I N T R O

The Eigg Island project of 2015 was the culmination of two residencies and two earlier projects on the Isle of Eigg, the small Inner Hebridean island long celebrated for its pioneering community ownership. It came together as an exhibition and live event at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh in march 2015, and it was a genuine collaboration: my paintings alongside the poetry of J,L Williams and the music of Atzi Muramatsu, shown together with crafts and photography by makers and artists from Eigg itself.

At its centre was a trilogy of large paintings, mixed media on redwood panels, titled West, North and East. Each reflected a different facet of my experience of the island: West the abstract blues and greens of Singing Sands, East a tranquil harbour with a single small boat, and North the epic fossil-filled cliffs at the island’s northern end.

North became the conceptual heart of the whole project. It grew from a day on Eigg’s geology trail with the geologist Professor John Hudson, who showed us a fragment of bone from a Pliosaurus that lived some 147 million years ago. As we sat eating lunch beneath the cliffs, Atzi began composing what became ‘Gaia Metempsychosis’, a piece for string quartet: Gaia, the earth, and metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul, its passage onward after death. The idea that, like those fossils, we are present in a single fleeting moment yet part of something endless, returning in time to the landscape itself, ran through the music and the painting alike. I added Atzi as a tiny figure on the clifftop (see detail below).

The launch drew some sixty people. Williams and Muramatsu performed the three pieces, West, North and East, written and composed in response to the paintings; a string quartet gave the first performance of Gaia Metempsychosis; and a six-minute film wove the paintings, poetry and music into a single whole, the evening itself filmed by Summerhall TV. Looking back, this is where much of what followed began: a way of working in which painting is answered by music and poetry, and the partnership with Atzi and Jennifer that would shape many collaborations for  years to come.

PA I N T I N G S

V I D E O

Featuring paintings, poetry and music edited by Rose Strang

 

VIDEO

(Interviews with participants. By Summerhall TV)

 

P O E M

(Poem created by J.L. Williams in response to paintings by Rose Strang and music composed by Atzi Muramatsu).

A hot bright burst of light
tight on the heel of the day
plays into what we cannot
not undo – the small screw bent,
spent, buckled, the driver’s metal arm
farmed out to jink up the heart’s
start or non-start, the cap or cup
chucked because we are what we,
you, me, have to be: makers,
breakers of bread, shakers of salt,
fault all ours or our parents’ or god’s
rods of light hurled now like javelinthin
slaked mica flakes white-gold
sold minute after mi-nute minute to pay
grey time her due. The notes we hear
clear as light through glass
pass through the air of the studio,
show how tipping the system’s vertical
coil horizontal makes the harp’s strings
ringing piano, makes the heart’s sunset
beget sunrise.
J.L. Williams

B L O G  L I N K S

https://rosestrangartworks.com/2015/02/20/ideas-gathering-pace/ https://

rosestrangartworks.com/2015/03/16/north-transmigration/ https://

rosestrangartworks.com/2015/03/23/three-days-to-go/ https://

rosestrangartworks.com/2015/03/31/eigg-island-launch-event-and-performances/

P L A C E