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The Hidden Place
2010
three colour screenprint, edition of 100
109 x 76cm (print & paper size)
Thomas A. Clark
The Hidden Place
Limited Edition Print
2010
£250 + VAT (unframed)
Full print details:
Thomas A Clark
The Hidden Place, 2010
three colour screenprint, signed and numbered on the reverse of print
edition of 100
109 x 76cm (paper size)
£293.75 (unframed, including tax)
£499.38 (framed, including tax)
The Hidden Place is a poem which takes the form of a map of Scotland on which all the place names have been replaced by phrases giving the original meaning of the names.
Places are often hidden behind their names. We see a name on the map or drive past a road sign and think we know the place. Of course, real knowledge is a slower process. Yet hidden within each name is a sense, the original meaning of the name, which may offer a clue to a place’s particular identity. To know the meaning of a name is to begin to reveal the uniqueness of a place.
Place names are repositories of local stories, telling of old cultures, history, geography, industry, religion and myth. Scottish names have their origin in several languages; Gaelic, Pictish, Norse, English, French, Latin and Scots. Each name is a piece of condensed folk poetry: the field of smoke, the sparkling skerries, the little shelter.
It changes our perception of a place to learn that Argyll is the land of the stranger, Greenock is a sunny hill, that Milngavie is a windmill, or that Pollockshaws is a little pool in the woods.
The print published by Ingleby Gallery is part of a larger project, The Hidden Place, initiated by the poet Thomas A Clark which proposes to install road signs around Scotland making the meanings of place names accessible to everyone who passes by bay of the bent grass, place of pebbles, ridge of tears. The Hidden Place is one long poem about the land and its people.
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