‘And the sun shone down on the flax’ Christine Borland’s ‘In Relation to Linum’ by Kirsty Lorenz

‘And the sun shone down on the flax’ is a line from Hans Christian Anderson’s The Flax quoted in ‘Field Notes’, the free publication that accompanies the solo exhibition ‘In Relation to Linum’ by Christine Borland at ‘Climate House’, the renamed gallery at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE). This beautiful bench is where I sat in the gallery with the artist discussing her work. It was a dreich misty morning, the gallery and the gardens were quieter than usual, the first whispers of Autumn coming from the trees through the window.

Words are pinned to the wall on either side of this bench, terms used in the processing of pulled flax to obtain the fibres required for spinning. Linen is made from the spun fibers and has been since the reign of the Roman Empire. Flax has been grown across Europe, in the Americas and Russia. The growing of flax and the production of linen has a centuries long history in Scotland. The plant, Flax (Linum Usitatissimum), is the focus of the exhibition. I hesitate to call it the ‘subject’ of the exhibition because this is not an illustrated guide, rather the plant is the material that ties together the installations presented, creating a timely and complex story of the personal, the historical, the scientific, and the cultural.

On the wall directly opposite us is ‘The Flax Sower Cloaked’, a digital print of the intriguing image that has been used to promote the exhibition. The flax sower is Christine Borland herself, in her studio, in the ‘act’ of digging, cloaked in linen, which is made from flax. Note that she is wearing socks and digging a floor. This still image refines the act of digging into one gesture. It is a woman working, a woman digging, an artist pretending to dig, a woman working. The monochrome tones suggest the history of old photographs.

It is exceptional, and clearly a bit uncomfortable, for Borland to present an image of herself in her artwork but it is an interesting example of the impact of COVID on this body of work. This exhibition is the rescheduled result of a residency. What began as a rare and wonderful opportunity to research, collaborate and work at RBGE, with all its botanical, historical and scientific resources, was short lived. Within a couple of months in 2020 it was transformed as COVID restrictions meant that the garden, the gallery, the library, the archive, the Herbarium, the Research Glass Houses were all shut. The artist’s usual process of investigative research with an institution and its people was turned outside-in as she, like many of us, had to work at home. If she wanted to create images of a figure in the act of planting, growing and harvesting flax, then she used herself as her subject. This image is hung appropriately in the centre of the exhibition, in the middle of the building. An image of the artist working, apparently digging in a poignantly functionless way, in her socks, a conduit for the swirl of ideas, references, history and the present. As a painter I can’t help but comment that the linen she is swathed in is also a surface to paint on.

The figure appears a lot in this exhibition, and it is the female figure. Historically it was women who planted, tended and harvested flax. Borland is very interested in the history of women’s work. Her two series of watercolours depict the movements of the female figure in the different acts required to grow and harvest flax: Dig, Rake, Sow, Riddle, Water, Weed, Pull, Ripple, Winnow. They are painted on linen paper, made from flax grown by the artist and her growers. The figures depicted are based on photographs of the artist herself in these various acts, staged in her studio. At the centre of these figures is a circular motif, a symbol of flax based on a John Hutton Balfour illustration of a cross section of an ovary in the fruit of Common Flax, pre-1859.

‘The Flax Sower – Dig, Rake, Sow, Riddle, Water, Weed, Pull, Ripple, Winnow’, Watercolour on Flax Tow Paper. Courtesy the artist and Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow. Photo Keith Hunter

Borland understands the process of growing, tending and harvesting flax intimately because it is something she has done as part of her process for making this exhibition, and in fact prior to this exhibition. Her relationship with flax began well before this particular project, c.2005 when researching ‘Fuchs Herbal’ of 1543 at Glasgow University. The seeds that grew the actual flax that is presented in various ways through the gallery here came from a harvest in 2019 grown by the artist and her collaborators/growers when working on a previous project at Deveron Arts, Huntly, Aberdeenshire.

‘Lineation Harvest’, Drying flax gathered from RBGE. Courtesy the artist and Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow  Photo Lynsey Wilson — ‘Lineation Harvest’, Drying flax gathered from RBGE. Courtesy the artist and Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow Photo Lynsey Wilson

When she first considered her work with RBGE for this project she was shown a planting list from 1670 when the garden was first established as a Physic Garden to provide medicinal plants for Edinburgh. Flax was on this list and it was like seeing an old friend. Flax has many medicinal properties that have been utilised for centuries and still are today. Echoing this history, she planned to grow flax again at RBGE, centuries later from her seed, but was forced to rethink with the onset of COVID restrictions. Instead, she grew it at home, in pre-industrialised style, and she recruited 50 volunteer growers to each grow and harvest 1m square of flax in their gardens or allotments. As happened across society in the lockdowns, this generated the most positive outcomes on social media. Instagram and Whatsapp came into their own, the restricted life of lockdown was eased through the community created through their involvement with the artist, the plant and each other, learning, growing and harvesting, sharing information and stories #Lineation. Interestingly 49 out of the 50 growers were women, though gender was not specified in the call-out for volunteers.

Borland is interested in the handing down of knowledge through maternal lineage. In relation to flax, which was historically grown and processed by women, she considers how the knowledge, processes and movements of growing and harvesting would have been handed from mother to daughter. The titles ‘The Sower’ and the ‘Sower’s Daughter’ appear several times through the exhibition. The artist’s daughters (at home during COVID) helped to grow and harvest the flax, one of her daughters has written text that is part of the exhibition and the publication. This is a focus in the final installation of the exhibition which consists of 9 screens presenting coinciding 3-minute films called, respectively, ‘The Sowers Daughter: Dig: Rake: Sow: Riddle: Water: Weed: Pull: Ripple: Winnow’. The films begin as abstract, almost sparkling, constellations of light that gradually take the form of a body in movement. The room hosts a strange choreographed dance of avatars. These moving figures are generated from the movements of planting, growing and harvesting the flax. The strange and beautiful installation poignantly touches on the historic (fields of women collectively making these movements), the personal (the figure filmed was the artist herself who learned these movements through her own growing), the future (the artist proposes the possibility of a digital avatar as way to hand on knowledge, implied by the title).

It is the plant’s growth, harvesting and processing to get the fibers that are considered in this exhibition. The artist describes how she has deliberately stopped before the point of flax’s ‘alchemical’ transformation to yarn, its spinning and weaving and all that this might lead her to – that is for a later date. Borland describes herself repeatedly as a ‘learner’, learning herself how to sow and tend and harvest flax. Learning to mix the preservative alcohol for the stems of flax in test-tubes, learning to make linen paper, learning about the plant, its history and the history of RBGE. But she is also of course a teacher (Borland is Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University), and through this work she taught her collaborators to grow flax. Through the free publication ‘Field Notes’ she (along with the curator Emma Nicholson) is teaching the viewer about the complexities of her (the artist’s) processes, ideas and inspirations. This is important because the work is not easy to slide into, Borland stubbornly insists on an aesthetic that takes you beyond the surface. It is still beautiful though. There is beauty in the dried plants in test tubes, the dried stems pinned to walls, the wild wall drawings of ‘off-combings’, the witchy ponytails of ‘combings’, the bundles of dried flax crowned with their baubles of seed heads. There is beauty in the love of language, the story of mothers and daughters, beauty in the collaborations, the acts of growing and the magic dance of the avatars. This work offers the great comforts of art - wonder and hope. Wonder at the complexity and poignancy of it all, hope for a way through the tragedy of our climate crisis.

‘Dressing Room’ 100 clay vessels, 100 bunches of line flax. Photo Keith Hunter. Courtesy the artist and Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow.

‘Dressing Room (Off-Cuts)’, 100 clay cones, flax tow and ‘The Distaff Dresser’, 6 watercolours on flax tow paper. Photo Keith Hunter. Courtesy the artist and Patricia Fleming Gallery, Glasgow.

‘And the sun shone down on the flax’ Christine Borland’s ‘In Relation to Linum’ by Kirsty Lorenz

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