Lady Bay Urban Island

Discovering Gayle Chong Kwan in Stornoway

Between 29th May - 20th June we travel from Barra to South Uist via Eriskay to North Uist to Berneray to Harris to Lewis return sailing to Ullapool... I would've liked to have returned to Brenais on Lewis where I found the old schoolhouse.

Objects and places evoking island histories.

Reaching Stornoway leads to my first encounter with the photographs of artist Gayle Chong Wang... and some connections on islands...

"A fictional island, on which exist the lost and destroyed buildings and places of Scotland, Chong Kwan’s The Obsidian Isle features a series of large-format photographic works, tactile prints, and sensory aids for use on the island, and a limited edition publication". 

© Photograph Gayle Chong Kwan

Ref: Gayle Chong Kwan - The Obdisian Isle - Lantair Stornoway

A full-colour 60 page limited edition publication featuring large-format photographic works, sensory drawings, text works and a wrap around pull-out limited edition cyclorama map artwork. Edition of 500.

© Photograph  Gayle Chong Kwan, 'Theatre Royal', 'The Obsidian Isle' (series), 2011

Transitions...

"In fact, everything corroborates my view that the image of the city's roar is in the very nature of things, and that it is the true image. It is also the salutary thing to naturalize the sound in order to make it less hostile."

(Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space)

I have included this quote because throughout my investigations I discovered others like Gaston Bachelard and Virginia Woolf have made these same comparisons with islands. I have also discovered that islomania isn’t a weakness or just a desire for escape but a deep-rooted need to find the emotional strength to contest and reconstruct a response to damaging socio-political views and the way decisions are made concerning future of our environment. 

My work explores transitional states by experiencing place as an island. Here the island considered is in a suspended state before it becomes something else. What transforms the mundane of this particular urban island and makes it interesting are the differing human reactions to its uncertainty and how we make bridges between what is see/know and what we imagine. It offers a poetic image rooted in a romantic longings and imaginings - the suspension of belief increasing the desire to leave traces of happenings and memories because most of us have little control over what happens to these sites in our cities which are listed to be demolished and the sites rebuilt upon. The proposal is to suggest there is a way round this by creating and inhabiting urban islands, seeping these in metaphor and imbuing them with utopian dreams to overcome inertia, ennui and the ultimate destruction of our memory of a place.

Island of Buildings (2011/12)
Slide Projection

Getting lost

Begin by travelling to the watery edges of Lady Bay and wander these shores until reaching a far place to the east you discover a couple of lagoons surrounded by tall trees. Imagine being lost or marooned and that you forget that beyond it, traffic constantly circumnavigates the island’s perimeters.

Lady Bay Island

Travels to watery edges of Lady Bay... the urban landscape never far away, the noise of traffic and people wandering its shores always within earshot until reaching this spot... off the beaten track...

This place to the east of the island has a mournful soulfulness. The village of Adbolton functioned as a harbour and once stood on the banks of the loop - the dismembered arm of the oxbow now creates two ponds either side bordered on every side with tall, spindly ashes and birches. However I've also read that the pools were created by bombs dropped during WW2 - the subsequent scene evoking the aftermath of warfare making it a very silent place with a sense of watery burials. I even believe that the crackle of frozen leaves trodden underfoot could belong to souls waiting patiently to depart this world and the accompanying birdsong is irridiscent lyrics...

The last visit blue and red markings on the trees suggesting a darker, murkier practice of recalling the dead or lost ones.

Bheir me o, horo van o
Bheir me o, horo van ee
Bheir me o, o horo ho
Sad am I, without thee.

When I’m lonely, dear white heart,
Black the night or wild the sea,
By love’s light my foot finds
the old pathway to thee.

Chorus

Thou’rt the music of my heart;
Harp of joy, o cruit mo chruidh;
Moon of guidance by night;
Strength and light thou’rt to me.

Marjory Kennedy-Fraser Eriskay Love Lilt 

Song of the Hebrides

Lady Bay Urban Island

In and around Lady Bay... preparing urban island project for Lady Bay Arts Festival... A visual artist and writer with skills and experience in management and working in partnership with people. Highly organised with excellent communication abilities with a strong motivation to engage audiences in practices that question the significance of the therapeutic and cultural importance of art and literature in relation to meaning/memory of places.

In order to make a response to the uncertainty of our urban surroundings, I interrogate metaphorical possibilities by creating imaginary islands in real urban places. I involve audience through discussions and tours guided by maps in a repetitive action of returning and reinterpreting, asking them to consider the possibilities for recurring and overlapping realities to be found in particular places with island characteristics and geographies. 

About The Lighthouse Installation

The Lighthouse installation
The Planter
(next to St Peters Church/M&S)
8th February
6-10pm


The installation is an experiment in interaction with the ever changing and erratic face of urban life - to which lights at night add both comfort and confusion - and to provide some semblance with the functions of lighthouses at sea. 

The public are asked to consider the ambivalence of meaning the lighthouse portrays both as a protector to those who are lost and as a symbol of danger. The artists Brenda Baxter and Loz Cliffe explore whether it's possible for the Lighthouse, in an urban setting, to offer direction to a place of safety and act as a warning of danger and uncertainty.

The Lighthouse’s positioning brings attention to the historical gateway of the city and offers the public a rare chance to participate in sharing whether it offers them protection or not.

Example of a lighthouse as part
of urban development
(not by the artists)
Kings Cross, London 2013
Photo © Brenda Baxter

“so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again ... murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorsely beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow..." Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Urbanisland

Urbanisland

A visual and written account of a journey to an island of buildings situated in the centre of Nottingham. Conversations are recalled through writing whilst surveillance and forensic encounters are captured with photography. The book is a poetic experience of a journey through a decaying urban landscape. It's a story of hopes and dreams buried in bricks and mortar and what is happenings with the passage of time.

Nottingham Night Light

Nottingham Light

The Lighthouse

8th Feb 6-10pm

The Planter/ Albert Street
Outside St Peters Church NG1 7DB

City Council has this allocated this location for the Lighthouse - the car park was too inaccessible and no power. Loz Cliffe now working on the sound component. I have come up with a design using found objects.

The light will be provided by a 30W LED spotlight but whether its competes with urban lighting in the area is to be speculated. About to have to do a test run… will just have to get folks involved with concept in other ways. I want to add sound of foghorns and suspend some groundsheets from the trees to enclose the lighthouse and to cut out some lights from area and display a map of the island. We hope the groundsheets will sound like the sails of ship or the use of polythene sheeting to wrap the trees and create shrine of light.

And if it rains - well thats another story!

The Lighthouse

Nottingham Light Night

8th Feb 6-10pm

The Planter