Strathnaver Museum & Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales
Marks Left In The Landscape
Liz Myhill – Museum Artist in Residence
The inspirations and outcomes of the residency have for me been very much shaped by my own exploration of Sutherland and the Strathnaver area, in particular while out drawing. Using information or objects in the museum as a lead I found myself particularly drawn to five specific locations; the oral history and photographs relating to life at Sletell and Poulouriscaig, pre-history objects and reconstructed cist which I related to the numerous Stone, Bronze and Iron Age sites in close proximity at Invernaver, coins from Loch Mo Naire and the text by Rev Donald Sage relating to Achness. The experience of drawing in these locations with a sense of events which had occurred there in times past was often a moving experience during which my solitude allowed the sense of peeling back the layers of time to imagine other people inhabiting that same space. The most intriguing thing I found to be the marks which had been left in the landscape by successive generations of inhabitants, forms often repeating, resources being reused and always the sense of there being the possibility of discovering something which may have lain undiscovered for many, many years. In such a sparsely populated landscape this notion of exploration, discovery and of walking over ground which no other human has trodden for many years is easily appreciated.
The object for concealment at each location would take the form of a “geocache” in which a series of small scale artworks and snippets of information relating to the place and its history plus a log book would be placed in a box and hidden at the source. The co-ordinates are then logged onto the international geocaching website and made available to the museum to enable people to search for and discover the box themselves. A trial cache was placed at Poulouriscaig in September and has so far attracted several visitors even during the winter months. I hope these geocaches will promote both enjoyment of the surrounding area as well as encourage visitors to the museum to expand upon what they may have learned.
I wanted to bring some of this sense of exploration to my work and also in a sense to contextualise some of the information I had gathered – to be able to access information at the sites it related to, get an impression of the locations with which museum exhibits were linked and aim to instill in others a similar enthusiasm and excitement about discovering for themselves the surrounding landscape and its history. In order to bring the landscape into the museum and the museum exhibits and information out into the landscape I decided to make two related objects for each locality, one to be held by the museum, the other to be concealed at the location.
Having collected various natural materials such as grasses, seaweed and grit while out walking on location I decided to incorporate these into the artwork by making collagraph prints – constructing a printing block from collage elements. Each print depicts a panoramic view taken from one of my sketchbooks and incorporates a section of ordnance survey map to increase understanding of the topography of the location as well as being rather appropriate given the quantity of time I spent consulting one while out searching for various landmarks!
