GSA Exhibitions and GSA Sustainability in Action Group are delighted to support Michael Barr, 3rd Year Sculpture and Environmental Art student was selected for Sweeney’s Bothy Residency. The opportunity was made open to all GSA staff and students to apply for. Michael was in residence at Sweeney’s Bothy on the Isle of Eigg from 7-14 March 2014.
Blog Entry by Michael Barr:
Michael has proposed to use as his starting point Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Sweeney Astray’ – the 7th century protagonist of which gives the Bothy its name, having been turned into a bird and living for six weeks in a cave on Eigg. He aims, from conversations with the island community, to map the wild growth of the foods that Sweeney is said to have eaten on his roamings – from watercress to brooklime, black sloes to wild strawberries.
He will also map the island’s caves, then travel back to the island in the summer to prepare a meal from these foraged foods, to share with islanders and to be eaten in the cave imagined to have been inhabited by Sweeney.