Art, Creativity and Life on the Isle of Eigg

What can a small island teach us about the relationship between art and community?

I love the Western Isles of Scotland. I have visited several islands over the years and have loved exploring with my family. It is the place I feel most in tune with the environment.

I have just returned from a week on the Isle of Eigg, staying in a tiny shepherd’s hut, living out my best Maggie Scraggle bog witch life.

I first became interested in the Isle of Eigg through its environmental action. Eigg was the first Scottish island to organise a community buyout, releasing itself from a feudal model of landownership and allowing the community to create a structure that prioritised environmental advocacy.

In my research for the MA in Creative Practice, I have been exploring how creative practice might contribute to the development of community, particularly through dialogue, shared experience and relationships with place. The Bothy Project which runs an artist’s residency from Sweeney’s bothy on the north of the island, seemed to offer an intriguing model. Rather than beginning with an exhibition or a defined public outcome, the bothy project creates space for artists to spend time immersed in a landscape and to allow ideas to develop through experience.

Sweeney's Bothy brings this idea into an existing island community. The artist is given solitude, but they are not arriving in an empty landscape. They are arriving on Eigg with its long history of collective action, volunteering, music and cultural activity.

This made me curious about what happens between the two.

Does an artist residency simply exist alongside the community, or does it become part of it? And what is it about Eigg that has allowed creative practice to become so embedded within island life?

To explore these questions, I spoke to Lucy Conway, who manages Sweeney's Bothy and Maggie Fyffe, secretary of the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust and a key player in the community buyout in 1997.

From the outside, Eigg can seem almost too good to be true. Its history of community ownership, collective responsibility and environmental stewardship has made it an important example of what can happen when people take control of the place in which they live. Alongside this sits a strong cultural life of traditional music, festivals, film, creative residencies and other forms of artistic activity.

It would be easy, therefore, to imagine that Eigg has deliberately cultivated itself as a creative community.

Maggie immediately contradicted that assumption. When I asked her about the importance of the arts on the island, she didn't describe a carefully constructed cultural strategy. Instead, she said:

"It's mostly to do with people and their interest."

The arts did not suddenly arrive with the community buyout, there already was a strong interest in music and culture. The Fèis, for example, has been running for decades, initially providing opportunities for children to learn traditional music and Gaelic. Over time, funding enabled the programme to expand into theatre and other cultural activities.

The impression I came away with was that creativity on Eigg has grown less from a decision to build a creative community and more from people pursuing the things that interest them.

Maggie described how public funding has sometimes been important in making this possible. With such a small population, it simply isn't possible to rely on ticket sales to support cultural events. Funding has allowed the island to bring in theatre and other experiences that would otherwise be financially unviable.

But money does not make these things happen. The real infrastructure is human. Talking about the organisation of one of the island's larger annual events, Maggie described the enormous amount of work involved - food has to be organised, a bar has to be staffed, the hall cleaned, people accommodated and performers transported. "It wouldn't work if it weren't for volunteers," she told me.

The Bothy Project was established to provide artists with the opportunity to live and work within remote Scottish landscapes, a concept Alec Finlay refers to as ‘hutopia’, a utopia of hut dwellings. Funded through public grants, cultural partnerships and residential fees, the project facilitates simple off-grid residencies where selected individuals are encouraged to spend extended periods immersed within a landscape.

The Bothy Project's approach is rooted in giving artists time, simplicity and immersion. The intention is not necessarily to produce a finished artwork or exhibition. Instead, the artist is given the opportunity to experience a place slowly and attentively, allowing ideas to emerge without a predetermined outcome.

This is particularly relevant to my own practice. My work has increasingly centred on prolonged engagement with landscape, exploring how weather, light, sound and material conditions influence perception and making. I have become interested not simply in representing landscape but in allowing it to become an active part of the creative process.

But there is an apparent contradiction here. The residency is designed around solitude, yet it exists within a community.

Lucy described the importance of this separation. Artists arrive with their own reasons for being there. Some want to write, some want to think, some want to make and some simply need to get away from their normal environment. She spoke of how this challenges the increasingly familiar language of artistic productivity. What happens if the outcome is simply that an artist thinks differently? Or gains confidence? Or discovers what they want to do next? It is much easier to demonstrate a physical object than a change in someone's thinking.

Yet perhaps this is precisely where the value of the Bothy lies. By prioritising immersion, reflection and attentiveness to place, it allows the process to come before the outcome. That is increasingly something I want to carry into my own practice.

The solitude of the Bothy does not mean that artists are disconnected from Eigg.

Lucy explained that many bothy residents become involved with island life during their stay. This can be in the form of visiting the school, attending an event, talking to people at the tea room or getting to know someone they meet along the way, but there is no single model of engagement. Some artists seek out connection. Others are primarily interested in working alone.

I have often thought about community in terms of participation: people coming together, contributing to something and sharing an experience. But the experience of Eigg suggests that community can be much looser than that.

Lucy gave me an example of this when describing the way islanders respond to visiting artists. There is a kind of informal awareness of people who are new to the island. Someone might notice that an artist looks lost and ask whether they need help. A lift might be offered. A conversation might begin, that encounter might become the beginning of a relationship between the artist and the community.

She went on to say that artists are not necessarily treated as exceptional when they arrive on Eigg.

"You're not exceptional when you come to Eigg. You're just somebody else."

Lucy told me about one artist who came to the island dressed as a bird and spent part of the residency living in a cave. Yet the same person could apparently sit in the tea room and have an ordinary conversation about football. Her conclusion was wonderfully understated:

"We're all a bit strange."

There is something important in that acceptance. The artist does not have to become ‘ordinary’ in order to belong. Equally, they do not have to remain permanently marked out as an artist or outsider. Their difference can simply exist alongside everybody else's differences.

Maggie made almost exactly the same point when I asked whether Eigg's community was different because of its history of community ownership. She was uncomfortable with the idea that Eigg should be presented as an exceptional model.

"I hate being held up as being, you know, really special."

She pointed towards other islands and rural communities where volunteering, collective action and strong social relationships also exist. Eigg, she suggested, is not an intentional community designed according to a particular social philosophy.

"We're just an ordinary bunch of folk that just happened to end up living here."

This challenged the romantic image I had carried with me. It would be easy to look at Eigg and try to identify the ingredients of its success: community ownership, environmental responsibility, volunteering, culture and creativity. But to reduce it to a model would miss something fundamental. Community is not a formula. It is something continually negotiated between people.

Creativity does not appear to sit separately from island life, it moves through it and perhaps that is what I am trying to understand through my own practice, not how art can be used to build community, but how artistic practice can create the space, time and encounters through which community might emerge.

 Thanks to Maggie Fyffe and  Lucy Conway for taking the time to talk to me.