Changing Places 1……….METAL HOUSE         

4th November 2006 - 13th January 2007

Taigh Cherasabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, Loch Maddy, North Uist.                                                              

This shell of a single-storey, roofless house with its bare stone walls, windowless windows, doorless doorway and gable ends pointing into the sky on the remote Hebridean island of North Uist is now entirely clad in reflective aluminium.

 It is the beauty of the changing light on these islands which caught my imagination.  I wanted to find a way to focus on that while also underlining issues about belonging and displacement.  All over North Uist these abandoned shells of houses – abandoned as inhabitants move away from island life, or into more comfortable modern dwellings, talk about the changing identity of the island. How do we know who we are if we don’t get some reflection back of ourselves? This is the question implicit in this art installation. The physical, changing reflections of the light over the landscape in the aluminium sheet hint at how our reflections of ourselves as a species are changing in the fast-moving, cultural and political landscapes we inhabit. And yet, against the backdrop of North Uist, however quickly the light changes, things also stay the same. Here is a quietness and timelessness – a different sort of reflectiveness is evoked.