LEWIS AND HARRIS

I N T R O

The Hebrides series (paintings below) came out of a week’s journey through Lewis and Harris in September 2016, made with the author and poet Louise Palfreyman as the first stage of a collaboration that also drew in the cellist and composer Atzi Muramatsu. We travelled up through Achiltibuie and sailed from Ullapool to Stornoway, sketching, painting, writing and filming as we went, gathering the material from which the paintings, poems and a short film would grow.

On Lewis we met the poet, navigator and artist Ian Stephen, a friend I had not seen for some years since we worked together on the live-art project Transitstation. Our conversation ranged over the shared roots of Hebridean and Scandinavian story and myth, and it gave me a way of seeing the islands: standing later among the slender columns of Lewisian gneiss at Callanish, I began to draw a parallel between the gneiss lying deep beneath the peat, laid down over unimaginable time, and layers of story, their origins buried and surfacing in fragments that tease us with half-lost meaning. From there we drove south to Harris, to the otherworldly, moss-carpeted coastline at Lickisto, its boulders left scattered by retreating glaciers, where we stayed in a yurt among the marsh rushes, a deeply peaceful place.

The paintings that followed echoed the timeless feel of the landscape, the darkness and light of the islands. The collaboration was gathered into a short film, my visual response to the journey, weaving the paintings together with poems by Louise Palfreyman, a reading by Ian Stephen, and a soaring, suspenseful cello score by Atzi Muramatsu. Its closing section, set to Louise’s Hebridean Light, put me in mind of the fall of Icarus, and stayed with me long after. The film became the seed of a longer engagement with these islands, and of the further work on Harris that followed the next year.

P A I N T I N G S