Taigh Chearsabhagh, Lochmaddy, North Uist, 2006

Ettie Spencer - house at night

LOOK OUT into the sheltered bay from the Taigh Chearsabhagh arts centre. It’s a bit late in the year for dinghies but marker-boys for creels bob bright. There’s a tradition of improvisation as with many island things, but you probably won’t have seen a hoover used this way before.

There’s a twist. It’s a hardy polystyrene version of an upright hoover, but it’s moored so it stays upright, whatever the rise and fall of the tide. Ettie Spencer is responsible. She is an artist interested in juxtapositions. So the domestic icon is afloat in the sea-road out to maritime commerce.

Friday 30 October was a night of breeze, big moon and fast light. Our chattering gathering was composed of the curious who had come to see the products of the East Lothian-based artist’s residency in North Uist. We were all issued with a head torch and taken, group by group, in a mini bus which left us at a croft gate.

A grassed walkway lit by two trails of lights led to Ettie’s house. If you asked a child to draw a house in the country this would be it. Two gables with a chimney on each, one door in the centre, and two windows, equally spaced, one at each side.

The proper proportions of the ideal small home, but there was no roof. The walls were perfect. A team of helpers had overlayed the rough harl with shiny new aluminium. So the shape was sharp, in contrast to the hints of wear and decay you could glimpse inside when your torch lit a gap. A near full moon and all these moving torches played together on the new surfaces.

So we met a dwelling shape that offered little protection. It had a reflective exterior but also contained that thought-provoking dullness. The outline was perfect but the building was missing its original purpose and its people.

We were offered a dram. Norman Johnson, a local piper, got his cold fingers working somehow and delivered his tune. He said that a great uncle of his had gone to New Zealand and lived in a tree for a while.

Back in the arts centre, a proper huddle of buildings in stone, slate, wood and glass and metal, we met a house within a house. The high gallery was occupied with an echo of the shape we’d just met outside. This one was made of light cloth, tensioned enough to make the form. Again it had no roof, but the foliage and sounds of Southern Hemisphere jungle played on its interior and exterior.

It seems to me that both suggestions of houses are part of the same work. Both were ideas, superbly realised thanks to what must have been a grand team effort of technical and practical support.

The organisation of the event was as meticulous as the presentation of the idea. These home-shapes are suggestions, layered with allusions, rather than political statements. But the politics of environment, emigration and immigration are present.

In the light of day the aluminium cladding reflects clouds and landscape back. As a viewer I felt my own notions of what constitutes a home, playfully distorted and returned.

Dramatic juxtapositions run the risk of easy effects which don’t probe beyond the element of surprise. These works are thoughtful. They are also fine examples of the types of partnerships the Taigh Chearsabhagh project has fostered for many years.

© Ian Stephen, 2006

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• Taigh Chearsabhagh