SHOPPERS and tourists walking along Princes Street last week were perhaps surprised to see a familiar face putting up blue memorial plaques on bus shelters and other locations in the capital.
The face belonged to Gerda Stevenson, the BAFTA-award winning actress well known for her role in Braveheart who has also recently become a successful writer of poetry.
The blue “guerilla plaques”, which are not harmful to any buildings and have probably been removed by the authorities by now, were installed to honour the late Scottish film-maker Margaret Tait, born 100 years ago this month on Orkney and who died in 1999 at the age of 80.
It was a personal crusade by Stevenson, as she knew Tait well – and won her BAFTA Best Film Actress Award for the role of Greta in Tait’s 1992 film Blue Black Permanent, Tait’s only feature film.
Stevenson also delivered this year’s George Mackay Brown Memorial Lecture with Tait as her subject. Her collaborator in the plaques project, Sarah Neely, director of the Margaret Tait 100 project, edited the definitive collection of Tait’s written work.
She explained: “We decided to put up temporary plaques when we discovered that Historic Environment Scotland’s criteria for blue plaques require that the person has been deceased for 20-plus years.
“Margaret Tait died only 19 years ago this year, meaning she’s ineligible during her centenary year.
“So we’ve decided to put up the guerilla plaques just now and finish the year-long centenary celebrations with the installation of a blue plaque on Rose Street on her 101st birthday in November, 2019. However, while putting up the guerilla plaques, we’ve been happy to discover that a number of people would like to apply to make their plaques permanent as well.”
Admirers of Tait’s work are currently in the midst of the events taking place to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Tait who made more than 32 short films and wrote three collections of poetry and two of short stories.
Exhibitions about Tait are currently running at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow and at the Demarco Archive Exhibitions at Summerhall in Edinburgh.
Additionally, tomorrow night the Glasgow Short Film Festival will feature two 1970s works of Tait’s direct animation – she painted directly onto frames of celluloid – evoking traditional Highland dances.
The films Tait produced during her career include Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait. The film looks at the life of the Scottish Renaissance poet, who she befriended while working in her Rose Street studio in Edinburgh.
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