Standing stones?

Today it is easy to see the appeal of Carrick's works for while the grand gesture of the Victorian artists, rendered in bronze with polished granite pedestal, has largely gone out of fashion Carrick's forceful carving and preference for clean and simple lines is more in tune with modern taste. Today the simple or primitive enjoys higher status and, since every age tends to look back at the past through its own particular colour of lens, it is tempting to look back and imagine that at Lochawe, Killin and Oban, Carrick was creating a kind of 20th century standing stone. It should however be noted that Carrick himself made no such suggestion and in his business papers his letters to war memorial committees concentrate on the idea of the highland cairn and the creation of a rock garden. Scotland in the 1920's was however still a deeply religious society and the suggestion to any memorial committee, which inevitably included at least one minister or priest, that he was adopting the vocabulary of pagan memorial would hardly have been politic. I believe that the posture of the Lochawe soldier and the proximity of standing stones, the enclosing megalithic circle of Killin, the incorporation of the cup and ring marked stone at Oban, do suggest something more than a taste for the rustic.

I think what can be said with certainty is that in these monuments we see a powerful convergence of artist, medium and community. Carrick was a true artisan and craftsman with a gift for working in freestone and a genius for composition. Just as important however was his obvious belief as a monumental sculptor that art is a collaborative process between artist and community, and the demand for artists to express the loss felt by these communities after the war resulted in the need for such collaboration on a scale which has not been seen since. After the Great War however western society was in a state of shock, all of the self-assurance and certainties of empire had died on the Somme. The heroic of the classical ideal and grand gestures often seen on Boer War memorials were unacceptable, and while Christian symbolism remained important the faith of many had been shaken, soldiers were well aware that their German enemies had shared the same faith in 'Got mit uns', and many felt bitterness over the church's self-appointed role of propagandist and recruiting sergeant during the war. In such a situation what was left for the artist who sought to express the feelings of a community? Some artists certainly looked to a return to fundamentals. In such a time of upheaval the one thing that endured was the community itself, communities like Oban and Dornoch which had down through the ages witnessed wars and every kind of change and yet endured. It also seems to me that there was no better material to symbolise this endurance than stone and Carrick's powerful style gave status to the stone, allowing its qualities to remain in the work. The standing stone is the most ancient form of memorial and I think that the adaption of this ancient symbolism and the use of local stone ensured that the memorial tapped into something more ancient and fundamental at the heart of the community.

I think it is interesting to draw comparisons between these memorials and those at Kinghorn, Newburgh, and Auchtermuchty in Fife. The Newburgh memorial features the carved figure of a Black Watch infantryman while Kinghorn has a soldier and sailor group. Both sculptures are forcefully carved but they stand on pedestals of dressed stone in a more formal setting and, although these are fine monuments, they do not have the same impact as the highland memorials. At Auchtermuchty, however, the memorial again succeeds in tapping into the roots of the community but on this occasion, where the totemic language of pre-historic ritual would be inappropriate in a town square, the vocabulary of the mercat cross and roadside shrine was successfully adopted.

Finally the role of architect James B. Dunn in this is difficult to evaluate. I am not aware of his having any involvement at Lochawe, Carrick's first highland memorial, yet Carrick was always at pains to stress Dunn's role in the conception of the Killin memorial. Interestingly Dunn was also the architect at Auchtermuchty and my guess is that while Carrick initiated the idea at Lochawe James B. Dunn entered into a collaboration and together architect and sculptor worked together bringing the original concept to maturity in some of the finest and most original war memorials in Scotland.