Orasaigh

Orasaigh is a poetry/photographic collaboration between myself and South Uist-based photographer Michael Faint focused on the eponymous island located off Boisdale, South Uist. Orasaigh will be published as a hardback book in August 2024 by Broken Sleep books.

Mike and I have partnered with two Uist-based cultural centres: Taigh Chearsabhagh, in Lochmaddy, North Uist, and Cnoc Solleir in Daliburgh, South Uist. With Andy MacKinnon (Arts Manager, Taigh Chearsabhagh) we will mount exhibitions at each centre comprising images, text, brochure and soundscape (a recording of the poem and recordings made in South Uist, shaped into a soundtrack). The Cnoc Solleir exhibition will take place 11/08/23 - 29/09/23. The Taigh Chearsabhagh exhibition will take place 03/11/2023-04/01/2024.

Each exhibition will be different and distinctive. Each exhibition will be accompanied by (in the opening week): a preview event, comprising talk, reading and viewing; a similar public launch event; a poetry-in-the-Orasaigh-landscape event (walk, talk, reading); a public, adult creative writing workshop, encouraging responses to landscape and place; a similar workshop for schoolchildren. We will also engage local, Gaelic-speaking poets and artists to translate the poem into Gaelic, as well as using local people as consultants on the use of Gaelic in the poem and exhibition.

The cost of mounting the exhibitions and the translations are being borne by the two cultural centres. My responsibility is to organise and lead the events listed above—launches, talks, readings, workshops and walks. Hyunkook Lee, Reader in Music Technology and the Director of the Centre for Audio and Psychoacoustic Engineering at the University of Huddersfield, has kindly agreed facilitate a recording of a reading of the poem and to record the sounds of the landscape around Orasaigh, using his innovative recording technology. He will shape this into a soundscape with Dr Duncan MacLeod, Composer & Associate Professor in Music at the University of Nottingham, who is currently Artist-in-Residence at Taigh Chearsabhagh. Hyunkook and Duncan will facilitate the delivery of the soundscape in the two exhibition spaces. Andy MacKinnon is facilitating the whole project, and also representing Cnoc Solleir.

This work will result in four main outputs, targeted at different and specific audiences: the two exhibitions; the programme of public engagement work; the book. This application is to facilitate the programme of the public engagement work, which is fundamental to impact. The impact, and engagement, will ultimately be rooted in the book, which will be a REF eligible publication of 4* calibre.

We anticipate that up to 2000 people (local people and tourists) will view each exhibition; and that, in total around 300 people (predominantly local people) will attend the range of engagement events. An accompanying weblink will allow (estimated) 10,000 virtual engagements with the exhibition.

The impact of this work lies in the way it will support the two cultural centres in fulfilling their core mission of engaging local people with heritage, art and Gaelic language and culture in the Uists, contributing to place-making and exploring identity in sustainable ways that promote well-being, provide opportunities for local people to engage in creativity and make a contribution to the local economy by providing cultural attractions for both local people and tourists.