Làrach, a Hebrides showcase
A collaboration between the Society of Scottish Artists and An Lanntair arts centre, Stornoway, Làrach (meaning a mark, impression, site, print or footprint) features artists who live and work on Lewis and Harris. The selection places a particular emphasis on photography, reflecting the current strength of work in this medium in this part of the Hebrides. The artists explore how the unique landscape and strong sense of place are deeply interconnected with the language, identity, culture and history of the islands.
Anne Campbell grew up in Bragar on the westside of Lewis. Her map explores a landscape of imagination, a dense web of Gaelic place names, stories and songs - language which is also expressed within Fiona Rennie’s diptych photographs of Gaelic writers. John Maher’s images of abandoned decaying interiors are emblematic of loss and de-population in the islands. Moira MacLean raids these abandoned crofts, her installation exploring alcoholism and tension in a household where punishment and religion were inextricable.
Jon Macleod, Beka Globe and Alex Boyd develop experimental landscape photography. Jon Macleod presents images taken by Solargraph cameras set up in locations across the island to capture the passage of the sun over a 6 month period - a kind of slow CCTV capturing the particular extremes of light and dark in the islands. Alex Boyd uses an antique field camera and wet-plate collodion process to create his tintype landscape photographs. Beka Globe presents ‘portraits’ of flowers unique to the Hebridean machair and Andrea Ingram, playing with light and movement, depicts and abstracts from aspects of everyday life.
The nucleus of Steve Dilworth’s exquisitely crafted objects is the primal energy of raw, once living material, with no separation between the physical and the metaphysical. The selection is completed by Jessica Danz, commissioned by An Lanntair in collaboration with the Icelandic film archive to re-score an early Icelandic documentary film. Ísland í lifandi myndum could have been shot in the Outer Hebrides, such is the relationship between the two locations. Rather than being at the edge, the work reflects the notion of the art of the Hebrides as being at the centre of an arc which reaches north through the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Scandinavia.
Anne Campbell grew up in Bragar on the westside of Lewis. Her map explores a landscape of imagination, a dense web of Gaelic place names, stories and songs - language which is also expressed within Fiona Rennie’s diptych photographs of Gaelic writers. John Maher’s images of abandoned decaying interiors are emblematic of loss and de-population in the islands. Moira MacLean raids these abandoned crofts, her installation exploring alcoholism and tension in a household where punishment and religion were inextricable.
Jon Macleod, Beka Globe and Alex Boyd develop experimental landscape photography. Jon Macleod presents images taken by Solargraph cameras set up in locations across the island to capture the passage of the sun over a 6 month period - a kind of slow CCTV capturing the particular extremes of light and dark in the islands. Alex Boyd uses an antique field camera and wet-plate collodion process to create his tintype landscape photographs. Beka Globe presents ‘portraits’ of flowers unique to the Hebridean machair and Andrea Ingram, playing with light and movement, depicts and abstracts from aspects of everyday life.
The nucleus of Steve Dilworth’s exquisitely crafted objects is the primal energy of raw, once living material, with no separation between the physical and the metaphysical. The selection is completed by Jessica Danz, commissioned by An Lanntair in collaboration with the Icelandic film archive to re-score an early Icelandic documentary film. Ísland í lifandi myndum could have been shot in the Outer Hebrides, such is the relationship between the two locations. Rather than being at the edge, the work reflects the notion of the art of the Hebrides as being at the centre of an arc which reaches north through the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Scandinavia.