A month of off-grid residency time living alone in Red Cottage up in the woods on Eilean Shona - a stunningly beautiful car free wilderness island on the west coast of Scotland. This opportunity was awarded by the Royal Society of Sculptors, and kindly supported by Vanessa Branson. Thank you! 

For my residency on Eilean Shona I took with me boxes of old photographic paper and cyanotype solution, a sculpture kit of mould-making and casting supplies, my camera and a large roll of bright orange gaffer tape. After cramming a months worth of food supplies from Fort William Morrisons into the car, the drive to Eilean Shona was a spectacular and scenic introduction to what was in store. Boe and Ali who manage the Island met me at the jetty, we loaded all my stuff into the boat and they delivered me to my temporary home in Red Cottage...  and then I didn’t see them or anyone again for at least a week!

I have stood in two woods where I have lost my sense of up and down, left and right, forwards and back.

The first, Moseley Bog, is a fifteen-minute walk from my home, and one of the most frenetic woodlands around. A place where ivy and blackthorn vie for any frond of light, where calamitous trees fall, bridging muddy streams, then lie deathly for weeks before exploding in new growth. It is home to quick-eyed crows, to fingernail shrimp that sprint silently beneath the waterline. An ever-fracturing, ever-changing, morphous world that consumes its visitors, spins them around, then spits them out onto the B-roads.

The second is the opposite; that wood is the pine woodland on the hillside of the tidal island, Eilean Shona.

When I arrive, I think the water is wine. It is tinted a very pale brown, but looks brilliantly gold because of the light shining through the large windows. The water goes through the peat, Vanessa tells me, pouring me some. By the end of the week I will find it strange to drink or bathe in water that isn’t ochre. Clear water will suddenly seem unnatural, an unfortunately wan iteration of something that could be golden.

The view from the dining room is a lesson in painting perspective. In the foreground, the damp grass and incomplete hedgerow are a brilliant lime flecked with lemon yellow. The towering trees that spread down the hill to the shoreline (whose names I must collect in a list) are a deep, appropriately forest green; a combination of pine needles, moss grey leaves and mint lichen set against the bold brushstrokes of their trunks. The water is grey; a white grey not dissimilar to the sky above. Both are calm today. The trees atop the island in the middle distance are less defined. Their greens, much like their branches, weave together to form a soft brown. Behind them lies the mainland. Were you to take all the colours of the foreground and the mid-ground and combine them on a palette board, you’d surely recreate the marbling of those hills. I know that the purple of the heather, the white of the rocks, the brown of grasses past and the electric green of new growth are all present. For now they merge in a backdrop perfectly coordinated to the scene. I understand why my grandfather liked to write in green ink.

In the summer of 2016, the stars aligned and I was lucky enough to stay on Eilean Shona for two months. As anyone who has visited Shona could imagine, my time during holidays and study periods that I had spent on the island while growing up, seeped into my soul and the magical ‘look out’ isle stole my heart.

Spending time on Shona as the daughter of the temporary guardians in the long line of eccentrics that have taken helm of the island, has been the greatest joy of my life. My love of nature lead me to write my masters thesis on environmental philosophy and I developed a strong sense that the island could help humanity during this period of alienation and reconnect with the earth. Her gentle wilderness seemed to speak through me and say, ‘I can help here.’

With this sense reverberating through me, I headed to Schumacher College, a center of ecological studies in Devon to learn with indigenous teachers from around the world. I felt the responsibility of being a guardian of wilderness and wanted to learn from cultures that lived symbiotically with Nature for countless generations. During my time at the college, I learnt some of the magic ways of living with the natural cycles.