Returning to Place - The Isle of Eigg
I learned a great deal from my recent return to the Isle of Eigg. I wanted to return to a place that had previously inspired a significant change in my art practice. When I first visited several years ago, I found inspiration along the beach line, where detritus had been washed ashore. Particularly around the Cathedral Caves on the south of the island, storms at sea had left the beach littered with balls of marram grass rolled together by the waves and bleached by the sun. Weathered litter and fragments of discarded material had formed unexpectedly beautiful shapes, alongside the bodies and remains of birds washed up on the shore. These encounters became the inspiration for a series of drawings and helped me begin to extend my practice beyond literal depictions of landscape.
I returned to Eigg expecting to continue these ideas. However, the land had a different plan. When I revisited the same places, the beaches were pristine and the sea was calm. The detritus that had previously provided such a strong visual and conceptual stimulus simply wasn't there.
My intention for the solo trip was to draw, make work and gather inspiration. I travelled with a considerable weight of art equipment. Although nothing was completely fixed in my mind, I felt that I knew what I was there to do and what I wanted to achieve.
I arrived on the Sunday afternoon and immediately began exploring, looking for where I might find inspiration. Over the following days I cycled and walked from one place to another. I had imagined spending full days drawing amongst the marram grasses at Larg Beach or sitting on the peat bogs, but the reality was less straightforward. At times I was overwhelmed by midges and I became increasingly conscious of the risk of ticks if I sat in the grass.
The drawings I made using ink, Chinese brushes and natural materials felt tense and stunted because I could not relax into the experience in the way I had imagined. The most successful drawings were more geological, looking closely at rock formations amongst the boulders, or were made while walking, where I could keep moving and avoid attracting the midges. Yet I continued to feel that I wasn't achieving what I had set out to achieve. I was trying to be fully present in the landscape while simultaneously thinking about my university assignments and what I needed to do when I returned home.
It wasn't until Thursday that something changed.
I set out that morning without a plan for where I should go or what I should try to find. I simply followed my nose. The weather was spectacular and the sea was glassy smooth. For the first time during the trip, I felt able to slow down and take my time, breathing in how beautiful everything was without feeling that I needed to make something from it.
At the beach, the tide was fully out. As the sea withdrew, it had left extraordinary patterns across the sand where the darker and lighter sands had separated and been deposited. The photographs I took were almost like perfect abstract drawings in themselves.
I swam in the sea and it was gloious!
I spent the whole day around the same location and experience the full extent of the tide. I watched the seaweed dry in the sun. I saw the rocks exposed and then gradually covered again. I watched the tide rise over them, slowly creeping upwards and holding the water in tension until finally – bloop! - they disappeared beneath the incoming water.
I listened to the sea gurgling and burbling around the rocks and heard seabirds calling across the bay.
Swimming at different stages of the tide, I watched comb jellies moving through the water, their iridescent colours pulsing down their bodies like tiny disco lights. I saw shoals of sand eels darting anxiously beneath the surface. I watched dry sand being lifted and carried across the surface of the water. The sunlight reflected so brightly that it dazzled my eyes as it danced across the sea.
Nothing particularly dramatic happened. There was no singular object that became the subject of a drawing. Instead, I became absorbed in the continuous movement of the place: the tide, the rocks, the sand, the seaweed, the light, the sounds and the creatures moving through the water.
The feeling was like the moment when you realise that painkillers have finally started to work. Something shifted in my nervous system. I felt calm and able to be genuinely present in the moment.
This experience helped me understand something about why I am drawn to these places and more importantly, what it might mean to be a body within a landscape. I had gone to Eigg intending to make work and find inspiration, but the most significant experience came when I stopped trying to find something.
It was a moment of being embodied in the landscape rather than simply observing it.
I don't think I need to try to recreate or represent that feeling directly in my work. In fact, trying to capture it visually might reduce something that was much more complex and embodied than an image could communicate. Instead, I can carry the experience with me as a resource within my practice. It has become part of my understanding of what it means to be present in a place.
Perhaps this is what I was looking for without knowing it: not another image of Eigg, but a different way of understanding my relationship to landscape.
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