Full Transcript for Anna Macleod, Rivers, Water, Ecologial Heath and Making.

one of the reasons why, so many of the old traditions have continued to exist in his timeline is because it's very, very poor, still very poor, and, they really only can survive on grant subsidies. 00:05:30.254 --> 00:05:31.814 Because the land is quite tricky. 00:05:32.204 --> 00:05:37.064 It's drumming land, so it's, a mixture of tillage and the pasture and bog. 00:05:37.365 --> 00:05:40.845 His farm was actually dug outta the bog by his ancestors for. 00:05:41.670 --> 00:05:42.389 The Morgan estate. 00:05:42.389 --> 00:05:55.899 It's reclaimed land Your heritage is Irish, Scottish, and you've been going back to different parts of Scotland, particularly some of the Aberdeen islands and working there and working in, in the cities as well. 00:05:56.290 --> 00:06:07.319 And there's always been a draw in, in my understanding of your practice Drawing parallels, a psychological and physical draw for you to be there, but also something around, ways of being in, remote places. 00:06:08.730 --> 00:06:09.689 Definitely. 00:06:09.810 --> 00:06:10.889 That's very true. 00:06:10.949 --> 00:06:19.149 And I think, I grew up in a city, my father's family are from the outer Heese and they're from the west side of the island wig, which is, you know, even more remote. 00:06:19.329 --> 00:06:22.579 Right on the side of the Atlantic, where the Uig sands is. 00:06:23.209 --> 00:06:26.589 And so they, there are a lot of crafts around there. 00:06:26.589 --> 00:06:35.930 And the crafts are, again, if anyone's familiar with the idea of crofting, it's a very small strip of land, that's really, really geared towards subsistence farming. 00:06:35.930 --> 00:06:38.420 You're certainly not going to get rich running a croft. 00:06:38.720 --> 00:06:48.720 So, like farmers in rural litum crafters are actually multitaskers, so they're fishermen as well as they have some cattle or they might have some sheep. 00:06:49.029 --> 00:06:54.220 And they might be tweed or Harris tweed weavers as well. 00:06:54.290 --> 00:06:59.920 it's very much a kind of multitasking way of running, with the land, you know? 00:07:00.040 --> 00:07:10.694 It's a very different type of farming to the kind of large, and the richer parts of, of the world where, you know, you've got these giant farms and being encouraged under EU regulations to get rid of hedge rows and stuff. 00:07:11.235 --> 00:07:19.305 Here, the farmers actually working with the hedgerows and they have more of a connection with nature, I think, and a closer observation of how nature works. 00:07:20.175 --> 00:07:22.095 And that for me has been fascinating. 00:07:22.095 --> 00:07:33.375 So I'm reconnecting with my own family's heritage at the same time as beginning to understand more about the landscape I live in and, the culture, and the heritage of that. 00:07:33.555 --> 00:07:36.464 And now it's become a huge focus for me. 00:07:36.555 --> 00:07:46.204 So I'm looking at folklore, I'm looking at, farming heritage practices, but also the

folklore and the traditions and customs that are associated with all of those things. 00:07:46.415 --> 00:07:48.334 Although I'm not a Gaelic speaker. 00:07:48.425 --> 00:07:51.475 I'm trying to learn, but, I do feel it was my heritage. 00:07:51.865 --> 00:07:57.495 One of my grandmothers didn't speak English, so it's not too far away that, my great-grandmother didn't speak English. 00:07:57.495 --> 00:08:07.435 So it's not too far away that, I was a Gaelic speaker at some point, but because of colonialism and the nature of schooling, that language got watered down and lost in my case anyway. 00:08:07.435 --> 00:08:10.915 So I'm trying to reconnect with that sort of sense of place. 00:08:11.425 --> 00:08:26.605 And, it's very important for me that sense of place is in language, but it's also imbued in the ways of seeing and how in these western climes that we live in, with a lot of rain and water coming in from the Atlantic, there's different ways of looking at the landscape. 00:08:26.605 --> 00:08:29.334 It's very particularly different to say the East coast. 00:08:30.095 --> 00:08:39.585 There's different flora and fauna, and therefore different customs and practices developed and different storytelling and different, senses of spirituality, I would say. 00:08:39.715 --> 00:08:51.345 I'm interested in the pre-Christian, how I suppose people who lived off the land and with the land, how they developed a kind of, a sense of celestial within that. 00:08:51.500 --> 00:08:54.620 Living in the northwest, within a stone throw of everything. 00:08:54.620 --> 00:08:59.929 There's some megalithic or neolithic stone pile or, you or, tripping over them. 00:09:00.139 --> 00:09:04.269 And literally, and, you're deeply conscious of that, you know, from karaoke. 00:09:05.184 --> 00:09:13.174 All the way up to monuments in Sligo and then across these Glens in north le from, there sweat lodges, as you said, rats, all sorts of things everywhere. 00:09:13.274 --> 00:09:21.174 You mentioned earlier a little bit about, your work, but water, and I think that was the first show that we worked together on, was kind of almost a survey show. 00:09:21.394 --> 00:09:31.975 I think you'd recently finished, an ma, and you had put together this extraordinary body of work looking at probably 10 years of research around water. 00:09:31.975 --> 00:09:35.105 And you were doing an awful lot of, residencies abroad. 00:09:35.105 --> 00:09:41.625 You've been to India, you've been to parts of Canada, Spain, all around the world, looking at water and water cultures. 00:09:42.014 --> 00:09:57.144 And that show, which will provide a link to, was really, really interesting and probably formative, in my understanding of your work and definitely in Understanding water as a resource in a way that we probably have taken hugely for granted in Ireland. 00:09:57.625 --> 00:09:59.304 Well, yes. 00:09:59.304 --> 00:10:07.044 I mean, when I started looking at water, in 2007, I focused my mind onto

an aspect of landscape. 00:10:07.044 --> 00:10:10.125 And of course, water is so fascinating because it's very abundant in Ireland. 00:10:10.304 --> 00:10:13.014 But it's also, in a greater global sense. 00:10:13.014 --> 00:10:14.154 The shaper of land. 00:10:14.154 --> 00:10:15.924 It's the source of all life itself. 00:10:15.955 --> 00:10:17.634 We wouldn't exist without water. 00:10:17.845 --> 00:10:22.004 So it's one of those absolutely fundamental elements that has shaped our continents. 00:10:22.004 --> 00:10:27.875 It's shaped our very landscapes around us, like whether it's in the form of ice or liquid or gas. 00:10:28.720 --> 00:10:31.909 It is a constant reminder of how we are still here. 00:10:31.909 --> 00:10:34.740 And, we have food production as a result of water. 00:10:34.740 --> 00:10:43.049 So, when I started looking at water, it was looking at the, mismanagement or the lack of management around water, in Ireland. 00:10:43.360 --> 00:10:52.600 We had a number of failures in the Irish landscape due to the inheritance of a colonial structure and then lack of infrastructure put into that, inheritance. 00:10:52.600 --> 00:11:05.980 So, very poor infrastructure in fact now'cause it hasn't been invested in and because of that part of the infrastructure is now failing and we are having like sewage seepages into water sources that look after whole cities. 00:11:05.980 --> 00:11:13.534 For example, that disgraceful, Galway situation and the Cryptosporidium outbreak and there are minor outbreaks all the time. 00:11:14.990 --> 00:11:17.450 Again, it's stem to about management of sewage systems. 00:11:17.450 --> 00:11:37.289 So anyway, I was looking at that as a greater arc and then began looking at all colonial countries that had inherited, a British system of management of water and then had sort of failed in their own independence to actually upgrade these systems and sort of forgot because the British system had actually been quite good when it was in the 18 somethings when it had been put in. 00:11:37.340 --> 00:11:39.350 Obviously everything needs, um, upgrading. 00:11:39.350 --> 00:11:48.090 So anyway, so I started looking at India and Ghana and West Africa and, Canada and places at that, that had been former British colonies Australia too. 00:11:48.750 --> 00:11:52.529 And looking at their management systems and looking at the disastrous failures of those. 00:11:53.460 --> 00:12:02.580 And then trying to come up with kind of positive ways of looking at how they might be improved, particularly through awareness that populations. 00:12:03.465 --> 00:12:08.684 As long as you can turn on the tap and something relatively clean comes out of it, people don't seem to be terribly interested. 00:12:08.865 --> 00:12:12.884 It's only when there is a massive failure that it focuses the mind. 00:12:13.735 --> 00:12:20.404 And so my practice started to look at what are the mismanagements and how are we letting it happen? 00:12:20.404 --> 00:12:26.115 As a population, as citizens of the world, as you know, people who pay taxes in certain parts of the world. 00:12:26.115 --> 00:12:34.205 How are we letting this happen and what can we do to kind of focus the mind and start demanding political change, but it also takes social change. 00:12:35.075 --> 00:13:14.765 There's always a dynamic between jobs, mining, interests, everybody wants a nice house but it takes mining to give you a house and there are all these complexities do we ship mining out to, underdeveloped countries and we don't think about the conditions of those mining is a very water heavy industry, mining became a big focus for a while and brought me to the Goby Desert, looking at the effective strip mining on, the population, the herding populations there, and then also on the kind of greedy water use and washes a lot of affluent back into the rivers, you know, but then bringing it back to, you know, what's our's responsibility as end users. 00:13:14.765 --> 00:13:27.166 We're all very happy with our mobile phones and, the, 46 components of mining that are in our mobile phones and every instrument we use, what's our capacity in this and are we even aware of it? 00:13:27.566 --> 00:13:33.048 These were the questions I was grappling with in the work Now I'm looking at water from a slightly different angle. 00:13:33.349 --> 00:13:44.178 And it's moved on to looking at the social practices around water and the cultural practices around it, and the course that brings me to landscape and how water is food production. 00:13:44.178 --> 00:13:57.538 And that's why I'm now making sculptures out byproducts of that, like the hay sculptures, which goes back to pal ethic, periods and looking at glues from bees wax and resins and, how early humans kind of adapted. 00:13:58.298 --> 00:14:11.119 And is there anything we can learn about that early adaption into how we might look at adapting in our modern world to climate change, which is because it's coming on us so fast and so furiously. 00:14:11.658 --> 00:14:12.918 Some people say humans are very. 00:14:13.323 --> 00:14:14.043 Good at adapting. 00:14:14.043 --> 00:14:28.413 I'm not so sure whether we're as agile as we might like to think and can we look to the past to find mechanisms or ways of being that would help us navigate the complexities that are coming fast and furious at us. 00:14:28.514 --> 00:14:39.823 I suppose that adapting takes, a new way of being and a ways you said that may require a lot less material wealth but I'm really interested, in that. 00:14:40.524 --> 00:15:00.964 Global view and how maybe, through circumstances and time that some of these global themes that you're thinking of, kind of got focused, deeper and maybe more specific context of raising awareness, public awareness about pollution, but also I suppose the ecosystem of rivers and kind of the detail that you're finding in that. 00:15:01.673 --> 00:15:06.543 And I'm particularly referring to pieces that

you've made recently, in Scotland. 00:15:07.894 --> 00:15:08.344 Yes. 00:15:08.344 --> 00:15:22.153 Well, I was very lucky to be one of the artists to work with the eco show boat, project that, Conley and Cleary, artists, initiated, which was a look at, the River Shannon all the way across, Ireland and. 00:15:22.869 --> 00:15:27.818 They invited artists who were interested in watery colleges to participate with them. 00:15:28.359 --> 00:15:31.908 And as part of that, I proposed that I would work on River Awareness. 00:15:32.719 --> 00:15:37.879 And I started working with a school in, with 11, 12 year olds. 00:15:37.969 --> 00:15:40.038 And these are all children from farming communities. 00:15:40.759 --> 00:15:48.899 And, so together over a number of months, we explored what are the threats to water, how important water is, what are the threats? 00:15:48.899 --> 00:15:53.958 And, they were themselves quite shocked to learn that one of the biggest threats is from farming itself. 00:15:54.948 --> 00:16:05.099 And, so I didn't want to kind of, I was trying to keep it very kind of, this is what's happening, but nobody's getting blamed here, but we need to raise awareness and how do we, what ideas can we come up with? 00:16:05.774 --> 00:16:08.173 To kind of ameliorate some of this, problem. 00:16:08.173 --> 00:16:10.303 And so the kids were amazing actually. 00:16:10.303 --> 00:16:17.764 They actually marched home and started talking about, you know, like they weren't to use any roundup on the farm but we just explored all the threats. 00:16:18.094 --> 00:16:22.323 And also that it was coming from industry, you know, for farming is one industry, but forestry was another. 00:16:22.374 --> 00:16:39.774 So in our specific context of quite heavy deforestation in a litum, commercial forestation, this was, you know, leading to the acidification of the water and then farming the, the heavy nutrients washing off, phosphates and, all the different nutrients that've been spread on the land, washing into the water. 00:16:40.014 --> 00:16:41.693 And then another big threat to is silt. 00:16:42.563 --> 00:16:54.644 So, if you farm right up to the edge and you don't leave a riparian zone, if you destroy the ecosystem to that point from the plant point of view, you've got a silt flowing into the river, which steals the oxygen outta the water. 00:16:54.644 --> 00:17:02.333 And, you know, so you might notice rivers that are, you know, very heavily, covered in plant life, and that's too much nitrates going into the water. 00:17:02.484 --> 00:17:03.774 So that's a very bad sign. 00:17:04.074 --> 00:17:12.713 You might think, oh, look at those lovely plants that are growing in the, in the river, but it's not a good thing at all and very bad for fish and other aquatic converter bits. 00:17:12.713 --> 00:17:22.314 And what really keeps the kind of bio, diversity going in rivers and riparian zones, are the, aquatic convert derates and insects life. 00:17:22.884 --> 00:17:25.733 There's a whole kind of food chain associated with those. 00:17:26.554 --> 00:17:39.453 Caly may fly, stone flies a kind of a whole genre of them, many of which, particularly the cataly and many families and species within that, are indicators of good water health and, temperature change. 00:17:39.483 --> 00:17:47.114 So, when, they, when ecologists go into rivers and they could kick samples, what they're looking for is a range of different. 00:17:48.028 --> 00:17:57.979 Larvae, from the caly stone flies and may flies are looking for, what's the diversity of the tic invertebrates in the river, and that'll show how healthy the river is. 00:17:58.769 --> 00:18:02.189 Caddisfly is a very important one because, they build little homes for themselves. 00:18:02.189 --> 00:18:09.739 And I was interested in that from a sculptural point of view, because they build these extraordinary, they use the materials around them, to build. 00:18:09.739 --> 00:18:18.929 So they might use tiny bits of flex of, of sand, and some use little stones, some use shells, some use leaves, some use twigs. 00:18:19.348 --> 00:18:39.318 So there's a whole range of things that they find lying around them, and they glue them together with a glue that's secreted from their, from their mouths A little bit like, silk is from silkworms and, this, it's actually a silk glue, which has a, which has a properties of, holding together materials underwater. 00:18:39.588 --> 00:18:40.104 And it's the only. 00:18:41.134 --> 00:18:47.943 Apparently in the globe that's known to stay strong underwater. 00:18:48.003 --> 00:18:58.864 So scientists are looking to see can they adapt this formula, for medical purposes, which would be a huge breakthrough in, in how to, help people as well. 00:18:59.463 --> 00:19:13.763 So I became very interested in this and, doing research in UCD with, Mary Kelly Quinn, she's an environmental, biologist, and she's written sort of Ireland's seminal book, which is Ireland's Rivers where, she's been looking at, the health of Irish Rivers. 00:19:13.763 --> 00:19:21.273 Now, unfortunately, our water quality is going down quite rapidly, and there's a number of factors to this. 00:19:21.273 --> 00:19:25.374 Farming is one, industrial pollution is another, domestic pollution. 00:19:25.644 --> 00:19:28.074 That's the responsibility of the government as well. 00:19:28.554 --> 00:19:32.213 Human, ordinary citizens, not taking enough care of the rivers. 00:19:32.263 --> 00:19:34.094 We don't have any pristine rivers left. 00:19:34.094 --> 00:19:36.644 We used to have pristine rivers coming outta mountains. 00:19:36.644 --> 00:19:47.403 Even the Shannon Pot isn't as pristine as the biggest river in the British Isles, It starts in Carvan and it's this little pool that bubbles up and has so much folklore history and culture associated with it. 00:19:47.463 --> 00:19:53.584 The salmon of knowledge, the whole mythological, cycle, is predicated around this pool.

00:19:54.124 --> 00:20:00.054 and yet, we're presiding over a time where our waters are being degraded. 00:20:00.108 --> 00:20:08.878 It's been called the Silent Tragedy because there's more biodiversity loss in rivers, than there is in any other species in the world and on land. 00:20:09.489 --> 00:20:17.898 That's something that's not very well known and the academia is trying to get out into the world, but, unfortunately it's not getting through to people. 00:20:18.288 --> 00:20:30.568 Now, when you look at England, since they've privatized the water system, it's a real warning against privatization because all they've done is look at profits and they've stripped out, all remedial work on rivers. 00:20:30.568 --> 00:20:33.328 And so that's why they've ended up in such a disgraceful mess. 00:20:33.378 --> 00:20:35.449 Their water quality is actually so bad. 00:20:35.449 --> 00:20:36.499 It makes ours look brilliant. 00:20:37.638 --> 00:20:41.403 But, in actual fact, we must be, cognizant of the fact that ours is declining. 00:20:42.064 --> 00:20:42.903 Quite fast. 00:20:42.963 --> 00:21:01.933 And, we need to make investment into, and the idea of privatizing it just isn't really bad, you know, because all private companies ever do is assets strip and do not invest back into, so it's a greater problem for capitalism and how we have to view capitalism and our natural resources. 00:21:01.963 --> 00:21:07.963 Not that I like to cook water as a resource, but you know, we do need to think about what's more important. 00:21:08.144 --> 00:21:08.354 You know? 00:21:08.473 --> 00:21:08.804 Yeah. 00:21:08.804 --> 00:21:11.023 Water as a public good of Absolutely. 00:21:11.384 --> 00:21:13.304 It's, it's, it's the national treasure. 00:21:13.423 --> 00:21:14.384 Of all treasures. 00:21:14.384 --> 00:21:19.304 If you lose your water, it's, particularly when you're on an island, you're, it's just absolute disaster. 00:21:19.308 --> 00:21:21.093 There's nothing worse I can think of. 00:21:21.093 --> 00:21:26.063 Where would we get our water if it became so undrinkable or unusable? 00:21:26.272 --> 00:21:27.022 Where do you go? 00:21:27.113 --> 00:21:30.413 I mean, it might be different for mainland Europe, but we've already seen water wars. 00:21:30.803 --> 00:21:31.583 We're seeing migrant. 00:21:32.692 --> 00:21:40.553 Part of this discussion that we're having all the time about immigrants coming into these waters and, coming to these countries. 00:21:40.553 --> 00:21:44.143 I mean, some of them are climate migrants and they've run out of water. 00:21:44.292 --> 00:21:45.583 They can no longer grow crops. 00:21:45.583 --> 00:21:46.782 I mean, where are they supposed to go? 00:21:47.563 --> 00:21:54.833 They're heading to Europe and they're heading to Europe because, Europe got wealthy on the back of their countries and their resources many years ago. 00:21:54.923 --> 00:21:56.623 And, now they've nowhere else to go. 00:21:56.772 --> 00:22:10.748 And so that's part of the question around, what are we going to do, as climate changes, of relationship with the natural world around us, and what implications does that have for us politically, culturally as well. 00:22:11.377 --> 00:22:28.403 And so in terms of some of the pieces that you've made, I know that a lot of this is work and progress or work that will be in for the development, but you were showing me, some beautiful, pieces that you'd made from recycled aluminum and a beautiful, seed pod that you've made. 00:22:28.863 --> 00:22:42.452 I wonder, could you talk a little bit about them, even the seed pod, which contains imagery of plants and, what I would consider sort of medicinal or would've known as medicinal herbs like the digitalists or the Johns worth. 00:22:42.452 --> 00:22:53.282 I think it's really important to get a sense of, how skilled you are as a maker and how beautiful visually that you tell these stories. 00:22:53.593 --> 00:22:59.682 I think you're one of the finest makers we have, in your understanding materiality and your approach to it. 00:23:01.393 --> 00:23:07.482 Well, I was very lucky to get a Reach Scotland residency at the Edinburg Sculpture Workshop, two years ago. 00:23:08.323 --> 00:23:13.282 That was on foot of having a show in Stoneway in the Isle of Lewis, which was the result of the landscape work. 00:23:13.702 --> 00:23:20.863 So my proposal to the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop for the residency there was that I wanted to do a project around the water of Leh. 00:23:21.403 --> 00:23:23.948 The water of Leh is the river that runs through the city of Edinburgh. 00:23:24.428 --> 00:23:28.137 And, when I was a child growing up in Edinburgh, it was a running sewer. 00:23:29.067 --> 00:23:30.298 We were told not to play in it. 00:23:30.337 --> 00:23:31.268 It was poisonous. 00:23:31.667 --> 00:23:34.508 Even in the 1960s there was a typhoid outbreak. 00:23:35.258 --> 00:23:42.998 For 20 odd years, the water of relief community trust have been working tirelessly to advocate for cleaning up the river. 00:23:42.998 --> 00:23:49.917 They've got 400 volunteers who work all along the stretch of the, 11 miles from the Penton tails down to, the sea at leaf. 00:23:50.288 --> 00:23:52.758 This winding river goes all the way through Edinburgh. 00:23:52.894 --> 00:23:58.743 And is really a treasure because it has now been cleaned up and they're doing more and more ies on it. 00:23:58.894 --> 00:24:08.314 So I was interested in making a project about this particular river as a celebration of return to health of the river through community action. 00:24:08.644 --> 00:24:19.169 So I was putting together this kind of idea that, you know, positive action can actually lead to positive change within environmental and, and can heal our relationship with nature. 00:24:20.138 --> 00:24:24.469 Therefore, I started my research in the herbarium, in the Botanic Gardens. 00:24:25.864 --> 00:24:26.493 In Edinburgh. 00:24:26.554 --> 00:24:34.864

And, uh, so I asked could I go and see their collection and in the meantime I came across this, botanist called, Gregory Nicer. 00:24:35.568 --> 00:24:53.469 He's written a number of books, but one of his early papers in the nineties was, a survey of the riparian zone of the water of leaf, looking at the common plants and how they were, beginning to come back and beat off the invasive species, as part of the cleaning up of the river. 00:24:54.699 --> 00:25:00.909 And the other thing was the coexistence of the communities of plants along the rivers, some of whom are introduced plants. 00:25:00.909 --> 00:25:09.608 You can't always say invasive species are bad because not all of them are, so he does great talks around the idea that, you know, some of the introduced. 00:25:10.249 --> 00:25:22.138 Plants were to help with health benefits the brewing of, beer, lot of plants that came in as part of different waves came into Scotland over a period of thousands of years. 00:25:22.659 --> 00:25:30.679 The Romans brought in particular plants for health benefits, and then other plants were brought in, as medicinal herbs. 00:25:30.709 --> 00:25:36.699 So I thought I went a deep dive into looking at the herbarium and the different plants. 00:25:36.818 --> 00:25:40.179 And I chose, and also looking at herbalism. 00:25:40.209 --> 00:25:46.759 12 plants that are related to the human body and aspects of, curative powers that they have for different parts of the body. 00:25:48.169 --> 00:25:51.229 And so I won't name all the 12 plants, but, st. 00:25:51.229 --> 00:25:52.729 John's Wash was one of them. 00:25:52.788 --> 00:25:55.709 And, comfy Bone knit was another. 00:25:55.769 --> 00:26:03.778 And your very common ones like nettles, nettles are very good as a general tonic for the blood, but also helps with your kidneys and helps with your bladder. 00:26:04.439 --> 00:26:08.798 Rubus the, raspberry, the wild raspberry, which grows along the side of the river. 00:26:08.798 --> 00:26:10.148 That's very good for the womb. 00:26:10.209 --> 00:26:15.159 And, there's rib work plantain again for the skin, valerian for the nervous system. 00:26:15.398 --> 00:26:16.568 So there was a whole range. 00:26:16.568 --> 00:26:23.269 I tried to pick ones that sort of cover the whole body, so if you could like, look at, the corpus and relate that to the corpus of the river. 00:26:23.808 --> 00:26:34.209 I thought I would make a healing banner and a healing sculpture, that would be paraded along with a group of people, along different parts of, the water of Leh as a celebration. 00:26:34.628 --> 00:26:36.308 A celebration of healing, but also. 00:26:37.358 --> 00:26:49.624 As a way of reconnecting with nature, because there are parts of Edinburgh, even though it's deep within the city, they've created walkways along which, and they're very leafy and beautiful and there's all ranges of flowers along. 00:26:50.163 --> 00:26:55.453 So, Hawthorne is another plank that I, found very much along the side of the water of leaf. 00:26:56.203 --> 00:27:04.473 In celebration of the return to the health of the water, they have done a cataly count and, stone fly count. 00:27:04.473 --> 00:27:12.314 And they've found that the CASSIEs have returned to parts of the river quite extraordinarily, amount of them kingfishers and otters. 00:27:12.644 --> 00:27:19.263 And therefore all the creatures that, benefit from biodiversity have returned. 00:27:19.294 --> 00:27:21.153 And, so that was a celebration of that. 00:27:21.364 --> 00:27:24.364 So I made outta recycled at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. 00:27:24.874 --> 00:27:29.804 I made seven of the species of Carly, cases. 00:27:30.719 --> 00:27:31.828 Outta recycled aluminum. 00:27:31.828 --> 00:27:37.108 So I did them from, from the kind of making the masters to the molds to the, to the actual cast themselves. 00:27:37.528 --> 00:27:46.499 And it's the second time I've cast aluminum, but I went through the entire process with the technicians there and sort of up to my skills at the same time, which was really, really exciting. 00:27:46.558 --> 00:27:50.568 And they have such brilliant workshops there that, it was very exciting to do that. 00:27:50.638 --> 00:28:09.969 I improved my mold making as well, but learning the embroidery was something that was very important to me too, because Edinburgh has a very long history with, sampler making, and I was interested in, not just because it's women's work, but the idea of embroidery or use of threads and use of sewing as a way of, protest. 00:28:10.493 --> 00:28:14.624 But also as a way of, recording history in a way. 00:28:15.104 --> 00:28:24.814 I mean, you can look back as far as the Bayou Tapestry is, or any of these tapestries where you find, that history is recorded in a permanent way through the technique of sticking a needle through a piece of cloth. 00:28:24.993 --> 00:28:33.163 So I was interested in that, but I was also interested in the School of Embroidery Weam School of needle work that was set up in the 1830s, by Weems. 00:28:33.163 --> 00:28:56.153 And her idea was to help the lot of, miners and farmers, distant farmers and tenant farmers helped a lot of their girl children, that they could teach them sewing and then they would still be employed by the need of work school after they were married and had children, which was revolutionary at the time, used to be just thrown to the wolves once you got married and had children like in Ireland. 00:28:57.263 --> 00:29:00.534 So, she came from the whole kind of tradition of utopian socialism. 00:29:00.874 --> 00:29:12.963 I was interested in bringing the idea of, socialist collective action into ecology and into river ecology and, how that might translate into kind of collective action, in a contemporary setting. 00:29:13.804 --> 00:29:14.763 Oh, that's so exciting. 00:29:15.094 --> 00:29:22.433 And to hear about the success of healing the river but also I think there's something

around that, collective action that's really interesting. 00:29:22.864 --> 00:29:34.034 Because it strikes me there's something of that at play in North Litum where communities do seem to come together, like particularly around environment, particularly around silk a spruce. 00:29:34.153 --> 00:29:34.423 Yep. 00:29:34.554 --> 00:29:40.854 Fracking, work that's happening now between firma and this region around, mining. 00:29:41.284 --> 00:29:45.074 But even more recently, some movements that have been quite white ring. 00:29:45.463 --> 00:29:54.270 Do you think there's something interesting in this neighborhood or this general region that, that has potential example of ways of coming together? 00:29:54.721 --> 00:29:55.651 Yes, I think so. 00:29:55.651 --> 00:30:04.411 I think there's been quite a few movements, in the love rum and, treasure litum, community movements that have come together for particular things like anti fracking was one. 00:30:04.980 --> 00:30:14.685 And, one of the biggest arguments about the anti fracking movement was that the effect of fracking on the water table and that that's what really got people's attention and also got the. 00:30:15.276 --> 00:30:31.895 Thank God got the attention of the government ministers as they went to vote on it because, you know, once again we go back to the idea of, you know, if you, if you irrevocably damage water, on an island, then you're absolutely screwed to know where to go. 00:30:32.306 --> 00:30:52.905 Again, it's not just the loss of farming land to the Sitka Spruce plantations, but it's the fact that they're owned by hedge companies, I'm sure you know the teacher's union in Canada, that was one of the hedge funds and I'm sure they thought they were investing in forestry in Ireland and they had no idea, the type of forestry or the type of setup that it was. 00:30:52.935 --> 00:30:57.016 I think there was a Danish teacher's union as well involved in the hedge, one of the hedge funds. 00:30:57.226 --> 00:30:59.145 And you just think, obviously they had no idea. 00:30:59.836 --> 00:31:02.215 'cause I don't think they would've invested, their pension. 00:31:03.026 --> 00:31:10.346 If they'd known what a monocultural, disgraceful ruination of the landscape, that it would be ruination of good land. 00:31:10.375 --> 00:31:17.395 And apparently after three cycles of the trees, the land is exhausted for hundreds of years, so it's completely useless for anything else. 00:31:17.635 --> 00:31:21.590 And in the meantime, you've sort of acidified your water table. 00:31:21.770 --> 00:31:22.546 So, yeah. 00:31:22.965 --> 00:31:31.516 You know, so there's been a lot of focus and what's been really nice about the movements up here, the social movements up here, is it's been locals and blow ins. 00:31:32.115 --> 00:31:44.965 'cause, you know, there's quite a dynamic between your local populations and what's considered a blowin like me, who have come from other places and don't have eight generations of, of occupation of the land. 00:31:44.976 --> 00:31:51.560 But we come together, whatever our other differences might be, we come together on, real social, change. 00:31:51.651 --> 00:31:53.510 And, it's, it's been pretty successful. 00:31:53.931 --> 00:31:54.080 Now. 00:31:54.080 --> 00:31:59.340 The judge litum have moved on to, fighting, mining, which is a, a subject. 00:31:59.340 --> 00:32:01.351 I'm very, very, close to my heart. 00:32:01.351 --> 00:32:06.330 'cause I've, I've looked at mining in places like Colorado. 00:32:06.330 --> 00:32:16.520 I've looked at the legacy, the river Riverine legacy of gold mining, in Colorado, which to this day they still have toxic piles from the 1890s. 00:32:16.520 --> 00:32:20.631 They still have toxic piles left over of the acids that they have to use. 00:32:21.111 --> 00:32:31.040 So there are still, you know, they still dunno what to do with some of these piles of stone that, you know, are so contaminated that they, they can't even move them in case the dust gets into the river. 00:32:31.040 --> 00:32:33.980 So the Colorado River was quite poisoned at many stages. 00:32:33.980 --> 00:32:44.661 And so the idea that they would be mining gold mining outside Manor Hamilton, and in fact there's quite a few sites being identified around these hills, of potential gold mining. 00:32:45.371 --> 00:32:48.971 Which is extremely worrying and that's gonna galvanize people's minds a lot. 00:32:49.121 --> 00:32:58.590 Not just the visual, mess that a mine makes, you know, the open scars and the horrible kind of removal of half a mountain to get at the gold. 00:32:58.951 --> 00:33:30.615 But what really does worry people, is the water and the environmental damage and the loss of biodiversity so yeah, I think all over the globe, there's so many artists now, I'm very proud to be part of a community of artists, around the world who are beginning to really focus on, what can we do to contribute to, society in such a way as kind of whether we are lucky enough to be citizens or not as citizens of the world, how can we help to bring these issues into the foreground and discuss, solutions are often very local. 00:33:30.976 --> 00:33:39.405 But there are solutions, but usually it's through kind of getting together and talking about them not being run over by big pharma or big companies or big industry, you know? 00:33:39.455 --> 00:33:43.385 And often our views aren't, taken into account when it comes to, talking about the economy. 00:33:43.816 --> 00:33:59.871 The economy seems to be a bigger issue than we are allowed to even have an opinion on, but, it's up to us all to start, making more of a noise about it, you know, but how do we work within that arena and still be artists, so it's constantly playing around with the idea of what does protest look like. 00:34:00.750 --> 00:34:06.000 There's always that tension, between the research, the meaning, and then the manifestation if you like. 00:34:06.451 --> 00:34:08.490 But

for me, I suppose there's two things there. 00:34:08.490 --> 00:34:09.721 I'd love to talk a little bit about. 00:34:09.751 --> 00:34:16.260 One is the performance side of your work and what you've been doing performatively, mm-hmm. 00:34:17.911 --> 00:34:29.681 In the beginning I don't really see myself as a performance artist but in the beginning when I started on the water projects and I started going to, quite far-flung places where I had to make mobile work. 00:34:30.025 --> 00:34:31.615 In order to get it home. 00:34:31.615 --> 00:34:36.476 So sewing became, it was something I could do anyway, and I learned sewing as a child in Scotland. 00:34:36.476 --> 00:34:44.036 So I started like putting that skill into, you know, making texts in fabrics and then, you know, being able to unroll them. 00:34:44.516 --> 00:35:01.525 I'm very interested in the whole kind of social movement of protest posters and banners and the whole kind of legacy of that, and then I saw them as sculptures as well, and then also other types of mobile sculptures that could be walked about in a damaged environment, you know, and it could bring people with you. 00:35:01.525 --> 00:35:03.865 So it became a strategy. 00:35:03.865 --> 00:35:16.916 I called walking as witnessing, so you go to a place and you bring some people and talk a little bit about what it is, and then just observe, you know, and so this was a strategy I used in quite a few places. 00:35:16.945 --> 00:35:25.186 The devastation was so upsetting that it began to get sort of depressed and kind of environmentally depressed. 00:35:25.186 --> 00:35:26.536 And I couldn't really go on with that work. 00:35:26.536 --> 00:35:29.476 So I switched it around into a more positive walking. 00:35:30.436 --> 00:35:36.315 Not that it wasn't positive walking, but it was just so I took on too much and I became overwhelmed by it, you know? 00:35:36.856 --> 00:35:43.326 Um, so I've continued with the, the, the walking and the banners, and I've made the banners more. 00:35:43.376 --> 00:35:50.936 I think I've made them more about healing, you know, so that psychological term rather than just witnessing, but witnessing and performing healing. 00:35:51.815 --> 00:36:02.195 The last one, just ask people to be silent when walking and just listen to the birds and listen to the trees moving, and listen to the wind and listen to the elements and try and kind of just connect with nature in that way. 00:36:02.505 --> 00:36:06.735 Rather than preaching anything about, what we should do or what we shouldn't do is just reconnect. 00:36:06.985 --> 00:36:13.976 I think because as I'd mentioned before, this kind of disconnect that we're all feeling, at the end of the day, it really does. 00:36:14.065 --> 00:36:17.186 It's tension in your head, it's a switch that you need. 00:36:17.396 --> 00:36:20.726 One can switch on and tune in a little bit. 00:36:21.155 --> 00:36:31.905 There's a lot of discussions now in neuroscience looking at the connection between, psychedelics and how people are connecting with nature through psychedelics and, looking at ancient practices. 00:36:32.556 --> 00:36:34.115 And rather it being a shamanistic thing. 00:36:34.115 --> 00:36:37.505 It's like neuroscientists looking at it and going like, what, what is this? 00:36:37.505 --> 00:36:39.036 Where does the veil come down? 00:36:39.186 --> 00:36:39.425 You know? 00:36:39.476 --> 00:36:44.635 And in Irish culture and in Gaelic culture, we talk a lot about the veil between the, the two worlds. 00:36:45.146 --> 00:36:52.056 As a way of walking or being and taking sculptures outta the studio, outta the gallery into, into the outdoor world. 00:36:52.505 --> 00:37:03.126 Is part of that kind of breaking this veil and thinking about what is our relationship to how do we perceive land and water and how is that connection rebuilt? 00:37:04.266 --> 00:37:04.626 You know? 00:37:04.896 --> 00:37:05.195 Yeah. 00:37:05.806 --> 00:37:19.431 I suppose one of the things as well that I think is so important to anchor in terms of an understanding of what you do is your keen sensitivity to materials. 00:37:19.431 --> 00:37:26.251 Things that I've seen that you've made in your very early career, your ability with materials is, very precise. 00:37:26.626 --> 00:37:37.945 Beautifully made, we've just come from the factory in Manor Hamilton, the sculpture factory, and you were showing me, some work that you're doing with found materials. 00:37:38.246 --> 00:37:47.085 Particularly around the Hawthorne and some of, the woods that you're working with and what, what you're doing, because it seems to me simpler, but very rich. 00:37:47.445 --> 00:37:47.956 Yeah. 00:37:48.076 --> 00:38:12.025 Well, so as a result of working with Jerry over the last few years, one of the, one of the practices that he still practices on, on the, on the farm, every spring when his calves are carving, when his cows are carving, he, he takes the placenta, the after birth and walks down to the haggard and throws it on the haw one tree. 00:38:13.115 --> 00:38:23.795 And he said, well, there's very few farmers left doing this, but in our area, in our little townland, there's still a few and we all do it and we don't want to let it go because we're, we're not afraid. 00:38:23.795 --> 00:38:30.746 We don't, I suppose there's this half belief in Ireland, and I've heard Icelandic geneticist talking about it as well. 00:38:31.275 --> 00:38:39.365 You know, like in Iceland 78% of the female MicroCon, DNA is Irish or West Coast Scotland. 00:38:39.365 --> 00:38:47.166 It's kind of these, these, these islands women were grabbed, kidnapped, and taken by force to Iceland. 00:38:47.215 --> 00:38:48.565 So he thinks, so he. 00:38:49.240 --> 00:38:52.570 Even though I'm a scientist, I have half belief in the ferries. 00:38:54.760 --> 00:38:58.090 In Iceland, they believe the ferries live in rocks because they don't have many trees. 00:38:58.721 --> 00:39:05.110 But here

in Ireland we believe that there are spirits or portals to the underworld, existing trees. 00:39:05.501 --> 00:39:06.641 And one of them is the Hawthorne. 00:39:07.391 --> 00:39:13.561 And the Hawthorne is well known to have very, very special properties, especially for the vascular system. 00:39:14.130 --> 00:39:24.670 So the berries, tinctures of the berries, the blossoms, blossoms tree, even the leaves, have a very slow but very good effect on, on the heart and the vascular system of the, of the human being. 00:39:25.510 --> 00:39:31.891 And so the Hawthorne has this very huge kind of legacy, in the Irish imagination. 00:39:32.490 --> 00:39:41.751 And so throwing of the placenta onto the hor tree probably dates back to, well, obviously it's a pre-Christian, but it goes way back. 00:39:41.751 --> 00:39:43.460 It probably goes back to the ancestors who were. 00:39:43.835 --> 00:39:51.905 The first cattle herds thousands of years ago, and I suppose they were appeasing or hoping or wishing for good luck or whatever. 00:39:51.905 --> 00:39:53.856 So it's a continuous practice now. 00:39:53.856 --> 00:39:59.956 I found references to it in in places like Suffolk and Norfolk in England and Scotland. 00:39:59.956 --> 00:40:00.945 It's mentioned as well. 00:40:01.186 --> 00:40:10.266 So it's a practice very early peoples in their early farming carried out And it wasn't always the Hawthorne tree, but in, in Arlington, Scotland it was always the Hawthorne tree. 00:40:10.536 --> 00:40:12.215 So anyway, I've been fascinated by this. 00:40:12.815 --> 00:40:16.536 And then I was very lucky to come across a Hawthorne tree very near to where I live. 00:40:16.596 --> 00:40:20.016 That split a number of years ago, dunno how it split. 00:40:20.646 --> 00:40:26.106 It might been hit by lightning or like half the tree just fell off and fell into the field. 00:40:26.585 --> 00:40:27.905 And I observed it for years. 00:40:27.905 --> 00:40:32.675 So I finally tracked down the farmer and asked could I have the half hot on that fell down in the. 00:40:33.456 --> 00:40:35.090 And he said, yeah, but you must leave it. 00:40:35.675 --> 00:40:41.346 You must leave an offering for the fairies because, you know, I don't want to bring bad luck to my field or to yourself. 00:40:42.005 --> 00:40:52.126 So I did leave, an offering and, got the tree back to the studio and I've been working on it for a couple of years, just stripping it back and letting it move and letting it change in its own time. 00:40:52.456 --> 00:41:09.766 But I think it's now, ready for, exhibition, you know, so I've got it to a stage where some of the sculptures will be a dialogue around this half belief in that there's a spirit in nature or that there's a portal between what we see and what we don't see. 00:41:10.275 --> 00:41:22.485 Just like the neuroscientists are saying it exists in our perception of the world, but because we've got so many layers of conditioning that we only see or understand like one

tiny fraction That's amazing. 00:41:22.936 --> 00:41:27.706 And there's other woods then you're working with as well, which was like, bog pine and bog oak. 00:41:28.215 --> 00:41:32.985 Well, bog pine and bog oak again are all gifts that have been given to me by different people over the years. 00:41:33.065 --> 00:41:41.585 I'm fascinated in the fact that because of our wet landscape we have ancient trees that have been trapped in, a slurry of water and land. 00:41:42.155 --> 00:41:44.945 They've got particular colors that have seeped into them. 00:41:45.045 --> 00:41:51.130 Outta the bog oak, there's a lot of tannin, so it's kind of merged and make it quite dark or brown in sections. 00:41:51.760 --> 00:41:54.431 Then the, bog pine again has become very red. 00:41:54.460 --> 00:42:12.371 So I'm interested in the colors and the chemical constitutes of that, and the idea that you're revealing the past, in the sense the Celtic calendar, you know, our, our understandings with the seasons are very tied up with, folklore, the very tied up with the ideas of spirits that come, and performed with certain duties. 00:42:12.460 --> 00:42:28.311 Like the, very light itself comes through Bridget and the renewal of the turn of the year, and then all the kind of customs that were associated with the turn of the year were very much rooted in landscape and very much rooted in what was happening to the landscape at that particular time. 00:42:28.731 --> 00:42:49.425 So, I'm just grappling with those ideas, with the materials themselves and how to reveal some of that, sense of passage of time through the chemicals and the colors and the materials and when you scrape back layers of time, you know what's revealed in them and the veins of the wood, and there's all sorts of things become obvious as a different way of looking at a material. 00:42:49.755 --> 00:42:54.525 Oh, we were saying as it was peculiarly human in, in parts like elbows and knees. 00:42:54.675 --> 00:42:54.795 Yeah. 00:42:54.795 --> 00:42:57.826 Seem to be revealing themselves. 00:42:57.826 --> 00:43:05.315 But also, you're going to introduce, other materials such as bronze and you've, you've worked with brass quite a bit. 00:43:05.416 --> 00:43:06.255 Bronze. 00:43:06.945 --> 00:43:07.155 Yeah. 00:43:07.155 --> 00:43:20.905 So the, the bronze is kind of, I'm interested in it because it's an ancient technique and it's, you know, there's a whole age of bronze and the alchemy of mixing different material and different metals together and the heat that's used within it. 00:43:20.905 --> 00:43:25.195 So, I suppose you could say a lot of this work is really to look at this. 00:43:25.871 --> 00:43:28.851 The combination of elements and how they create different things. 00:43:28.851 --> 00:43:32.210 So yeah, that's why I'm interested in those materials. 00:43:32.451 --> 00:43:34.161 I'm also interested in the process of casting. 00:43:34.161 --> 00:43:35.360 It's really quite fascinating. 00:43:35.751 --> 00:43:40.251 It's something I've dabbled in a little bit over the years, but I've never really gone deep dive into it. 00:43:40.621 --> 00:43:54.951 But I'm beginning to see, the fascinating properties and sort of things that you can do in combination with other materials and such an ancient process and such an old human ingenious way of, putting things together and getting something else. 00:43:54.956 --> 00:43:55.045 Mm-hmm. 00:43:55.126 --> 00:43:55.846 You know, come out of it. 00:43:55.945 --> 00:43:59.681 So yeah, I'm really interested in that and, see what happens. 00:43:59.681 --> 00:44:03.420 You know, I'm in the early days of this work, so I've learned to trust my intuition. 00:44:03.960 --> 00:44:08.701 So I'm working quite intuitively now, not sort of coming up with an idea and making a drawing and then. 00:44:09.615 --> 00:44:13.456 And then making it, I'm just going with the process and seeing what happens. 00:44:13.456 --> 00:44:15.106 You know, it could be a complete disaster, who knows? 00:44:15.106 --> 00:44:17.956 But get there eventually, you know. 00:44:17.956 --> 00:44:19.425 But I do trust myself now. 00:44:19.425 --> 00:44:24.876 I feel I've been at this game long enough that, there's certain things I can trust. 00:44:25.326 --> 00:44:33.766 And I wonder as well, when you've been at something for such a long time, You have a long practice terms of a very active practice over extended period of time. 00:44:33.815 --> 00:44:51.275 And you've taught, you've worked extensively in studios, so I suppose there's a longevity to what you've done, I wonder do you see so much of what you have achieved or directions that actually are beginning to knit together, that there's a cohesiveness to what you've been doing. 00:44:51.315 --> 00:45:01.416 Yeah, I do see, see things coming together, like early things I didn't have the skills to make and different, you know, paths I could have gone, but I didn't have the wherewithal to put it together really. 00:45:01.865 --> 00:45:02.675 In the early day. 00:45:02.675 --> 00:45:05.565 I mean, I was going to college, in the early eighties. 00:45:06.016 --> 00:45:26.795 It was a very big social movements then, I was brought up in a kind of socialist background, so I always wanted to be involved in artist led, artist initiated programs I was lucky enough to be part of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and now Speech Trans Sculpture Center, an approach to making art, not making the art itself. 00:45:26.945 --> 00:45:38.585 But these are the ideas that are driving, you know, looking back at materiality, looking back at how materials are used, in social and cultural kind of landscapes, and how that might infect the art making that I'm making now. 00:45:38.585 --> 00:45:44.005 And so now I've got the confidence to put that in place and, just run with it, you know? 00:45:44.206 --> 00:45:51.675 I used to want to make things that kind of, looked at cultural heritage, but I didn't really have the wherewithal

to get there. 00:45:51.706 --> 00:46:06.286 You know, I just go and look longly in museums at artifacts, but I didn't know how to kind of approach But now, yeah, I suppose I'm able to revisit some of those ideas that were kinda half baked 40 years ago and kind of like bring them along now. 00:46:06.525 --> 00:46:09.706 But there's, there's even more urgency now, I think, for me anyway. 00:46:09.885 --> 00:46:10.126 Mm-hmm. 00:46:10.315 --> 00:46:11.695 In, in pursuing them again. 00:46:12.056 --> 00:46:22.795 Because they do have cultural resonances, I think now, and we're in a particular time where there's a kind of an urgency to resolve some things in society. 00:46:22.896 --> 00:46:27.885 And this is my attempt to kind of bring that around together for myself. 00:46:28.456 --> 00:46:40.945 But I think, I think as I said earlier, there are a lot of artists now beginning to make that realization and are working really hard to work with these questions and, how that might have a relevance. 00:46:40.996 --> 00:46:52.545 You know, so our more and more of our museums and our galleries and our are kind of, spaces of kind of exception are are being, becoming sites of discussion for this. 00:46:52.545 --> 00:46:52.606 Yeah. 00:46:52.726 --> 00:46:59.896 You know, we're trying to get more and more general population to engage more with these, with these kind of. 00:47:01.721 --> 00:47:04.215 You know, we don't want the gallery to be it. 00:47:04.331 --> 00:47:21.751 It has been quite elite, you know, and it's been very particular, and sometimes the language used can be very exclusive and not very open to, you know, bringing, you know, constantly meeting people and kind of just having chats with them about, you know, about some of the things we're talking about. 00:47:21.751 --> 00:47:24.030 And then they go, oh yeah, but yeah, but I know nothing about art. 00:47:24.036 --> 00:47:28.340 It's like, if art is almost a kind of barrier to, to them, you know? 00:47:28.360 --> 00:47:28.780 Mm-hmm. 00:47:29.496 --> 00:47:34.585 Being able to, they won't even walk into a gallery., I'm just going to try and do it my own way. 00:47:34.646 --> 00:47:37.726 And I'm hoping that, with this exhibition coming up that. 00:47:38.376 --> 00:47:42.365 You know, certainly I'm eating more and more in the farming community. 00:47:42.416 --> 00:48:01.646 They might feel confident even if they just come along'cause Jerry's involved, but through working with the kids and the schools some of these ideas might kind of resonate and they might feel more comfortable to come into the gallery like if you take something away from its bedrock and you present it independently of its roots, it's everything. 00:48:01.795 --> 00:48:01.976 Mm-hmm. 00:48:02.085 --> 00:48:03.226 It loses meaning. 00:48:03.226 --> 00:48:03.286 Yeah. 00:48:03.376 --> 00:48:10.735 So it's, it's the tentacles, it's the reach, it's the embeddedness throughout the community that kind of makes things. 00:48:11.045 -->

00:48:14.115 Real, and attracts people. 00:48:14.445 --> 00:48:14.626 Mm-hmm. 00:48:14.686 --> 00:48:21.286 And so, like we're sitting here, in your studio, we have six beautiful Creoles that you've made hanging on the wall. 00:48:21.335 --> 00:48:26.885 And we're surrounded by yarns and lots of different material, source material, wood branches. 00:48:26.985 --> 00:48:32.905 You have the maker's hand, you have the aesthetic sense of the exhibitions that you make. 00:48:32.905 --> 00:48:36.306 I suppose they're almost entering into a story. 00:48:36.856 --> 00:48:38.385 And you tell that very beautifully. 00:48:38.956 --> 00:48:41.476 Can you talk a little bit about exhibition making? 00:48:42.215 --> 00:48:52.576 We were talking earlier about the, water Conversations exhibition, you know, which brought together these projects that have been different parts of the world and there were so many different materials being used in that as well. 00:48:52.815 --> 00:49:01.956 But again, it was more the portable, you know, this exhibition is really very much bringing the landscape into the gallery as much as possible. 00:49:02.005 --> 00:49:07.255 For example, the threads that I'm using, not all of them, but many of them I've dyed myself. 00:49:07.255 --> 00:49:18.175 So I'm using the plants that are featured, the 12 plants that are featured as health benefits, of our common landscape that are sometimes eradicated with Roundup as weeds. 00:49:18.686 --> 00:49:29.175 I'm using them as dyes so I think it's kind of the translation of the material, of the landscape into something, a piece of work. 00:49:30.376 --> 00:49:37.275 And that process is kind of, as I said, it's becoming much more intuitive. 00:49:37.545 --> 00:49:42.106 I'm just going with what feels right with my body, if that makes any sense. 00:49:42.106 --> 00:49:42.166 Yeah. 00:49:42.195 --> 00:49:47.746 You know, the aesthetics of the exhibition itself, is kind of intuitive as well. 00:49:47.985 --> 00:49:54.286 I think the wooden pieces are going to have a discussion with themselves about who's more land and who's more water, you know? 00:49:54.291 --> 00:50:00.800 So, that tree is kind of entwined in itself, but it's got, this definitely has an energy and it's something to do. 00:50:00.920 --> 00:50:05.190 And I'm not sure, whether it's the folklore attached to the tree as well. 00:50:05.221 --> 00:50:19.681 I mean, Jerry and I did a heritage project called the Rum Hawthorne tree in 2023, where we brought together musicians and artists and horticulturalists to look at the traditions surrounding the Hawthorne tree. 00:50:21.331 --> 00:50:28.501 In a way that was a process for me, even though it was a community project and looking at heritage, but it was a process for me to work out ideas, you know? 00:50:28.505 --> 00:50:40.356 It was a summer long project and we had many events and public came along and discussed it, and we made a film with Boric Cunningham, beautiful film about the whole thorn tree and the lone tree, and its importance in Irish cultural life. 00:50:41.255 --> 00:50:54.786 But all the time I was thinking, you know how I have this tree and it's a lone tree, what does it mean and how will it, you know, how will I approach it, so, that was just a deep research for me at the same time. 00:50:54.786 --> 00:50:56.590 Towards exhibition making. 00:50:56.590 --> 00:51:00.010 So I'm going to develop more hay rope work with the trees. 00:51:00.521 --> 00:51:11.471 Our fiber heritage got lost and forgotten There's still the basket making still goes on, but this fiber work, which would've been ubiquitous, in fact, they used to line it with them, beeswax to collect water in. 00:51:12.130 --> 00:51:14.291 So you'd make a basket, which water will flow through. 00:51:14.291 --> 00:51:17.311 But if you line it with beeswax, it's watertight. 00:51:17.360 --> 00:51:20.240 This is how early peoples, would've moved up in this landscape. 00:51:20.240 --> 00:51:42.380 So I'm interested in that kind of long-term time relationship because if time is cyclical, which we know it is, and related to the seasons, then it has to be that, we have this continuum through the use of the materials back through time and we just don't have the archeological evidence for it. 00:51:42.431 --> 00:51:47.800 I have rope, rope made from, Jerry's cow's tails. 00:51:48.490 --> 00:51:49.391 Oh, that's amazing. 00:51:49.690 --> 00:51:53.376 So this is rope that I made, from Jerry's cows. 00:51:53.376 --> 00:51:54.471 So he cut off the tails. 00:51:54.471 --> 00:52:01.320 So in the winter when they go into the sheds, they cut off the tails so they don't flap poo around and so I made it into a rope. 00:52:01.320 --> 00:52:06.001 Now all ropes used to be made that way, you know, if they weren't made of hay or whatever. 00:52:06.521 --> 00:52:08.831 I'm copying ropes that I collected. 00:52:09.400 --> 00:52:11.860 Made from horses tails in the Goby desert. 00:52:12.431 --> 00:52:18.041 And then in the 1970s, which is for me in living memory, it changed almost overnight. 00:52:19.150 --> 00:52:22.541 And these things were considered backwards and related to poverty. 00:52:23.110 --> 00:52:28.300 And that happened in my own cultural community in the islands of Scotland as well. 00:52:28.360 --> 00:52:32.351 You know, even the language was thrown out, the baby out with the bath water. 00:52:32.561 --> 00:52:33.581 The language was thrown away. 00:52:34.090 --> 00:52:36.371 My father was beaten in school for speaking Gaelic. 00:52:36.371 --> 00:52:39.851 You were hit and English was the way forward. 00:52:39.920 --> 00:52:49.161 We understand nature in deeper ways than we're allowed to by the gloss of modernity and kind of, and I think it is there still. 00:52:49.460 --> 00:52:49.670 Yeah. 00:52:49.831 --> 00:52:57.731 But, you know, trying to unearth it might bring us back to a way of understanding how, as I said, we might move forward in other ways. 00:52:58.630 -->

00:53:07.460 Well, thank you so much, Anna, for, talking to me and giving me all this time and insight into, into how you approach things. 00:53:07.510 --> 00:53:12.880 Who do you look at artistically or are there writers or music? 00:53:13.001 --> 00:53:14.291 Are there other elements? 00:53:14.291 --> 00:53:23.231 Are there art forms that feed in to open up things for you or feed into your work or even. 00:53:23.936 --> 00:53:24.655 Your wellbeing. 00:53:24.876 --> 00:53:42.936 Well, I, you know, been very influenced by, the great movements of, the 20th century really, constructivism, land art, like all those have sort of fed into my kind of, cultural consciousness, and the writings of all those, that would play into that kind of understanding of, modernity and contemporary modernity. 00:53:42.936 --> 00:54:01.985 But then of course, Merla, Ponti would be, somebody who's very influential in how I'm viewing the work at the moment, in terms of, the experience and perception of our human body in the environment that we find ourselves in, and how that kind of translates back to, our perception of ourselves. 00:54:02.826 --> 00:54:26.195 Current events are making me look at, political philosophy like Hannah ENT and nam Chomsky and, Saeed, these are, people I've read before, but I'm rereading at the moment because, there's an urgency to to grapple with those ideas, currently, a lot of what's going on is actually affecting me in the studio as well as in other life, you know? 00:54:26.585 --> 00:54:40.485 So, that's coloring my, approach at the moment, but in my greater, trajectory as an artist, I've been really interested in the experiential, and its relationship to politics and social movements does that make sense? 00:54:40.485 --> 00:54:40.905 It does. 00:54:40.905 --> 00:54:48.550 I suppose the Hannah around and Merla Ponte, when you consider where they came from and what they had to solve. 00:54:48.820 --> 00:54:53.831 We somehow seen back at that point, just probably very shocking to us. 00:54:54.400 --> 00:54:55.391 Yeah, exactly. 00:54:55.481 --> 00:55:02.721 You know, I had a very strong diet one point in my life of, science fiction, which I thought, oh, that's all over now. 00:55:02.811 --> 00:55:04.101 We don't have to worry about that anymore. 00:55:05.081 --> 00:55:07.001 Yet we've solved all those things. 00:55:07.641 --> 00:55:08.541 We certainly don't have to. 00:55:08.851 --> 00:55:13.880 So anyway, it's all a bit of shock to find that I have to rer or, or it hasn't sunk in. 00:55:14.525 --> 00:55:15.096 For other people. 00:55:15.425 --> 00:55:16.626 The warnings from history. 00:55:17.195 --> 00:55:24.715 But art at the moment, I suppose, there's been a growing interest. 00:55:25.925 --> 00:55:32.996 I was very unfashionable for a long time making things and having a kind of interesting craft. 00:55:33.865 --> 00:55:44.190 But I think, it's come full circle now and there is much more of an interest in the relationship between making and art, visual art and how it's, what material means. 00:55:44.731 --> 00:55:49.050 I never, for me, it didn't really sit with me very well. 00:55:49.170 --> 00:55:56.541 Very highly conceptual work that I was interested in the ideas that it was grappling with, but it didn't satisfy me in terms of. 00:55:57.275 --> 00:56:03.635 Because my connection to materials has always been so strong that the absence of materials was an absence. 00:56:03.876 --> 00:56:04.115 Yeah. 00:56:04.775 --> 00:56:06.831 Well, even to touch something like this, horse hair. 00:56:07.090 --> 00:56:08.146 Cow hair, rope. 00:56:08.476 --> 00:56:09.856 There's something complete in it. 00:56:10.286 --> 00:56:17.306 You can feel for want of better word, the early technology of it. 00:56:17.485 --> 00:56:18.505 Yeah, exactly. 00:56:18.896 --> 00:56:19.076 Yeah. 00:56:19.076 --> 00:56:19.615 So, okay. 00:56:19.615 --> 00:56:20.065 Rational. 00:56:20.186 --> 00:56:21.266 There's something rational. 00:56:21.295 --> 00:56:37.496 The technologies of landscape, is a book that I, you know, this guy called n who has been very influential in understanding the early, development of technologies and how they apply to, the growth of cities and the distancing of us from understanding networks. 00:56:37.496 --> 00:56:45.036 I mean, we used to understand networks'cause they were quite small and sort of, you could grapple with them, but when they became so huge. 00:56:46.490 --> 00:56:55.340 Like giant dams or electricity networks that span, you know, go under the sea and across, you know, like it becomes sort of beyond the fathomable, you know? 00:56:55.340 --> 00:57:15.820 And, um, so it's, it's, yeah, it's that relationship that I'm sort of interested in how we reclaim, something back to what we can experience and understand in a way that, because there are other unfathomable, extraordinary places that you can go as well. 00:57:15.971 --> 00:57:17.110 That's brilliant, Anna. 00:57:17.110 --> 00:57:18.070 Thank you so much.