Exhibition in the Window, Caol, Fort William

Stories from the Glen

[wish] [miann] brings together the work of two Lochaber based artists, Jen Deschenes and Ali Berardelli who have created a series of images and text in response to time spent in Glen Nevis at the artist’s treehouse, Outlandia. Exploring local folklore and examining historical objects synonymous with the area Jen and Ali have created a pictorial epitaph representing people and their stories alongside charms and votives used in the past as methods of protection. The exhibition has been showing in the Window, Caol, and is transferring to the West Highland Museum, March–May 2016.

Jen Deschenes and Ali Berardelli are both graduates from Glasgow School of Art and for the two friends this is their first formal collaboration.

Jen was born and brought up in the Shetland Isles and now lives in Spean Bridge. Jen creates sculptural work based on her origins as a textile artist using screen printing, embroidery, and drawing. Storytelling has been at the core of her work and she has a love of exploring new materials and resolving her designs with a variety of mediums.  Ali Berardelli has always lived in Fort William and she is greatly influenced by the community around her and nature and the stories embedded within it.  Ali has been coordinating art projects for many years within Lochaber and alongside this has continued her practice in drawing, collage, photography and typography.

All images courtesy of the artists

Bethan Maddocks AIR 2015

It is the penultimate day of the residency so perhaps it is apt that this morning was spent talking about goodbyes and loss. I am surrounded by mountains everywhere and this landscape makes me think of my father who was a keen mountaineer and died 15 years ago. It makes me wonder of how much these mountains have seen, how many passings, how much change over the millennia and epochs since they were born and shaped out of ice and fire.
This landscape is poetic and Outlandia is a place of solitude but not loneliness, a place of contemplation and connection. [Extracted from Bethan Maddocks' web site.] 

Read more here.

All images courtesy the artist

www.bethanmaddocks.com/

Claire MacLeod AIR 2015

Claire Macleod explored clans, calligraphy & culture during her Outlandia residency. "The stories of people who have lived in the glen through ages and generations was especially interesting, and having studied these stories and met some of the people who have lived in the glen in the past century, I cannot fail to see the place in the context of these stories. This is especially true when walking across the Peat Track, past the pathway into Outlandia and down into the glen. It is because of the Nevis area that I moved to Lochaber and is a place I hold very dear. I have been on the Board of Trustees for a charity called Friends of Nevis since 2011, whose aim is to help the local community look after and manage Ben Nevis and the surrounding landscape. In the past year I have enjoyed exploring grafted calligraphy and would like to work with words and stories from people who have lived in Glen Nevis, giving them a voice, using text and textiles. Although I am mainly involved in design and film, I would welcome the opportunity to explore stitched word further".

Claire speaks briefly about her residency in the following video:

Video courtesy the artist

Mike Dodd AIR 2015

The work I produced during my week in Outlandia was in response to reading Nan Shepherd’s wonderful account of the many years she spent living in, and responding to, the Cairngorms, called ‘The Living Mountain’. Among her observations of natural phenomena in a mountain environment were two which leapt out as bases for artistic activity. The first was this: ‘… the peculiar motion of the current among the ice-floes [in winter] has woven the thousands of floating pine-needles into compacted balls, so intricately intertwined that their symmetrical shape is permanently retained.’ Using glue which I made from natural, organic constituents, I mimicked the formation of these spheres and placed them near the river and streams in Glen Nevis. They would be washed away in autumn’s and winter’s floods.

She also writes: ‘… pluck a feathery grass… hold a sheet of white paper behind it and see how the shadow stands out like an etching… a miracle of exact detail.’ When the sun shone, during a week blessed with good weather, I chose a number of different plants and trees to hold my sheet of white paper behind, before photographing their shadows.

Another activity occurred to me just a day or so before I started my residency. I packed a small, old-fashioned letter stamping kit and used it to stamp Gaelic words on trees and stones in the area around Outlandia. They were words or concepts taken from, or relating to, Nan Shepherd’s book. The one shown here is: MATHAIR (mother/origin or source); [others not shown] SAMHCHADAS (quietness, silence); SAORSA (freedom, liberty); MI-CHINT (uncertainty).

My other activity during the week was to make ‘rain drawings’. I was prepared for the ‘sun shadow’ photos (see above) but realised that I would probably have some rain during my five days’ residency. When it did rain, I stayed in the treehouse at Outlandia and used water-soluble pencils and ink to produce rain trace images, some in the form of monoprints.

All images courtesy the artist.

mikedodd.com

Ian Maslen AIR 2015

 

All photography courtesy Ian Maslen

Between the 7th and 13th of September 2015, I was undertaking an artists residency in Glen Nevis, Scotland.
I was attracted to this residency as it gave me a valuable opportunity to experience a landscape that I would not normally have access to. As an artist based in London, I have found that I have to work in full-time employment in order to survive, therefore my studio time is limited to just two days a week. Going off of the grid for a week gave me a rare opportunity to focus on my practice away from the distractions of London.
My plan was to use this one week residency to gather source material for a new video installation work. The work will feature mysterious man-made structures, inspired by brutalist architecture and science fiction situated in a natural environment. These structures will seem out of place, and possibly out of time in their environment.

 

https://www.axisweb.org/p/ianmaslen/

Justin Carter AIR 2015

All images courtesy Justin Carter
One of the first things that struck me about Outlandia is how it remains something of a secret. Few people seemed to know exactly where it was and what exactly it was for. Even finding the treehouse structure became something of an adventure, building up my expectation of what it would be like. This sense of anticipation is further heightened as you finally come across the sign for Outlandia at the beginning of a floating wooden walkway which guides you slowly through the dark forest on the final part of your journey.

Despite, or perhaps because of this hidden and uncertain quality, you do get visitors, and this slow stream of unexpected ‘guests’ reminded me of other residency situations where the artist can become something of a curiosity, an exhibit even - in this case framed within the wooden architectural structure. In a heightened state of (self)consciousness this sense of theatre worked its way gradually into my thinking as I struggled to make sense of the amazing physical location of Outlandia.

My initial proposal asked about ways of making connections with the mountain landscape. Was the lookout architecture an aid or a hindrance in this respect? A breakthrough came as I began to construct rudimentary devices capable of holding pen and paper. With open windows and wind assistance these devices began to slowly perform uncertain movements intimating scribbled drawing or shaky handwriting. I left one such device (made from pig wire and stone) balanced on the studio chair looking out towards Ben Nevis, free to do its thing - free to be discovered by unexpected (and unsuspecting) guests: the artist as automaton. I call this work Waiting for Nature to speak to me. (folly).

Later on, I took these basic devices further up Cow Hill to make more elaborate gestures in the open air. We had a great time. I would now like to further explore these ideas by testing the dynamic possibilities between object (sculptural device), activity (mark making), the physical drawing (paper) and documentation (video or photograph of set-up). Even though there is no real connection between what is drawn and the view (or backdrop), I’m interested in the way the viewer is compelled to make meaningful connections between drawing and landscape. It is this aspect I would like to research further through exhibition and documentation.

http://www.justincarter.info/

Hanna Tuulikki AIR 2015

image source: http://hannatuulikkdiary.tumblr.com/post/128781937321/outlandia-residency

My intention is to create a new vocal composition that responds to the natural acoustics of the forested glen. The artist's fieldstation, with it's hillside setting, is ideal to 'broadcast' a sung piece from, vocalising into the landscape. In Glen Nevis I am excited to test my abilities to respond to different locations near Outlandia, with an awareness of their cultural and historic context. As well as working with performance to camera, I have also been extending my research into Scottish culture, specifically the relationship between folklore and place and investigating the origins of human sound-making, exploring how music has grown out of peoples' relationship with the places in which they dwell.

www.hannatuulikki.org

  

Ruth Simons & Laura Degenhardt AIR 2015

Images courtesy the artists

It took a day for us to settle, and utilise the space as an effective artists' studio. We then realised that the studio would be a place of artistic production, rather than a research base from which we might explore the surrounding area. We continued to work in the studio, drawing, painting and working with installation, for the full seven days, from 11am to 5pm.
We both responded to being immersed in the space, with few distractions. We used the space as a drawing studio, for installation production and siting, and as a test space for conversations on art, practice, and methods of working, allowing for forward planning and dreaming.

Jess Rotherham AIR 2015

Image: A collection of plasticine sculptures that represent the scale of the hearts of common mammals from Glen Nevis and the surrounding areas. Photographs courtesy the artist.

In my artistic practice, I attempt to create projects that place the human within a larger system, for example, that of the animal kingdom in my current and ongoing project, The Beginning of the Plasticine Archive of 5146 Mammal Hearts. 

Although endlessly romanticized, hearts, in their very essence, hold the inevitability of death. Throughout the mammal kingdom this shared pump of expiry differs little, and stays hidden in a multitude of chests as the essential life-giver.  Thus, I have decided to build a sculptural archive of the hearts of all the existent mammal species, ranging from Bumblebee Bat (7mm) to Blue Whale (the size of a small car), along with the sound of their respective pulses beating. The beats will stretch from 10bpm to 1500bpm (so fast that it will be inaudible to most grown human ears) and will be heard (or unheard, in some cases) all at once in a soundscape that will be more akin to vibration than noise. 

My aim is to create an immersive installation in which the human can place itself on a par with its mammal relatives, stripped of the intelligent body which consistently conceals its animal parallels. 

This project could be a lifelong endeavor, and has to be researched so carefully, often finding the data takes more time than creating my sculptural works. My time at Outlandia enabled me to concentrate on the artistic, rather than the information-driven, side to my practice. Overall, I think the thing I will remember the most about my time at the residency is the impact that the forest had on my work. I came to Lochaber with an expansive list of the mammals that live there, the trees that grow there, their dimensions and life expectancies. However, occupying a space which was at the heart of many a habitat for these lifeforms caused me to look at them as something other than data. Data and information are central to my work, and my practice often slips between different disciplines, calling upon doctors, scientists, and the like. The proximity to nature made me question how best to represent these lifeforms in my sculptures, and caused a change in how I had been representing them up to now.

I had graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in June, and was happy to have a residency lined up for soon after. The project is continuing, will be exhibited on a small scale after my next residency in NSW, Australia, and then will be exhibited in a larger space in Liverpool, UK, in November/December 2016. After that, it will grow and grow.  

jessrotherham.com

Harry Giles AIR 2015

I want to spend a week in Outlandia writing games for hikers: short, expressive games which foster deep and absurd connections with the West Highlands, its visitors and its ecologies. The games will engage social and ecological tensions playfully, aiming not to educate but to explore. Inspired by the tradition of “gamepoems”, the games will be beautiful and stimulating to read in themselves, and some may be unplayable but exciting to imagine. The residency will be spent researching and drafting the games by walking, sitting, observing, talking to hikers and asking them to play. Following the residency I will design the games for publication [...] that can be worn around the neck in plastic pockets, like maps.

All images courtesy Harry Giles

Casual games for casual hikers available here.

harrygiles.org

Zoe Benbow AIR 2015

All images courtesy the artist

My paintings aim to communicate a sense of awe and enjoyment in landscape, as a means of questioning our cultural construct of wilderness and our relationship to the natural world. The images are developed from drawings made ‘in the field’,  yet by an intense engagement with the processes of painting and studio practice, the resulting canvases become as much a meditation on geology of association and memory as of an actual place.

My experience of walking and drawing in mountain environments is that everything  - light, wind, vegetation and stones - are shifting, sliding, moving with every moment. Outlandia being off-grid and off the ground, represents a still point in a turning world. I have followed a line in literature that has taken me through the writings of Roger Deakin, Robert McFarlane, Rebecca Solnit and Nan Shepherd. Like Nan Shepherd I have a tendency to wander in mountains, searching, stopping, looking and bizarrely napping and dreaming in protected hollows.

I’m particularly interested in the experience of landscape as intimate and surrounding  - as opposed to being distancing and remote - and will focus on discovering nooks and crannies exploring a micro/macro dynamic. Points of interest include areas of acute transition and drama in a defined space such as rock and water or in the tree line. It is my intention whilst at Outlandia to employ the space as a conceptual nest from which to go out and gather information. I will spend the week walking and drawing, exploring the landscape.

www.zoebenbow.co.uk