Skerray Museum, until 12 August 2005

Trees by Finnish artist Teija-Tuulia Ahola.

FOR MILLENNIA GOLD has held a particular fascination for humanity; the metal’s density, light and colour and relative rarity made it a standard of exchange and currency. Legends and mythology are weighted with its magicality. It binds and symbolises marriages.

The lust it provokes creates murderers and tyrants, despots and imperialists. The idea of it encapsulates love and hate, peace and war, goodness and evil. The alchemists believed that it could be made from base metals such as lead, an idea used a metaphor for transformation by contemporary writers such as Paulo Coelho.

Doubtless, these thoughts – and many more – have occurred to the Finnish artist Teija-Tuulia Ahola as she has explored the many metaphors and associations of gold in her work. Her love of and fascination with the material is palpable, living, passionate.

In the intimate, fragile and beautiful setting of a restored pre-clearance building in Skerray which now doubles as the community archive and museum, Ahola has transformed this space, adding new dimensions and emotions to the ancient stones which have doubtless born witness over the centuries to a range of human drama. Gold, in the hands, heart and mind of this artist becomes a metaphor for the transformative power of art itself.

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Gold brings alive the memory of song, child-birth, death, the baking of bread and the drying of salt in rock niches.

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Ahola has layered some of the external and internal stones of the building – pre-Cambrian schist and gneiss (lovingly restored some years ago by the stone-mason Gavin Clarke) with gold-leaf. The high-lighted stones become quick with energy and vitality; they sing of the past, present and future. They bear witness to geological time and the lesser, more fragile idea of human time.

In this enclosed and sheltered space, a domestic enclave, the stones speak, talk and chant. Gold brings alive the memory of song, child-birth, death, the baking of bread and the drying of salt in rock niches. Lives of poverty are made rich: echoing and spirited accumulations of the past. Gold becomes historicity, futurity.

In her photographically derived prints, made using a silk-screen process, the history of Sutherland is witnessed in the stark images of wind-blown trees; deforestation and climatic change brought about these changes, a contrast to the forested landscape of Ahola’s homeland. Trees are history and they tell an economic and social story as much as an ecological one.

Ahola’s husband, Charles Sandison, who was raised in the area and has shown his work at the highest international level (at the Venice Biennale in 2001) complements Ahola’s sensitive approach by projecting images of place and face onto the ancient stone above the fireplace. Pixels are replaced by numbers; their flickering clusters conjure real faces from a real place. History made real; genus loci honoured.

© Giles Sutherland, 2005