I am part of a STRANDS North Uist Collective and we have an upcoming exhibition in Inverness.
STRANDS – North Uist Collective
We are six, sometimes seven, artists all living and working in North Uist.
Throughout Uist coastal causeways have established network links between communities. In a sense the Strands group of artists are a conceptual and philosophical causeway bringing together creative practitioners with a shared interest in our islands’ history, environment, ecology and how that might shape the contemporary culture of our islands, both now and in the future.
Surfacing
In Uist it sometimes feels as though it is all going on below your ankles or in the sky and there is not much in between, but if you stop to pay attention and listen, the pulse of this dynamic landscape is playing a complicated symphony in overlapping tempos to reveal its memories and stories.
Walking the moors and shores there is a clear divide in the very makeup of the land. The west offers the glimmering white shell sand strands, but cross to the east and the landscape is formed of lochs and blanket peat moorland, and underpinning both of these is rock, while water runs everywhere and each blink reveals a changing sky.
On the shore the tide answers to the moon, racing in and out twice a day bringing gifts from the sea for the beachcombers to find in the strand line, man made and natural, connecting us across the Atlantic, and to the Caribbean or further afield, a daily reminder of our influence in the natural world. Around the year volatile weather systems play with the fragile dunes shifting sand to reveal buried treasures, including substantial prehistoric iron age settlements abandoned long ago as the sea encroached and the sand enveloped them. Enigmatic cup marked stones lie hidden in this marginal landscape, their surfaces covered and revealed again over and over by the passing elements.
On the moor the blanket peat has been building for up to eight or nine thousand years, a consequence of previous climate changes, associated woodland decline and an increasing human population. In places people and the elements have peeled back this dermis to reveal the traces of a hidden landscape. The remains of human occupation surface, dating back since the neolithic era with elements such as standing stones, and the Island Duns and Barps.
Geological time plays out the base line. Rocks surface on the moor and the sea, some left after glaciation and others placed by people. The granite was formed by fire deep in the centre of the planet and surfaced some 2.6 billion years ago to form the basement building blocks of land. It has travelled across the surface on tectonic plates and watched mountains and continents grow to bury it and then erode to re-expose it.
Around 250 years, in Scotland, James Hutton developed the theories that underpin modern geology, namely that the earth is not young, and that geological features are not static, but undergoing continual transformation. He famously remarked that: “we find no vestige of beginning, no prospect of an end.”
This exhibition pulls together some of the threads that weave through our individual practices focusing on themes of surface, time and change, with reference to this place that we all call home.
Strands North Uist Collective – August 2023
happiest under the sky 