Big Country

In his debut exhibition, Mark Cousins shines a light on an overlooked artist while exploring some crucial issues of our day. Xuanlin Tham speaks to the filmmaker about covid, climate and cubism

To the prolific filmmaker Mark Cousins, art begins with an infection. What is the feeling of creating or experiencing art, after all, if not an embodied, visceral possession: a conversation between two entities made vulnerable to one another? Cousins’ upcoming Edinburgh Fruitmarket installation, Like A Huge Scotland, hopes to evoke one such moment of ‘infection’. Its genesis can be traced back to Cousins’ own infection by the work of Scottish cubist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. For her part, Willie (as she liked to be called) was also infected by a lifechanging encounter. One fateful day in 1949, she climbed the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland; the experience would forever alter her as an artist and a human being.

‘This is the story of a relationship between a brain and a glacier,’ says Cousins. It’s a quote from the film he’s making alongside Like A Huge Scotland, a four-screen installation that immerses visitors within Willie’s paintings of the glacier, still images and sound, from the music of cellos to brushes on canvas. ‘What I’ve tried to do is give people a sense of being in the Alps, but instead of being surrounded by mountains, they’re surrounded by paintings,’ he elaborates. ‘It’s trying to evoke one sublime experience with another.’

Willie’s moment of epiphany with the glacier (which to Cousins, crosses over from the natural realm and into that of the numinous and eternal) beckoned his own artistic response. ‘I sometimes feel half asleep, somnambulant,’ he reflects. ‘I think Willie was also searching for something, that she didn’t feel fully alive until that day.’ His encounter with her work triggered an analogous jolt, an awakening in dialogue with Willie’s own. Emphatically, he says, ‘I cannot get her out of my head’. Like A Huge Scotland thus emerged as a tribute to infectious epiphanies past, present, and yet to come. ‘I knew it had to be bigger than life. It had to be luminous, it had to surround us; it had to feel like a plunge into cold water, a sensory shock,’ Cousins describes. ‘I’m very interested in the idea of a sublime experience taking you out of yourself.’ He invokes writer Joseph Campbell’s phrase, ‘the rapture of self-loss’, as one crucial way that art can reorient us, perhaps especially urgent in times of climate emergency. ‘There’s a political dimension to art taking us into more transcendental realms,’ he affirms. ‘A holistic view of not just the planet, but the broader field of existence.’

Cousins first encountered the transcendental power of Willie’s paintings in the late 80s. While cubism is often associated with a certain analytical frigidity, he saw in Willie’s paintings, and her diary entries about the glacier, a reminder that cubism is inevitably a euphoric desire to see something from every angle: an ecstatic fracturing of time and space.

‘She felt like she was above the glacier, below it, inside it and around it,’ he says, mapping the planes with his hands; the gestures mirror the installation’s multidimensionality. ‘That’s why the installation is the way it is. It’s this idea of simultaneity: how can we feel it everywhere at once, not just looking straight?’ Asked what he hopes visitors will take away from Like A Huge Scotland, Cousins responds, ‘I hope people will fall in love with this artist, Willie Barns- Graham, who has not been given her proper due. And I hope people will realise her art brings to the fore many themes that we in the 21st century are interested in: feminism, neurodiversity and climate emergency.’

Perhaps most importantly, however, Cousins hopes that the installation captures and translates this experience of infection: one that’s particularly poignant today. ‘Covid has reminded us that we are a single species, that we’re all vulnerable to each other, that we’re tenderised by each other. And to respond to the world. Forget art,’ he interrupts himself, ‘even just to respond to the sunset here in Edinburgh today, is to be vulnerable, tender and therefore absorbent.’

Like A Huge Scotland promises to make us vulnerable to discovery, but what will we be infected by? Let us surrender, become open and absorbent: and find out what epiphanies lie in wait.

Mark Cousins: Like A Huge Scotland, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, Saturday 5–Sunday 27 November.