Film and Video Umbrella

PROJECTS

Balnakiel

2008

Shona Illingworth

A single-channel video and three-dimensional sound installation, Balnakiel is a complex investigation of memory, history and spirit-of-place set in the village (and former radar base) of Balnakiel in the far North West of Scotland, where the artist grew up.

The film work at the centre of the exhibition offers a vivid portrait of this remarkable location, at the furthermost edge of Britain and continually exposed to, and under siege from, a hostile and threatening environment, in which the extremes and vicissitudes of weather are echoed by the intermittent thunder of RAF and Royal Navy manoeuvres around this still-active bombing range. As well as a study of this brooding, melancholy landscape, the work will focus on the lives and recollections of contemporary residents of Balnakiel and the nearby, older clearance village of Durness, highlighting a split between the original inhabitants of several generations standing and a newer influx of arrivals from four decades ago.

Within this patchwork of overlapping impressions and stories, Balnakiel considers underlying complexities in the interaction between individual and collective memory. Partly shaped out of a series of exchanges with cognitive psychologist Martin Conway (whose ideas about memory formation are also manifested through a series of drawings that accompany the installation), the work draws attention to the strategies memory employs to attempt to either articulate or suppress strong undercurrents of experience when a sense of self and community identity is under threat. Celebrating the resilience of those isolated communities (while noting the slow and progressive depopulation that haunts this landscape), Balnakiel gives voice to these contrasting perceptions and constructions of the past, and the way in which they continue to resonate in a place whose geographical remoteness belies its position at the forefront of considerable social and cultural change.

John Hansard Gallery
17 February - 4 April 2009

University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJ

John Hansard Gallery, 17-Feb-09 to 04-Apr-09
University of Southampton University Road Southampton S017 1BJ