An Island Exchange

IAN STEPHEN chronicles his journey with three more Lewis-based artists to the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea

FOUR LEWIS-BASED artists left home to travel to Åland. The an Lanntair exchange is a return for an excellent exhibition installed in the Stornoway arts centre last year by a group from these Baltic islands. So there’s no pressure on Jon Macleod, Moira Maclean, Joe Mahony and myself.

The show will be mounted in a former dairy so the venue is geared more towards contemporary art and installation than hanging pictures. The project was devised and organised by Jon, who is the Visual Arts officer at an Lanntair, but who also has travelled widely to take part in artist residencies.

There is a working theme of “domestic shamanism”, but the artists are encouraged to respond to the situation. That means a bit of space left to think on your feet. So we are all armed with the prefabrication of possible works.

The Exhibition in Aland (© Ian Stephen, 2009)

Projection will be a strong element but it’s possible that a performance element may enter. Moira is a painter by trade who has built up an audience and a market for her work but she is perhaps best known for her excursions behind the facades of domestic interiors with their own histories.

She made a powerful installation as part of the new an Lanntair’s opening show, based on the layers of wallpaper from The Sail Loft – a historic building on the other side of the harbour. And she built a minature Lewis room as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Home event.

We all know the visit is about more than installing an exhibition. Hopefully there should be a chance to respond, to begin a dialogue

Jon’s own work often uses faded fragments of language and a journey into fragments of past and present lives. Often it is expressed in different forms of print medium but it can take different forms of expression.

Joe has many concerns and many skills but with an emphasis on lens-based work. His last installation at an Lanntair involved setting up red umbellas and filming their reaction to a west side Lewis gale. So it’s possible that the breeze from our Islands may be transferred back to the Baltic.

I’m interested in taking a story with me, a Lewis version of an iconic tale which must re-occur in many different settings and cultures. I hope to find a good shamanistic way of rooting it in another group of Islands but may of course find that it is there already.

I had a lot of help developing the idea from an education project just completed at an Lanntair. The singer and actor Anna Murray and myself have been developing the work of many primary school-aged children on the islands into a performance to celebrate the visit of the historic herring-drifter Reaper.

The Exhibition in Aland (© Ian Stephen, 2009)

We had a few days to install the show in the old dairy. This is certainly a place for contemporary art. Along the road there is a fine museum. We have been to an opening – invited guests to hear a range of speakers including the Prime Minister of Finland. There is much discussion about the quality of his Swedish.

This is when I realise that I have brought a work, realised in the Finnish language, to a group of Islands where the speaking of Swedish is central to identity. Good that I’ve also brought a film where the language and stories which prompted an action are replaced with piano improvisation. That should be international.

Talking of International – this is the week when the local team are drawn to play Athletico Madrid. There is a buzz building while, along the harbour, fleets of shiny botomed dinghies and keelboats are ready for the Island Games which will start in a few weeks.

Our space, Galleri Kakelhallen. has rough walls, mostly, but two sites are ideal for projection. This makes it easy to plan the show – reducing the possibilities. And Moira needs strong light for one work and a wide wall for another. Like Joe, she has chosen to make a labour-intensive piece. Unlike Joe, it is in her normal working practice – so there is not the same sense of risk and tension.

Moira has taken wallpaper samples, salvaged from various old homes. It is a domestic archaeology. She casts the shadow of a scrapbook type image of a pram to the wall and paints the outline in pale blue and silver. Then the domestic debris is arranged to fill part of the shape.

Joe is also concerned with shadows. Or reflections. He has painstakenly assembled the negative plastic rolls from a series of fax messages. When held to the light, you can see a reverse imagery of mapping and language. But the work is delicate and the examination of the concept will only work well if the result looks interesting. For the first few days it looked – to anyone else – like a series of bin-bags.

Ian Stephen - the blue men of the Shiants - from children's workshop devised with Anna Murray at Garenin, Lewis

Jon has taken birch-bark from the islands, salvaged during his residency on Kökar. There is a series of three. A strong shape is readable in deep blues on the weathered silver. It is a triangle – the gable end of a Lewis or an Åland house.

A similar shape will eventually be projected on a wall. But the video of the gable reacting to shifting light has been taken from under the water. So it is a sea-creature’s view of a human domestic shape.

We take a break. We go to the island of Kökar. (sounds like cherka). Satu Kiljunen is one of the artist’s whose work was in the museum show, opened by the Prime Minister. She is established – a teacher and also one of the hundred artists in Finland supported by the government. She is also generous. Jon is now a friend, following his winter residency on Kökar – an experience which would have been a trial for some.

I wake early and walk by a bay to watch a muskrat sunning itself and observe me in turn. It is the perspective that’s in Jon’s video. After a morning sauna, wood-fired, we are all taken in a traditional Åland open boat – but with a viable though antique Finnish petrol engine – to an Island where there is an astonishing piece of architecture. A timeless log house is built into rocks that could be on Iona – pink granite. The smell of the oil treatment of new roof shingles fills the calm air.
It was touch and go whether Moira and Joe could make the trip. We all know the visit is about more than installing an exhibition. Hopefully there should be a chance to respond, to begin a dialogue. But Jon and I know our work will be realised in time – the others don’t yet know that for sure.

Well, I didn’t either, because, late Saturday, there was still no means of introducing a decent sound quality to the gallery. The right man was scheduled to come on Monday. But there’s a big conference – the shipping company, Viking line… and he’s the engineer so….

So I decide there’s no point in worrying about what I can’t sort. I’ve played with an amplifier, with my own portable small speakers. I’ve decided that it’s better to have no sound and remake the work again than have bad sound. That’s OK.

And a poem comes, from conversation with Satu – as we walk the high ground behind her home. We have strong support and the beginnings of strong friendship already. So I know I can ask to have this new poem made in Swedish.

We are back, relaxed and glowing, from the Kökar adventure. Roddy, the an Lanntair director is good at lights. He tunes the spots on Moira’s installation of 33 bird-skulls, one for each year of her life, so the reflection adds another angle. Independently, all the artists have used a variation of reflection, refraction or reversed imagery in their work. This was not discussed in detail but happened during the installation.

Jon gives up looking for the right brackets for a glass shelf to show more curls of bark. He finds a domestic mirror and washes it with emulsion. It happens in minutes and it’s perfect. There is a domestic echo and a hint of the other works but the gleanings from the natural world are returned. It’s clear that they’re valued.

Joe turns the corner in the last few hours. His bin bag-like hanging is transformed so it’s like a Chinese scroll. There is a hint of red to highlight a route through the mapping. The idea is realised but it also looks good. It chimes with his showing of a previously made work – how an installation of red umbreallas respond to a Lewis gale. I’m not the only one who thinks it seems Japanese as local artists, friends of Jon, come for a preview.

The Exhibition in Aland (© Ian Stephen, 2009)

Joe’s work is deeply considered but sharp in focus. That’s another part of the analogy with Japanese aesthetics. He sets up a challenging process but it’s not an end in itself. He is studying a possibility. Both these possibilities – the wind-blown umbrellas filmed in a landscape where the colour is edited out – and the negatives of the fax roll – they are now things you can see and enjoy.

Jon’s work is complete when he pours peat-ash from Lewis into stencilled shapes. Of course one element of that shape is from a Lewis sheiling and one is from his Island residency in this area. It’s possible that these will be walked on and that’s accepted.

My librarian friend has written her translation on the wall. The sound engineer arrives and it’s sorted in minutes – high quality floor speakers with their own power. The poem on sail battens has found its own shape – initially ordered and then disrupted by wild forces. Only in stories can you control the wind and not for very long. Sooner or later a last knot will be untied and the winds of Cape Horn will come to Åland.

Or the west side of the Hebrides, Peter Urpeth’s piano music was developed in response to the imagery in my own short film. He played, silent movie style, to the dance of a bone netting-needle. But it could easily have been developed for Jon’s projection, or for Joe’s installation or for the dance of the red umbrellas. It could well have accompanied the pregnant Moira as the icon of the pram took shape during a process which was really a performance.

Talking of performances, only Roddy and Moira got to the match, looking through railings. They reported back. The local side lost by only 2 goals to 1 to the mighty champions. A respectable result.

Here’s the poem.

the definition of ice –
when a fox walks the bay

evidence of elk, crusted now
as a nightingale is in full throat

small sign of the non-tidal surge
so water just covers clay

© Ian Stephen, 2009

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