Now, in the temporary cathedral of the Collins Gallery, McKendrick's altars define the seven sects of the great religion. Totemic high priests jealously guard not only the altars but also the skills of their own learning - their trades - passed down as arcane wisdom through the generations. At the Altar of the Sacred Hammer, 12 such guardians keep watch.
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Opposite flicker the electric candle- lit faces of a similar group around the Altar of the Great Spark. Here too are the keepers of the Rivet Tool Altar and over those who watch over the Altar of the Golden Rivet - that elusive Holy Grail believed by the riveter to lie hidden among the millions of rivets in every truly great structure. Behind the altars glow two furnaces, bathed in red-hot light. Their significance is not lost on McKendrick, as echoes of another religion - the Calvinist heritage of the shipyard worker.
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For in the Shipyard the Sunday sermon promise of the fiery pit became a palpable reality. This exhibition resonates with such powerful parallels, intermingling the myth and religion of Christian, Celt and Poet. As McKendrick himself has explained, in the closed society of the shipyard, the workers created their own mythology in which demigods from the Gorbals perpetrated feats of Herculean proportions. Their legends were perpetuated by word of mouth in a storytelling tradition, which mimicked that of their ancestors. Mckendrick has made the equation that so many of his fellow shipbuilders were essentially- transplanted Highlanders
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Iron 3
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