HALLO DAVID

RACHEL HUNT: Self-Directed Residency, 2016

Using Sweeney’s as a place to explore the ‘out-dwelling’ skillscape. My trip to Sweeney’s was well timed, unintentionally so. It came in the midst of my write up, during a particularly fraught couple of months, when a years worth of empirics was being turned into just five chapters of a thesis. I am studying huts and bothies in rural Scotland and have found that, as Nan Shepherd wrote, ‘The thing to be known grows with the knowing’. Even in a thesis there is never enough room. I was stressed and frazzled and it was a wet, wet winter. Sweeney’s offered welcome escape.

Hunt_Meagaidh
Hunt_Meagaidh

The bothy was warm, well built, and opened onto a fantastic view. It was a place for writing, a space for thinking and strangely liberating outdoor showers. I woke every morning to light the stove, make bread and soup, walk the dog (Lucy had kindly allowed me to bring) and then settle down to write.

Hunt_Dwelling
Hunt_Dwelling

It was there, in the bothy, that I wrote chapter 7. Emboldened by the words within the bothy library, and Nan Shepherd in particular, it began to take shape. It is in this chapter that I look to the ideals and idylls of hut and bothy life, address the issues of journey, health, gender, nature, biophelia and lastly attending to skill. It is for this last section to which I am most indebted to my time at Sweeney’s. My introduction to this chapter states the following:

…this chapter will turn to the ideal of skill. It does so to advance a series of observations: 1, that there is the potential for a innate skill to ‘get it’, a knowledge rather than an act; 2, there is the claim that simplicity in itself is skilful – the ability to make something look simple, is in fact, where the true skill lies in this case, embedded in an impressive relationship between ‘out-dweller’, thought, practice, and environment; and 3, that while living simply is often typecast with the trope of ‘return’ or ‘escape’ to a ‘simpler’ existence, to be successful in that endeavor can require a complex ‘skilling up’ – a process of learning, adaptation, creativity and flexibility which is, arguably, ‘akin’ to what is routinely expected in the modern world.

Living in a hut, albeit a particularly luxurious one, allowed for an ascetic aesthetic which acts upon the self, focusing the mind on the physical tasks to be done and, in my case, the mental task of what was to be written. Mind and body worked together over that week to the tune of 10,000 words, and a calmer mind. For me at least, these are not normal work outcomes. Not together and not in the same week. Heidegger once write of Building Dwelling Thinking, without commas, to emphasise the harmonious linking of the three ideas and so I would argue that Sweeney’s, and buildings like it, offer a space for Hut Thought Word. I would thus like to thank Sweeney’s bothy, and the Bothy Project, for allowing me to explore the notion of a hut as a space to think, to write, and to be. Buildings have the capacity to act upon their users, impacting upon the work they produce in that space and I learnt a great deal about this process during my week here. I am thankful for every moment of this opportunity.

I have, in other spaces, written of the words people leave in the bothy, particularly in the bothy book and so I am also grateful for those who left their words, images, and as a first for me, their sculptures, for me to find.

Hunt_TopTips
Hunt_TopTips
Hunt_Popup
Hunt_Popup
Hunt_Maps
Hunt_Maps

While visitors books can be seen as inconsequential lists of names, dates, times I would rather see them as treasured individual literary gems, works which, in their handwritten state, become a modern day manuscript reflective of the initial days of the revolutionary move from orality to literacy (Finkelstein and McCleery 2002). They take us back to a time when there was only one book, one ‘object’, in one place. The makers thus mimic the monks of days gone by, creating books to be valued and protected. These ‘gems’ above, may well make it into my thesis, and they certainly demonstrate the need for greater attention to the guest book and the treasure they hold.

OX ART: Self-Directed Residency, 2016

 

Ox On Eigg – Isle Land Life. Psychic Experiments and Site Worship is the Ox Art residency at Sweeney’s Bothy, on the Isle of Eigg, selected and hosted by The Bothy Project. Ox Art are collaborative artist duo Annabel Pettigrew and Rob MacPherson. During our time on Eigg we performed daily psychic experiments using Zenner cards, and read the Tarot. We filmed and captured lots of footage in view to making a film of our time in Eigg, which will be exhibited later in 2016. We explored the island and performed ritualistic respect to the sites we visited.

 

isle-land-life

Isle Land Life, image by Ox, 2016

 

cave

Black Hole Cave, image by Ox, 2016

Isle Land Life (audio)

 

Isle Land Life

13.00:57          A black hole of the mass of the sun

33.03:18          About to begin

34.01:04          Low 150 miles South-West

30.01:44          Now for ten years

14.03:26          But there’s another kind of Hawking radiation

18.00.00

13.15:06           Fragile from the storm

04.03:35          Smile a certain sadness

28.00:10          Tears must be cried

32.00:52          To forget

31.01:00           Sun is high

03.02:21           And the Loan Piper walks off into the distance

10.00:55

04.04:48          (Instrumental)

10.00:24

20.00:30          We get so close, near enough to fight

05.02:06          Recognised, if that makes sense

13.06:11            Know the positions of particles

27.05:34           Promise, melt the ice

13.11.:17            But you couldn’t come back to our universe

12.00:18

Isle Land Life, poem and audio by Ox, 2016

 

Isle Land Life, ‘The Collector’, film short by Ox, 2016

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Isle Land Life, ‘The Collector Suggests The Tarot’, image by Ox, 2016

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Isle Land Life, ‘The Collector Deals The Tarot’, image by Ox, 2016

Ponies

Isle Land Life, ‘Polarised Ponais’, image by Ox, 2016

Isle Land Life, ‘An Sgùrr’, film by Ox, 2016

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Isle Land Life, ‘An Sgùrr’, film still by Ox, 2016

Ox would like to thank the people of Eigg, and Lucy and Eddie for their tremendous hospitality.

Further credits can be found on oxart-uk.com

All images, audio, text, and moving images remain the intellectual property of the artists.

 

 

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.

jaspergarriga-scholar

 

jaspergarriga-stars

Behind the writing desk we found ourselves become Asian Connoisseurs of the scholar rock there sticking out of the ocean; a rock that educates the viewer in the art of perception and dwelling, in what it means to be somewhere.

The notions of perception and dwelling can be extended in the mind to become the practices of observation and craft, of writing and making.

But writing also shapes the land, just as the soil can teach one how to read.

jaspergarriga-blue

While straying further and further away from common tracks we became absorbed by lumps of grey matter that, after a gentle drizzle, responded by bursting into colour – we realised right there that the thing and its name both meet upon the hand. They come forth from its silent and sensitive interaction with the world.

 

Jasper Coppes & Cristina Garriga



jaspergarriga-pott

Supported by My Bookcase