In the summer of 2019, Irish artist Saoirse Higgins undertook a placement as Embedded Artist with Scottish Government, joining a consultation team that visited 40 of Scotland’s 93 inhabited islands - from the Shetland Islands to the Outer Hebrides, gathering the views of islanders in order to develop Scotland’s first National Islands Plan (NIP). This exhibition showcases newly commissioned work by Higgins resulting from this placement, being invited to respond to the consultation process from a different angle, connecting the voices and experiences of islanders and their sense of place in a different way.
Taking its title from a poem by Orcadian poet Robert Rendall (1898-1967), the exhibition focuses on the interactions between islanders and those arriving from the mainland by tracing the oscillating movement between two island viewpoints: one looking out from the island edge to sea – the islanders’ horizon; and the other looking in from the sea to the island – the ship’s eye view of the edge of the island, which islanders look out for on their journey home, or when taking themselves out to sea. In portraying this, Higgins draws from her conversations with islanders, geospatial data and 360-degree film footage, while using her own body as a cartographic tool – approaching, becoming entangled with, and connecting different island landscapes.
Higgins’ investigations of the sea to island viewpoint are influenced by a series of maps developed by 18th century hydrographer Murdoch Mackenzie (1712–1797), held in the collection of the Orkney Archive in Kirkwall and loaned to Pier Arts Centre specially for this exhibition. Mackenzie mapped Orkney, the Hebrides and Ireland, making the land the anchor point for the sea to make his maps. Mackenzie’s work made it safer for islanders to travel to and from islands and provides a good analogy with the Scottish Government’s National Island Plan as a tool aspiring to meaningfully improve the quality of life for island communities which simultaneously broadens connections and conversations with the mainland.
Higgins’ own mapping journey begins with 'Angle of Vision – Map of the Geographical Centre Point of 93 Inhabited Scottish Islands', developed in collaboration with cartographic design consultant Paul Naylor and technical consultant Chris Mee at Ordnance Survey. This map shows all inhabited Scottish islands with lines linking their individual calculated geographical centre points to their collective island nation centre. The mainland territories are absent in this map, emphasizing an island-centred viewpoint, which destabilizes dominant notions of centre and periphery. The map is displayed in the exhibition, as well as being available as a limited edition print, and is accompanied by is a specially designed Island Centre Marker Buoy with the mathematical formula that was used to calculate the island geographical centre points printed on its body.
The abstracted, geospatial information contained in the maps gives way to an embodied understanding of place in Higgins’ film 'Distant Views of the Land', adopting a land to sea view. The film was shot on the island of Papa Westray (also known as Papay) in Orkney, where she lives, on its most Northern point – called Fowl Flag. It shows a view out to sea from the land with Higgins standing right beside the viewer, who is invited to join in a moment of contemplation and survey the landscape together. While recalling imagery from art and literature in the Romanticism, including Caspar David Friedrich’s 1808 painting 'The Monk by the Sea', Higgins’ depiction of herself looking out to sea never stops being every-day, both in scale and sentiment, partaking in a sense of reverence for the landscape and collective guardianship over it that is integral to island life. Many islanders interviewed by the artist in Papay spoke to her of their close connection with the sea, and how the island’s boundedness by the ocean frames how they experience themselves in the landscape. The film’s audio track is of the sea around Papay, with 16-year old islander Jessie Dodman reading a text excerpt from Murdoch Mackenzie’s 1774 'Treatise on Maritime Surveying'. Our attention is drawn here to the younger generation, whose ideas and energy are core to the survival of islands, providing hope for the future.
Nestled between physical locatedness and an imagined elsewhere, Higgins’ works draw us into a lived, embodied experience of island life, imbued with geopolitical realities and a pressing sense of both urgency and optimism in looking to the future. Both close and distant, feet rooted to the ground as much as bird’s eye, these multi-faceted views of land and sea capture moments of alive, complex and caring occupancy of islands by different generations of islanders and visitors, underpinned by a shared awareness of the islands’ own vibrant presence and agency.
