DOMESTIC SHAMANISM

The term insular, literally 'dwelling or situated on an island', has come to mean detached, isolated, narrow-minded, illiberal or provincial.

It's certainly true islands can create the conditions for such introspection because of the physical limits, and perhaps because social change takes longer to reach there.  An island can become a crucible for belief systems, where a culture can concentrate and grow as on a Petri dish.  But also ideas.  Islands have much in common.  Most common is a state of mind.

The Outer Hebrides are saturated in tradition, custom and folklore, drawing on Irish (Gaelic culture), Scandinavian (Viking) and all parts between.  Some practices have disappeared, some have endured.  Superstitions more typical of peasant and mediaeval societies lived on into the 20^th Century, within living memory.  

The artists represented in the exhibition used the concept of shamanism stripped of its more exotic associations with primitive spirituality and tribalism to bring it into a more prosaic context; the home and work and now. 

It’s a juxtaposition; as of the hearth and the earth, the earth and the ether, the ceiling and the sky.  The use of artifacts, symbols and everyday objects to insinuate and suggest wider, unseen forces and influences.  Accretions of wallpaper and documents of abandoned spaces, birch bark scrolled and carried by the sea, a kelp forest projected on a gable-end, net-mending, storytelling and faxed images through the ether.  It’s about transference between one realm and another.    

We are grateful to Mervi Appel of Kakelhallen and to Satu Kiljunen and the other artists Vesa-Pekka Rannikko, Pive Toivonen and Santeri Tuori who were our guests in Lewis in 2007 for their assistance and hospitality in this exchange.

Roddy Murray

Director