signalling to each other to surround him. Whatever their ultimate purpose was, what they saw next halted them. The prince knelt on the waterfall bridge facing the intangible spirit of an enormous spirit wolf. The spirit wolf was of brightest silver, seemingly formed from the moonlight, with eyes of golden fireflies, and it towered over the prince who bowed his head in filial respect, his face radiating with shining light.

To the women the luminescence of the prince was so extraordinary that it provoked within them such envy, such bitterness, such hatred, that it consumed them, and their hearts withered.

As one, they advanced upon him from every angle. Too late the prince and the spirit wolf saw them, and as they pounced on the prince, the spirit wolf jumped clear of the waterfall bridge.

Into the prince’s flesh they sunk their fingernails, ripping through his skin to the muscles beneath, tearing at his sinews with their teeth. They pulled him downwards, and onto his chest the matriarch-in-waiting leapt, plunging her hands into his heart, wrenching it from his chest and devouring it. In triumph, she pushed his tattered and lifeless body into the darkness, and it fell as a beautiful, perfect silhouette against the moon’s light. Howling with delight the women licked his blood from their faces, their anger and their envy satiated in their feast.

Their triumph, however, did not last long. The spirit wolf filled the sky, howled in visceral rage at the death of his son, and turned his eyes of golden fire flies on the women. “Your envy and your bitterness have driven you to destroy what you could never possess, so now you will live as you are, filled with perpetual hatred.” As he spoke, the women’s bodies began to change: their backs hunched, thick wiry hair burst through their skin, their hands and feet grew claws and their faces transformed to those of blood-stained hyenas. “You will scavenge these hill” commanded the spirit wolf. “You will be shunned by man and beast, hated, reviled, condemned for an eternity to live in your own natures. No one will come here, no one will seek you out, and you will fester here together”. With this, the hyenas fled into the forest howling as they ran, attacking each other as they darted this way and that. The spirit wolf leapt down the enormous waterfall and found the body of his son on the rocks below.

Carefully the spirit wolf took his son onto his back and leapt far up into the night sky. Tenderly he licked his son’s body clean, and with each lick he placed part of him in the heavens until the prince formed a shining constellation of stars that could only be seen in the light of the wolf moon.

NB Goes Walkabout in Australia

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