Caught by the Current
The Deep, Emotive pull of the Islands of Scotland
The Islands have a pull to them that I’ll always feel within a deep knowing part of me.
Ever since I was little when we as a family would venture to the Highlands normally to show my Irish family some incredible places when they would come to visit, I would always note the distant slivers of land on the horizon. So near to my grasp yet always so far, there would never be enough time to venture out to them or even a way to reach these sculptures of ancient matter in the middle of the sea anyway. I was always so curious, so intrigued by what lay there, never able to be present on the land where I stood yet only gaze longingly to the Islands that looked like giant whales reaching up out of the depths.
It wasn’t until I was at Art school in my early twenties that I remembered the childhood pull I had to explore these places, these far corners of Scotland, little dotted jewels scattered around our coastline. I grew up in Dundee on the east coast where there is not so much of a connection or talk familiarly with the islands of the west coast. The east coast is beautiful and dramatic in it’s own way but it was and always has been the west that I’ve been drawn to with the peaks that dominate the horizon and the shoreline that has been shaped and then re-shaped again of years being worn and battered by the dominance of the Atlantic.
It’s there where I always had the call to seek out.
Studying at Dundee (DJCAD) was a place where I felt I was able to nurture my creativity and felt supported in learning all ways of expressing myself, knowing from a very young age that there was only one road for me and that involved being an artist in any form possible, an intrinsic need to create, have a deep sense of meaning and carve out this outlet for myself. Dundee was a place though that wasn’t dramatic enough for me in terms of big nature walks and being in the hills.
In my 2nd year of art school, I kept drawing mountains from my mind that I remembered from childhood, furiously and obsessively painting and drawing lines of the land from my imagination, places I didn’t know were something I’d made up or formed from actual memories. It became very apparent that even though we were given such open briefs within fine art, I still chose every single time to draw and paint works that were inspired by nature, environments from places felt within myself, lines, marks and textures that conjured up big open spaces and vast far away shores. I didn’t know why but I simply allowed it to come and be expressed.
It was as if being in a creative environment and being allowed to spend as much time as possible creating, learning, developing surrounded by hundreds of other art students and being facilitated and supported by our tutors that all of these scenes of wonder and curiosity about the natural world and my place in it found its way from my mind onto the canvas. It was at this age of 20 in my second year of art school that not only did art give me the deepest sense of meaning and sense of wonder but so did being in nature of any kind, slowing my mind down, making me feel small and how it was imperative that I had to carve out a way of being where I was able to live a life where both things where sparking off one another, driving my passion and allowing me to create from a place of true inspiration and calm within myself.
One of my first trips to the Outer Hebrides was around the very same time I began expressing all of this in my work, land masses and Islands coming out of my mind onto the canvas, places I’d yet never been but they were somehow already there in my subconscious. The Isle of Barra was the first stop. I’ll never forget the feeling when I eventually found myself out in these Islands in the far west, Islands at the mercy of the thunderous Atlantic, the shoreline being worn away day by day creating a coastline of jagged rocks and a patchwork of ever-changing inlets and streams.
