Saints and Heroes
From Anatolia to Caledonia

"Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them" - Emil Cioran
 

"The lamp is not put out by the breath of the denier,

Once alight, the fire of passion burns"  - Pir Sultan Abdal

​
 

Wandering Dervishes, Wonderworkers, Shapeshifters, Maverick mystics and Holy warriors; "Saints and Heroes" casts a light upon the strange personalities across time, space and culture that are nevertheless united in suspending the flow of our ordinary realities, letting loose the absolute into our everyday lives. The physicality of these enigmatic figures, their bodies frozen mid-transformation, is given primacy in this collection. 

Representing mystics across a vast distance, and pulling from different traditions, the erenler (hero-saints) of Anatolian Sufism make up the lions share in the series, introducing the strange world of deviant dervishes to an English-speaking audience. Pulling from the Persian miniature tradition, the drawings themselves reflect a liminal language where the figures are largely androgynous and delicate; arcadian bodies amidst a twisted, foreign world. 

It is a kind of frontier, through and through. Made possible only in the spaces that open up in the midst of a rupture. Inspired heavily by the literary and artistic imagination of Post-Mongol Persia and Anatolia, "Saints and Heroes" draws heavily from the mystical sensibilities of a world reeling from collapse and at the precipice of a brilliant renewal, one made possible by the new encounters of peoples and ideas, momentarily freed from stagnant systems of control. 
 

The temporary suspension of the "ordinary", the kind in which mystics thrive, mirrors their own fantastic miracles. The strange becomes something increasingly familiar, but never ordinary. It is on the periphery, the marginal and the strange that mystics naturally operate, like brilliant pillars of light, offering us the possibility of transformation. A world turned upside-down, is one in which our mystics appear to us, convincingly upright.    

While the focus of "Saints and Heroes" is on the Medieval Middle East, space is afforded to consider the topic within a Scottish and Western European context. We too, in Glasgow are the children of catastrophe. The Japonisme of British and Scottish Art Nouveau is as much a product of the violent ruptures of Empire, and new nodes of convergence that emerge in these shattered spaces as that of the Mongols which both brutally upturned the existing Islamic order and simultaneously revived Persianate culture, heralding the "mystical turn" in Eastern Islamic civilization. This is why a painting of St George is featured in this collection; a quintessentially Oriental Saint from Anatolia, martyred in Palestine and "discovered" and reintroduced to the British Isles during the Crusades. The itinerary of these extraordinary Saints, martyrs and mystics follow directly in the footsteps of those least expecting to be changed by them.
 

In the shattered ruins of conquests and upheavals, the marginal and strange often flourish, and we too are irrevocably changed in our encounters with them.