Blind Ossian      animate >>

In Ossianic poetry, elemental evocations of the land and its natural dramas are the backdrop for the noble deeds of ancient heroes. Colvin superimposes the face of Ossian upon a scene of stony desolation, which seems to metamorphose from depopulated landscape into the ruins of a building, or a building that stands incomplete, then into mysterious standing stones, or stones in a graveyard, possessed by ghosts. Ossian, the ancient Celtic bard, presides over this scene, now clearly visible, now vague and obscured.

The face of the poet is based on an etching by Alexander Runciman (1736-85). Colvin's treatment acknowledges the artifice of the image. As an etching it contains the notion of something that is both present and absent - the 'positive' of the inked line and the 'negative' of the un-inked areas of paper. This becomes a metaphor for the fusion of the real and the fabricated in Macpherson's 'translations' of Ossian, which are themselves emblematic of the mingling of the mythical and the factual in Scottish history.

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