Echoes of the past came into the present in Mackay Country over the past three months where textile artist, Deirdre Nelson, and paper artist, Joanne Kaar, have been working as artists in residence.

Mackay Country covers Eddrachillis, Durness, Tongue and Farr in the most north westerly corner of the Scottish Highlands along with the bird sanctuary Handa Island.  A national lottery grant through the Scottish Arts Council and funding from the Highland Year of Culture 2007 enabled three artists to take part in their first arts-based project.

For Deirdre the starting point for her work was the importance of the birds on Handa both as a source of food in the past and as a tourist attraction today.  After discovering that feathers from the birds were bartered for wool on the mainlands she started knitting the bird species of Handa using cheviot wool spun by a local Larbert spinner.

This then developed into the emigration of members of the community from Handa to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton and the migration of the birds.  With children in Scourie, Kinlochbervie and Achfary she created a community of birds which were photographed and printed onto postcards. 

She then made links with an art teacher in Cape Breton whose ancestors were amongst the first immigrants from Handa, and these postcards then took the same journey as the immigrants in the past in an exchange with the children in Cape Breton.

Joanne Kaar was also influenced by the concept of journeys over land, sea and through time, but her ideas were realised in a series of handmade ‘books’ and paper objects contained in boxes within a case in the shape of a boat.

She explored new techniques looking at the effect the landscape had on artwork being buried in a peat bog, or placed in saltwater and dried in the wind.  She created a grow your own hut circle and threw six identical bottles into the sea off Faraid Head on the date a ship called the Canton was wrecked off the rocks in 1849.  Each bottle held an account of the shipwreck.

There are many travelling services which visit Durness including a mobile bank, cinema and library, and Joanne has now added a travelling school.  Achiemore Side School on Cape Wrath closed in 1947 when there was only one pupil left.  It was a very small school and only the foundation stones now remain.  Joanne took banana skins from the Sango Sands restaurant in Durness and mixed them with linen to create a similar texture to the stones.  She then joined the papers together in the shape of the school, added rusty colour papers to mark the corners, and unrolled the Cape Wrath school in the playground of Durness Primary School so the current class could stand inside it.

An exhibition of the work by Deirdre and the children of Scourie Nursery, Kinlochbervie High School and the Primary schools of Scourie, Achfary, Kinlochbervie and Syndey, Cape Breton, called ‘birdies of weavers bay’, is being held at Scourie Village Hall, Scourie, by Lairg on Saturday 25 November 2006 between 10am and 5pm.

An exhibition of work by Joanne is on for two weeks from 26 November 2006 at 1 Bard Terrace, Durness, Sutherland.  Open daily. 

Both these artists engaged with the landscape and history of Mackay Country in a way that influenced the local community and their own work.  You can find out more about their experiences and ideas in their blogs which have been followed by readers across the world.  Read about Joanne at http://joannebkaar.blogspot.com and go to http://dstitched.blogspot.com/ to discover more about Deirdre. 

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