IAN STEPHEN describes his ongoing Creative Scotland Award project

FOR MANY YEARS I’ve been making art. I’ve also been sailing, engaged in subsistence fishing, and making my living from organising maritime rescue. Of course the maritime world has been a main subject of poems, stories, photography and sculptural work.

The “Voyagers” series for Radio Scotland was based on a journey made in our 1912 Orkney yole. My role in the “Green Waters” exhibition and book was shaped by interlocking narratives, all tracing sea journeys, in time as well as through water. Public Works in Mull and Benbecula have focused on a boat-shape, renewed through generations as a story is continued by being passed on.

So the simple idea behind my Creative Scotland Project is a natural continuation. This is it: take as a premise that there is a parallel between the process of telling a story and the process of navigating a sailing vessel through sea routes. Now test it by sailing through the settings of traditional Scottish sea stories, ranging from Cape Wrath to the Clyde. Find the most appropriate way to share the experience.

This is what has happened so far.  I already had an ideal vessel for the journeys. We bought a Robert Clark designed sloop called “El Vigo”, when she was berthed at the British Kiel Yacht Club, in Germany. Normally, my family would not have been able to afford a 33ft yacht in seaworthy condition, with good sails and a recent engine. But this one came with a story and an owner who was more concerned with finding a good family home for her than finding the highest price.

So our family bought  this yacht which was designed for offshore racing and built in Spain in 1961. She is a well proven seaboat, a big factor for us. In 2001, we sailed her through the Danish Islands of the Baltic and through Limfjorden before making the open North Sea Crossing between Lemvig and Stornoway. We encountered a bit of weather and high water in the Skagerrak and the Pentland Firth but El Vigo looked after us.

The Award bought the time to sail through the stories and to develop and share them afterwards. It also covered the running costs of the boat for over a year and let me pay the expenses of particular crew who would help document the voyages. So the musician Norman Chalmers sailed with us to St Kilda and the Flannans, but he also took photographs. And the photographer Craig Mackay made dramatic prints but also played bodhran in the El Vigo band.

When you’ve finished taking on food and water and noting forecasts and checking pilotage, you’re sailing. You’ve anticipated the key moments of the voyage – the tidal gate you’ve to catch or the anchorage you can go to unless the wind shifts to the east. You’ve listed these waypoints in a small notebook and plumbed them into the GPS. But between these salient (or saline) points, you have to trust to the vessel and to your experience.

You must also be willing to alter plans, fall off a shifting wind to increase boat-speed, alter for a safer anchorage in response to a fast moving front.  I believe the process of a telling a story is exactly like that. The waypoints which let you navigate through the route are clear. But between them you remake the story according to the conditions encountered.

In the summer of 2002,  El Vigo sailed through a gap in the Shiants; out between Boreray and Stac Lee to Village Bay, Hirta and on through another gap in the Flannan Isles or Seven Hunters.  Before the voyage I worked with pupils in Sleat School, Isle of Skye, passing on St Kilda stories. After the voyage one of those found its way into my script for Seven Hunters, a play commissioned by the Highland Festival and directed by Gerry Mulgrew.

Our night route through the Flannans entered the dialogue between the mate and master of the “Archtor”, the vessel which will report that Flannans Light is unlit.  And Craig Mackay’s visual realisation of the theatre set is informed by the same navigational experience. A film made with Andy Mackinnon is touring with the play, also seeking to share the experience of that one voyage through these 3 archipelagoes.

There were other voyages. We made the connection between Mingulay and Eigg which is central to the strongest story I know.  And tonight (Monday 30 June 2003) we plan to set sail again.  I still hope to make a book, capturing the voyages but these are spoken stories. So the El Vigo band will perform at the Hebridean Celtic Festival this year and at the Scottish Storytelling Festival in Edinburgh.

And when I was asked to make a web-based work as part of the Scottish presence at this year’s Venice Binennale, I broadcast from the sea by means of a satellite-phone and updated stories by daily instalments.  The site still needs some tuning so please be patient as the stories take time to download. But the medium seems to me to be  appropriate. It was built with Graham Collins of Simbiotic, Glasgow. and you can reach it via Zenomap.org. Look for Saline points.

So I’ll continue to sail, subject to weather, health and circumstances, and continue to share the experience via visits to schools and Festivals and via projects such as the Seven Hunters tour. The work may cross several formal disciplines but it is all about finding ways through stories.

Ian Stephen is a writer and visual artist based in Lewis.
 

© Ian Stephen, 2003