ECA Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, 21-28 October 2011

TIMED to coincide with the Scottish International Storytelling Festival 2011, this linked exhibition and storytelling performance have both been compiled by Stornoway wordsmith and sailor Ian Stephen, whose voice runs through each of them.

At Edinburgh College of Art’s gleaming new Tent Gallery, Stephen’s multi-generational, handed-down stories are presented in the most modern of multimedia contexts in Is a thing lost… Bheil rud caillte….. Three display folios contain individual stories, word processed and printed off with some Tweeted on-location poems inside Photoshopped brochure covers, and serve more as keepsakes (available at the counter for a fee) than as exhibits in their own right, although a trio of recorded versions of the tales presented on small video screens are far more typical of the white cube situation.

One of the screens in the ECA installation

On one screen only Stephen’s voice can be heard, reading the tale of Ailein Duinn and Anna Caimbeul over still coastal photographs. In the others a more formal approach is apparent, with a story from St. Kilda – a dark and brooding affair about bodies being washed off into the Atlantic Ocean by the surf – told while Stephen is apparently clinging to the side of Hirta during a live climb on the deserted island.

The third, the Danish story of King Lindhorn, which he says a Danish visitor to Scotland taught him, is the most interesting, purely because Stephen appears to have been filmed in a featureless room in Cramond as he narrates, when the story was meant to have been delivered to the Royal Danish Academy in person. On this occasion the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud prevented him from travelling, and so the story had to be transmitted online instead – more than any other, this is the film which makes us think not just about stories, but about the methods of their dissemination in pre- and post-folk cultures.

Stephen’s ability as an engaging, absorbing transmitter of tales and ideas was further demonstrated by his appearance at one of the Storytelling Festival’s Island Nights events at the Scottish Storytelling Centre (25 October 2011), telling stories of Scottish and Irish islands alongside Irish storysmith Nuala Hayes and his fellow Hebridean Angus Peter Campbell, in the process demonstrating the something of the regions’ coastal interconnectivity. All three are soft-voiced and easy on the ear, with the raconteurish Campbell (a “pre-television, pre-radio, pre-Elvis Presley, pre-Runrig Gael” who saw “the twilight of the oral culture“) in particular a man whose words are packed dense with insightful asides and remembrances of forgotten facts.

© David Pollock, 2011

Links

• Ian Stephen
• Scottish Storytelling Festival 2011