Art Residency, March 2024 by Robin Tarbet
/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!
Sculpture is at the heart of my practice, but I'd also planned to incorporate making work in print and photography. I studied printmaking at the Royal College of Art and Norwich School of Art and Design, and before that I’d worked in Fotospeed photographic company throughout school and my foundation course year. The island was the perfect setting to combine analogue photographic processes with physical forms and tactile surfaces, enabling me to create prints from a very sculptural mentality. Being away from the digital world seemed the ideal place to look back and play with camera-less processes like Sir John Hersche’s cyanotype printing as used to by Anna Atkins an English botanist and photographer in the latter part of the 19th century. Her book ‘Photographs of British Algae’ is widely considered the first book published illustrated with photographic images. The temperate rainforest climate of the woods on the island itself created an intriguing sculptural landscape. On mass the moss was such a dense blanket that covered the ground, but in isolation each stem looked like a mini tree and I liked the act of collecting and printing individual strands of moss as specimens, maybe to make my own moss collection book from the forest….
The act of walking, finding and collecting is a big part of how I engage with a place and I was constantly foraging the flotsam and jetsam washed ashore. In an environment where the weather ensures nothing is permanent, finding curious perishable material to petrify as solid forms via mould-making and casting was always on my mind. I often found myself drawn to the abundance of seaweed lining the shores and the lush moss that blanked the forests as sources for inspiration. In an environment where the weather ensures nothing is permanent, finding curious perishable material to petrify as solid forms via mould-making and casting was always on my mind. I often found myself drawn to the abundance of seaweed lining the shores and the lush moss that blanked the forests as sources for inspiration. Being on the small island looking out across the sea loch to neighbouring yet disconnected places felt quite filmic in itself, and I can see how J.M. Barrie would have been inspired when he visited here in the 1920s.
One of the first things I moulded and cast was a small green sea urchin shell that I found perfectly in tact on the beach. Such a delicately intricate little gem that somehow survived being washed ashore amongst the craggy rocks and seaweed. I also made a series of small plaster cast sculptures by silicone moulding the detached anchors from kelp seaweed that had washed into the loch. Out of context the undulating forms of the root nodules looked almost alien against the white sand on the west sea facing bays of the island. These were always intended as material tests and now I’m back in my london studio I’ll aim to cast these forms in a more durable material, as tactile sculptures (and their origin namesake implies) they seem too inviting not to be held.
As well as casting individual objects, I used the seaweed on mass pressing it into clay to create a series of bass reliefs. Again I liked the intertwined entangled density of the seaweed as a texture.
I intended to use whatever resources were at hand to make work while away from my familiar surroundings, and find my own and visual language on the island. In the cottage I embraced a DIY approach and turned the corridor space by the fridge into a make-shift darkroom. I constructed pin-hole cameras from empty food containers and located them out in the landscape. Going analogue enabled me to create long exposure images that recorded the same light duration of lunar cycles as I physically had on the island. By preparing a set of pin-hole cameras on the day I arrived meant I have images that represent a complete months worth of time.
I’d decided before I’d left London that I was going to take a range of art materials so I could make a variety of physical responses, and a good tool kit to allow me to adapt to different of ways of working as my ideas on the residency developed. Without the pressure to create finished work, I saw this as a space away to freely develop ideas and playfully experiment with whatever I found around me. Being disconnected from both the internet and ‘the art world’ meant the noise and baggage in my head often reinforced by social media and art industry insecurities faded, and I soon stopped concerning myself with operating as an artist, and I just got on with making work. With the door opening on to the loch I found the studio a really productive place to work between the world outside and the ideas in my head. The studio was a place to get on with the content and realisation of making work, which I already know will act as a catalyst for more substantial outcomes in the future.
I spent a lot of time at all hours of the day and night in the forests and down on the loch side - and neither was as dark or as silent as I’d imagined. Stars are bright and wildlife is loud.
It was an amazing feeling to be able to just roam around and experience the constant changing light and atmosphere of the island. From the spectacular view of the sun rising over the distant mountains from Red Cottage, to the sun sets down by the loch. As the island is located in a sparsely populated area of west Scotland, on a clear night the sky is blanketed by an array of stars and well defined moon. I wanted to respond to the feel on the island and create a series of soft grainy works from within my temperate forest surroundings using very long exposures. Images that take a long time to capture have the visual record of the time that passed while the camera was there. I liked the sense of mystery and non definition within the forests at dusk or dawn, quite opposite to what we now expect in sharp digital images.
Maybe it was being away in an ancient landscape or simply the isolation of being on my own. I found myself thinking a lot about the ephemeral nature of the things around me, and how to capture a sense of alchemy in the work I produced during my month on the island. I’d initially taken the photographic paper to make pin-hole cameras, but by playful disrupting the light sensitive material I could also make photograms, again much like the camera-less photography of the 19th Century. My old Silver Gelatin Paper produced lumen prints rich in colour that were further enhanced by the changing light, long exposures and playful contaminations from the things i’d foraged. As a way of creating images lumen printing required no chemical processing which seemed the ideal process on an island with a keen legacy of green practices and environmental conservation. The notion of venturing onto a wilderness island on my own to create a set of forever unfixed photographic works that can’t be shown to anyone seemed almost magic in itself.
Finding suitable locations for the cameras was a challenge, as I was aware of being respectful to the fragile landscape and leaving no trace. I’d noticed various human interventions - from wildlife camera traps on posts scattered around monitoring the deer; to info badges fixed on trees around the island. The former owner seafaring Captain Swinburne had collected numerous types of pine on his worldly travels and established what became one of the most diverse Pinetums in Europe. So I felt my high vis bright orange ‘hide in plain sight’ approach to locating my pin hole cameras was just an another temporarily human addition to the landscape.
My parting gift to the island was installing a set of long exposure pin-hole cameras in various fixed locations to remain for a full year, or at least as long as the elements allow.
My aim with this residency was to step away from city living and take a breath to explore a sense of wonder about the island while being off-grid and out of signal. A rare opportunity to slow down, go walking and make curious discoveries. To think about deep time, big landscape and being alone, digitally disconnected in the wild. Being outside every day and physically active in all weathers felt healthy, and having a living connection with the natural world in contrast to the city was a real thrill. Being able to focus on making work away from my everyday distractions in the beautiful island setting of Eilean Shona will be one of the most enriching experiences of my life. I have left with an abundance of material experiments and it’s invigorated a new sense of escapism in my work.
A month of breathing fresh air and talking to myself while getting lost exploring the remote island terrain while secretly pretending I’ve been shipwrecked - magic.
This opportunity was awarded by the Royal Society of Sculptors, and kindly supported by Vanessa Branson. Boe, Ali, Jack and Niamh - Thank you!
Robin Tarbet @robintarbet