'Things That Befell Us In Those Strange Years': Environmental Art Festival Scotland, 2013
FUNDERS & PARTNERS: Creative Scotland, Dumfries & Galloway Council, The Scottish Government, Year of Natural Scotland 2013, Dumfries and Galloway Leader, European Community, Forestry Commission Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage, Galloway and Southern Ayrshire Biosphere, Chrichton Carbon Centre, Creative Carbon Scotland, Northlight Heritage
PRODUCERS: Wide Open, The Stove, Spring Fling
LOCATION: Mossdale, Dumfries & Galloway
Northlight Heritage were invited to design and deliver this contribution to the first ever Environmental Arts Festival Scotland, which took place over 4 days in August 2013. Through a series of sculptural installations we took visitors on a journey to explore the timescapes around the Stroan Viaduct, via fragments of text and local placenames set along a narrative trail. The title of our contribution arose from The Raiders, a work by 19th-century Galloway author Samuel R Crockett, who grew up less than a mile away. The viaduct represents a junction -- a convergence of watery and human energies where the boundaries between past, present and future blend and blur, while all around it are traces of past places and stories and possibilities. We hoped to awaken the viewer to the hidden meanings and history behind the places we often take for granted.
The Environmental Arts Festival Scotland explored people's relationship with landscape and environment through temporary commissions, musical events, debates and performances. It built on some of the themes developed in the region's rich array of local, national and international artwork that refers to its long history and heritage of close cultural connections with the landscape -- from Bronze Age rock art to Henry Moore's modernist sculptures at Glenkiln and Andy Goldsworthy's Striding Arches.
Environmental Art Festival Scotland
A lightfoot installation of considerable imagination, and involving for the audience. -- Jean Atkin
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