Gaelic Arts Residency: Craobh agus Basgaid sa Pholl-Mhònadh
Last year I had the honour of being selected as the Artist in Residence for the annual Tobar an Dualchais x ATLAS Arts residency to explore and create work inspired by oral recordings taken across Scotland over the last hundred years, housed within the virtual Tobar an Dualchais collection. The residency was in partnership with ATLAS Arts, who coordinate and run an engaging arts programme across Skye and Lochalsh.
While my residency came to a close earlier this year, the influence it has had on my practice has only just begun. I’ve tried my best to summarise the highlights in a short series of posts on my website. Here is Part One: Pàirt a h-Aon.
My residency with Atlas Arts and Tobar an Dualchais (TAD) was the first time in my creative career that I have had the luxury of dedicating meaningful time to research. It was a real joy. I connected with my family history and local landscape, I interviewed my Dad and together we learned the Gaelic names for local plants, revelling in the stories and knowledge that could be uncovered from each.
My local culture and surroundings inform and inspire my work, but through my residency I thought more about people: for what is culture without the people who make it. TAD became a treasure trove of stories, and I spent hours trawling through it, finding nuggets of gold everywhere I looked.
I made lots of individual developmental works inspired by the archive, but one recording stood out to me: Craobh agus Basgaid sa Pholl-Mhònadh. Aonghas MacCoinnich, who is being recorded by Donald Archie MacDonald of the School of Scottish Studies, is a wonderful storyteller, and you can almost hear the glint in his eye as he tells a story of finding a submerged willow basket while he’s out cutting peat. The next day they return to the same spot to find that the basket has vanished into dust as if by magic. All that remained was the square base of the basket. It sounded likely to me that the peat was preserving the old basket, and when unearthed it started to disintegrate, but I loved the way Aonghas told his story; the hint of the supernatural, the peat-cutting and basketry, all of which are elements many of us grew up with in the Highlands.
Inspired by Aonghas’ story, I imagined how that basket might look now, disintegrating and taken over by plant life found in the peatlands. I had been listening to recordings on TAD around botany and plant-lore in the Highlands, and so I gathered local plants and dried them, looking for those that would grow in peatland specifically. Together with my dad (whose degree in botany came in handy), we identified them and researched their Gaelic names, which often held stories of their own. I then went along to a basketry group meet-up in Edinbane on Skye, and learned how to weave the square base of Aonghas’ basket. With this I pierced the willow with a fine needle and carefully fed in the dried flowers and plants that I had collected. The final work brings together so many different threads of research, and I hope that it celebrates our landscape, language, culture and craft – and most of all, the stories behind them.
Craobh agus Basgaid sa Pholl-Mhònadh
Captured by photographer Cal Douglas in her natural habitat as she would have been found,