The reproduction of life requires a radiating seed, a sacred island, mountain inundated - entrusted to man rather than the gods. The origin gives way to repetition, the moment to series.
Such small things/ Fat hen, wood sorrel, bog myrtle/ Spittled across the island ground/ Hawthorn, sticky willow, honey suckle/ Singing, ‘Do you love me enough?’/ like a blinking echo over the water.
You, give us something to bend for
Something to worry at. And
pluck the golden sprigs off. And
chew the greening flesh from.
These are simple dances.
Obedient as ants are.
N.B.
NEIL BICKERTON: Residency, 2015
Such small things/ Fat hen, wood sorrel, bog myrtle/ Spittled across the island ground/ Hawthorn, sticky willow, honey suckle/ Singing, ‘Do you love me enough?’/ like a blinking echo over the water.
An Acrostic of Appreciation for Sweeney’s Bothy and the Isle of Eigg Sweeney In Seamus Heaney’s poem, Sweeney is “wind-scourged, stripped/like a winter tree/clad in black frost/and frozen snow.” But the bothy has a warm hearth, the best designed garlic crusher on the planet, and a hot outdoor shower for use in rainstorm or starlight.
Wonder “How strange,” wrote Hugh Miller, “that [these seas] should have once thronged with reptiles more strange than poet ever imagined…”
Echo What creates those meanders across the surface of the sound on a calm day? The paths of breezes? The borders of different bodies of seawater? I was told they were the tracks of freshwater streams flowing out from the island.
Every flower, every rock, every moment. In geological time, the cliff behind the bothy is a wave a thousand foot high. And it will come crashing down. (Elsewhere, Kathleen Jamie writes: “Wind and sea. Everything else is provisional. A wing’s beat and it’s gone.”)
Not known What to make of great round stones in the rocks beyond the Singing Sands? Giant fossilised bubbles? Fossilised stromatolites? What?
Exploration “The feeling of intelligibility is like an ocean surrounding the small island of things we truly know…We are engaged in a fragile ongoing project of making sense.”
Yesterday Imagining Rùm as it was: a volcano 10,000 feet high. Imagining Rùm as it was: under a mile of ice.
Story Duncan MacClellan of Tigh an Sitheanan lost four sons to the Great War.
Bed A platform lifted up like a nest on the branches of a tree. Good for sky dreams.
Oak Scything bracken to allow the saplings some light, I took the top off an oak. Fxxx.
Tarn Studying the tracks of the wind racing over the surface of a miniature tarn* on Beinn Bhuidhe. Beyond, across a wide blue sea, the Cuillin Skye-line.
Hebrides You may go days without seeing them and then, over a blue sea or over a golden sea, 30 miles beyond the southern tip of Rùm, there they are: Barra, Vatersay and Sandray.
Yes Skye Red and Skye Black, brewed by the Isle of Skye Brewing Co. and sold at the Isle of Eigg Shop, are both good beers. I didn’t get around to trying the others.
Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. He is writing A New Map of Wonders. He stayed in Sweeney’s Bothy from 18 to 25 July 2015.
* Tarn – northern English dialect for small mountain lake. In Scots, a lochan I guess
CASPAR HENDERSON: Residency, 2015
An Acrostic of Appreciation for Sweeney’s Bothy and the Isle of Eigg Sweeney In Seamus Heaney’s poem, Sweeney is “wind-scourged, stripped/like a winter tree/clad in black frost/and frozen snow.” But the bothy has a warm hearth, the best designed garlic crusher on the planet, and a hot outdoor shower for use in rainstorm or starlight.
RACHAEL BERMAN MELVILLE: Self-Directed Residency, 2015
Day 1 - Monday, March 23, 2015. It was dark before, unseen. Now it is morning. Blue skies, the ocean. Two waking hours on Mallaig and I felt I knew the place. It is a beautiful little port town with much seafood to offer. After a rain shower and a rainbow, I return to my tiny, clean hotel room and gather my belongings.
JASPER COPPES & CRISTINA GARRIGA: Self-Directed Residency, 2015
The thing about living on an island that is only reachable by boat, Martin Creed writes, is that every time you leave you have to “watch it get smaller and smaller in the distance until it is gone [which] is amazing and sad”. The isle of Eigg is special because standing on it you can see another island that constantly appears and disappears without ever getting smaller. The window of Sweeney’s Bothy is an instrument for longing, directed at that other place out there – sometimes veiled in cloud or snowstorm, sometimes shimmering in the sun.
ELLIS O’CONNOR: Self-Directed Residency, 2017
Window out to the West. I began my journey up to the Isle of Eigg on the 3rd of January. I went to Eigg to walk, to amble through the wild terrains, to think, to be surrounded by wild weather and to make a brand new body of work made up of photographs, prints, drawings and writings in direct response from the atmosphere and surroundings of the Bothy. The first artist residency of the year and sure enough the wild weather did not disappoint
DAVID LEMM: Life Off the Grid Residency, 2014
I was invited to a residency at Sweeney’s bothy as part of Life Off the Grid project with Edinburgh University. Inspired by the story of the infamous 1806 William Bold map, the project aimed to examine how maps are perceived and used on the island; exploring their significance and value as tools of way finding, instruments of organisaton, material artefacts and repositories of meaning.
HANNA TUULIKKI: Self-Directed Residency, 2014
cloud-cuckoo-island In May 2014, I spent a week with Alec Finlay at the wonderful Sweeney’s Bothy in Cleadale. In the evenings, with the stove alight, we worked together on the Away with the Birds score transcriptions, sifting shapes from sounds. Outside, in the day-time, I explored and began research for a voice-performance-to-camera piece – to be filmed next spring – as part of Mnemonic Topographies, a new body of work investigating the land encoded in the song, the lore embedded in the land.
AMY WINSTANLEY: Self-Directed Residency, 2014
Gathering. This was my 25th year of visiting Eigg but the first time doing an artist residency. It was a week of beautiful November sunshine, some visiting and socialising with an equal measure of solitude and thinking time. It was a gathering of ideas, thoughts and material for my project I am working on towards a show next year.
