When you say it aloud, it’s a hard word in your mouth, there’s an implication of something inflexible and finite. To be on edge is to be anxious, to be taut or tense. Something that is edgy is controversial, testing, risqué; but in reality the edge is often a soft and dynamic place, where it is tricky to pin point exactly where the boundary is; a place of compromise, and negotiation; a place of meeting, mingling and coming together but also a place of transformation and change. This is no more so than at the shore, where tide and weather create the littoral zone, a blurred region of water, land and air.
Introduction by Ewan Allinson
BA(Oxon), MSc, Sculptor – August 2021
Place and time are intertwined in North Uist in ways that are utterly unique. For the ever-growing number of artists in the island, inspired by its people, its heritage, landscape and seascape, there is a sense of being privy to something that exists only here. The sense of place is a sense of time, told by a geology so extraordinary as to defy the imagination. The Grey Gneiss that forms the island is 3 billion years old. Most of the rocks that form the UK mainland are younger than 450 million years old. This is the bedrock of a different dimension, of our planet in its youth. Exquisite mineralogy, twisting bands of quartz, feldspar and hornblende, tell stories of forces beyond our ken. On the edge of time, on the edge of a continent, on the edge of the ocean, North Uist is at a crossroads of planetary elements, an epicentre for all that is sublime.
Little surprise then that a key component of the recent reversal in the island’s long-term population decline has been thanks to the growth of the creative sector. Painters, sculptors, musicians, makers and bards of all kinds are building livelihoods harvesting the elements creatively, just as crofters and fishermen harvest the land and sea. The vitality and depth of their work is a reflection of how the artists themselves are in symbiosis with the forces of geology, of tide and storm, season and moment. Change is a constant and expressing that demands that artists reach the peak of their practice. The development of an arts infrastructure on the island has bolstered this licence to experiment. From the lively Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre at Lochmaddy, to the availability of an arts degree through the centre supported by the University of the Highlands and Islands (this exhibition’s Fiona Pearson was instrumental in founding both these institutions) there is a palpable sense that, to quote North Uist’s renowned violinist Anna-Wendy Stevenson, “Uist is leading from the edge”.
The exhibition brings together the work of 5 artists all living and practising in North Uist.
I thought I should introduce you to my friends and colleagues who I am co-exhibiting with. This exhibition was originally conceived in deepest lockdown last spring, when we were still forbidden to meet up in person with anyone outside our household. Living on my own I felt that this was detrimental to my well being, and living as we all do on a sparsely populated island blessed with long beaches and open space, topped off with a spell of fantastic weather we met one at a time for walking and talking, drawing, sitting in the dunes with respective flasks, and hatching plans. We needed something we could look forward to, something we could actively plan for, and at the time we felt that by September 2021 all this would be a distant past, and we would all be travelling and meeting freely again far sooner. But now with the hindsight we all have we were OK in our choice of dates, but not super OK…..
lockdown walking with sketchbooks. Cally and Fiona. Photo by Sheenagh
Anyhow the art has been wrapped, and we are all long enough in the tooth to have been double vacced for quite some time, and all practised, if weary, with sticking tests up our noses or throats, so we are heading off to the big city for a fortnight of adventures. Hopefully some people will come, and hopefully some of them will buy our work, but for me I’m also really looking forward to the change and to the people….
So who are we…..
Fergus Granville
I’m largely inspired by the environment and archeology of the Outer Hebrides. The sea brings strange flotsam and jetsam from a vast catchment, and transforms and slowly owns man-made objects. Storm surges reveal ancient burials, artefacts and structures and rain and gneiss of the islands interior combine to form a thick blanket of peat.
I rarely return from a walk empty handed. As an obsessive collector, I often try to prolong and savour the moment of discovery by making the things that I find into something new. Much of what I make is related to aging, metamorphosis and death. this is not intended as morbid or negative, but as a neutral and inevitable process.
Living on North Uist one is constantly aware of the tidal ebb and flow, as well as weather and seasonal changes. Surrounded by a myriad of other creatures: birds insects mammals and fish, all breeding dying and decaying, makes the latter seem natural and commonplace.
Fergus has lived on North Uist for most of his life. He is the proprietor of the Hebridean Smokehouse. He has participated in a number of exhibitions on the island.
Walking the Atlantic shoreline on the island of Baleshare can seem like a tranquil pursuit – vast skies, deserted sand and the mesmerising sound of the surf – but the beach is a constant hive of activity. Flotsam, flora and fauna, come and go, creating ever-changing installations. Beautiful abstract patterns are drawn, wiped and redrawn by the rhythm of the tide. Dancing waves meet and retreat from sand and shingle in a never-ending quadrille. They set to their partners. At once challenging and in perfect harmony.
Marnie lives and works in North Uist. She is primarily a painter, but also makes prints, casts and site specific works.
Across the flat space between the high and low tidal zone the sea deposits its gifts to be found and claimed, then takes back what is unwanted. With each new tide comes something new, something previously unseen. The surface of a painting is like an inter-tidal zone where repetition, rhythm and form can trigger fresh ideas and meaning; and, where improvisation and the smallest of variables in composition echo the complexity of nature.
Each day I walk along Tràigh Bheasdaire, at home in Berneray. It is a place to observe and imagine. The continual shifting nature of the tide connects us to bigger global geomovement; the slow slip of the glacier over land; vast tectonic plates repositioning continents over millennia.
Fragments of ceramics washed up here seem so small and fragile. Their human function as a much loved vessel or container are now a memory. Shaped by these global forces they have acquired new value and importance.
Sheenagh Patience lives and works from her studio overlooking the Sound of Harris in the Isle of Berneray. She is a graduate of DJCA in Dundee.
On Instagram @sheenaghke
Fiona Pearson
The edge of space.
My recent work has reflected the subtle edges of land and sky. Bird flights connect them.
“the intensified sky, hurled through with birds” Rilke
Fiona Pearson has lived on her croft in Uist for 40 years. She has been involved for many years in Arts Education, setting up the Fine Arts Degree offered at Taigh Chearsabhagh. She is a keen walker and exploring the island shores and moors is a part of her life and practice.
I love it when the days lengthen and the summer breeding seabirds arrive on their own river in the sky, no visas or tickets, just an instinct and knowledge of their own world. They live in the edge where the elements meet, at home in the air and water, and settling on land to breed.
I can often be found balanced on a rock somewhere with my sketch book, and although I have yet to work out how to sketch whilst swimming, and have had limited success from my kayak, the movement and point of view from the water is vital to my practice.
This past summer I have kayaked across the Minch and visited the great whirling bird worlds of St Kilda and the Shiants and pondered on the nature of passage, arrival, and how when you are in the middle, that’s when you are most at the edge.
Artist gardener like an ocean wind over the water she goes. Catherine moved to Uist 6 years ago for a year to study fine art. She’s still here.
Thanks to Visual Arts and Craft Makers Awards (VACMA) for their bursary awarded to catherine in January 2021 that has assisted in development of works for this exhibition.
Last year I collaborated with a musician, Ewan Macdonald, whose ancestor Lachlan MacKinnon was one of the men responsible for killing the last known Great Auk or Garefowl in the British Isles around 1840. They thought it was a witch….. Once plentiful across the North Atlantic, the very last Great Auk ever was killed by specimen hunters in Iceland a few years later.
This summer I visited St Kilda myself, and could almost imagine the Garefowl on the rocks at the water’s edge under the noisy bustling guillemot shelves above.
Flightless and easy to catch when on land, they were hunted for their down, which was prized for pillow making, and their size meant that they made a good meal in the pot for whalers and other long distant fishermen and seafarers. By the middle of the 19th century they were increasingly rare and sought out by collectors.
I’ve also been inspired by a poem by New Zealand Poet Bill Manhire from his collection Wow, published in the UK last year by Carcanet. The last verse has been pinned up in my kitchen since I came across it and feels very apt.
It’s a great collection and highly recommended. Available widely from good bookshops
Huia
By Bill Manhire
I was the first of birds to sing
I sang to signal rain
the one I loved was singing and singing once again
My wings were made of sunlight
my tail was made of frost
my song was now a warning
and now a song of love
I sang upon a postage stamp
I sang upon your coins
but money courted beauty
you could not see the joins
Where are you whn you vanish?
Where are you when you’re found?
I’m made of greed and anguish
a feather on the ground
*
I lived among you once
and now I can’t be found
I’m made of things that vanish
a feather on the ground.
This drawing will be part of works being exhibited in Edinburgh 26 Sept-9 October at the Dundas Street Gallery. Edge, contemporary art from North Uist with 4 fellow Uist Artists. Fiona Pearson, Sheenagh Patience, Marnie Keltie, and Fergus Granville. Open daily 11-6.
This summer I kayaked across the Minch. I camped on the edge of an Arctic tern colony, stayed on the whirling bird universe of the Shiants and made landfall in Lewis at abandoned settlements. A midsummer sea passage with birds, minke whales, arrivals and departures and a sense that when you are in the middle then that’s when you are most at the edge.
I’ve been processing this journey for a while through sketches and collages.
Here are some new paintings that are part of this process.
These will form part of our exhibition EDGE.in Edinburgh opening 26 sept – 9 October with 4 fellow Uist Artists.
happiest under the sky 