Fair Isle: A magical island, a change in perspective

Back home after my research trip to Fair Isle, with hundreds of photographs, sketchbook pages, little collections from the shore and plenty to think about.

I'm home.

Back from Fair Isle, and I'm still not quite sure how to put the experience into words. It was a magical island. Everything I hoped it would be, and then quite a bit more.

Getting there was another story entirely. The ferry crossing was, without question, the worst boat journey I've ever had. I've travelled on some pretty choppy seas, but this was something else entirely, adn my first experience of being seasick. Not exactly the glamorous arrival I'd imagined!

Thankfully, Fair Isle more than made up for it.

I'd been looking forward to this trip for a long time. It was an opportunity to spend time in a place connected to my family history, to explore a landscape I'd never experienced before, and to give myself some uninterrupted time to look, listen, sketch and think about my work.

I knew it would be inspiring. What I hadn't anticipated was quite how much it would change my perspective.

A different kind of coastline

Most of my painting practice has grown out of my connection to Orkney, particularly the familiar bays, shorelines and horizons that I carry with me. Even when I'm painting from memory, or making work inspired by somewhere else, those places have a way of finding their way into the paintings.

I think I arrived on Fair Isle with an idea of what a coastal landscape might offer me. I was expecting the sea, the light, the weather and the familiar feeling of being somewhere surrounded by water.

Fair Isle gave me all of that, but it also gave me something quite different.

The coast here feels powerful. The cliffs, the rocks, the exposed headlands and the sea all seem to exist in a constant conversation with the weather. The water can be dark, cold and rough, and the landscape feels shaped by the elements rather than softened by them.

It isn't the calm, sweeping bays and quieter horizons that have so often drawn me in elsewhere. There is a rawness to Fair Isle that I found both challenging and exciting.

It made me think differently about what coastal can mean in my work.

I came home knowing that I want to paint this place, but also knowing that I need to give myself time before I do.

I don't want to rush straight into making paintings simply because I feel I should have something to show for the experience. I want to let the place settle in my memory, to look back through the material I've gathered and see what stays with me.

Sometimes the most important part of a research trip happens after you return home.

Paying attention

One of the things I wanted to do on Fair Isle was to pay attention to more than just the view.

As an artist, it's easy to reach for the camera when something catches your eye. I took hundreds of photographs during the trip, and I'm looking forward to spending time going through them. But I also wanted to slow down, make sketches, notice small details and record the things that might otherwise be forgotten.

Each day, I collected little things from the shore and my walks around the island: stones, shells, seeds, discarded twine, wool and feathers.

I carefully noted and labelled each one with the date and place. They're modest little objects, but each has a connection to a particular walk, a particular day or a moment when something caught my attention.

I like the idea that these things can act as markets of the journey. They're not souvenirs in the conventional sense, but small pieces of a place that I can return to as I being making new work.

I also kept a sketchbooks with me, drawing whenever I could find a spot to sit and spend some time looking.

Some sketches were about the landscape itself. Others were simply a way of recording what was in front of me, or of giving myself a reason to stop and look a little longer.

Alongside the photographs, sketches and collected objects, I kept notes each day on what I expected, what I felt, what I learnt and what surprised me.

Looking back, I think that last question might be one of the most useful: what surprised me?

It's easy to travel somewhere with preconceived ideas about what you'll find. The real value often lies in the things you hadn't anticipated.

Five colours a day

I set myself a small daily exercise of noticing five colours.

It sounds simple, but it became another way of looking more carefully at my surroundings. Rather than thinking about the island in terms of a single overall palette, I began to notice the individual colours that kept appearing throughout the day.

Green. So many shades of green. From the grasses and vegetation to the softer, muted greens of the landscape, there was far more variation that I could have captured with the materials I had with me.

Brown. Earthy browns, weathered surfaces and the purply-brown of the heather. Colours that might easily be overlooked until you start deliberately searching for them.

Red. Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be another flash of red. Old doors, plants and little details around the island. It was a colour that kept interrupting the more subdued tones of the landscape.

Yellow. Gorgeous golden, autumnal yellow. A warmth that appeared in the vegetation and seasonal details, particularly striking against the darker colours around it.

Blue-grey. The colour of the dark, cold, rough sea. Not the bright blue of a sunny summer's day, but a much deeper, heavier colour. A blue-grey that seemed to hold the cold, movement and power of the water.

These colours are already beginning to feel like a palette I want to explore. I don't yet know how they'll translate into paintings, or whether they'll appear together in quite the way I've recorded them. That's part of the process.

For now, I'm happy to have noticed them.

Five words a day

I also recorded five words each day.

Some were words I already knew from Orkney and Shetland, while others were new to me. Words have a way of holding a place differently from photographs. They can carry a sound, a memory, a local expression or a particular way of understanding the world.

Coming from Orkney, I have a longstanding connection to the language and stories of the Northern Isles. Spending time in Fair Isle brought that connection into focus again.

I was reminded that landscape isn't only about what we see. It's also about the words we use to describe it, the names we give to places, and the language passed between generations.

I want to keep those words close as I begin working with the material from the trip. They may find their way into titles, notes or the thinking behind a painting. Even if they never appear in the finished work, they've already become part of how I remember the island.

Selkies on the sandy beach

And then there were the seals.

Or, as often called in Orkney and Shetland, the selkies.

The word carries two meanings in the Northern Isles: it is a local word for a seal, and it is also associated with the traditional stories of selkie folk who shed their seal skins and take human form before returning to the sea.

I've know the word since growing up in Orkney, but spending time with the seals on Fair Isle made it feel particularly present.

There is only one sandy beach on Fair Isle, and I spent hours there sketching. The seals would appear in the water, watching me as I sat with my sketchbook.

We spent hours together on that beach. Me, sitting and drawing; them, bobbing about in the water, disappearing beneath the surface and popping up again.

I suspect they were much more interested in whatever was happening in the sea than in what I was doing with my pencil, but I liked to think we were keeping each other company.

There was something wonderfully companionable about those hours. No particular need to be anywhere else, no pressure to produce a finished piece of work. Just sitting, watching, sketching and being there.

Whether a seal or selkie, I was very happy to have them around.

Those quiet hours on the beach are among the experiences I keep returning to when I think about the trip. They remind me that research doesn't always mean actively searching for something. Sometimes it's about staying in one place long enough for the place to reveal a little more of itself.

Recording the rhythms of the island

My daily notes went beyond colours and words.

I recorded the places I visited, the weather, sunrise and sunset times, and the times of high and low tide. I also paid attention to the sounds that stood out each day.

All of these details helped me build a record of the island as I experienced it.

The tide changes the coastline. The weather changes the colours. The light changes the way a familiar view appears from one moment to the next. And sounds can stay with you long after the view itself has faded from immediate memory.

I was interested in how these different markers might eventually feed into my paintings.

Perhaps the timing of a tide will influence a horizon. Perhaps a particular sound or remembered atmosphere will affect the marks I make. Perhaps the colours I recorded will be more useful than any photograph when I'm trying to find my way back into the feeling of a place.

I don't need to know the answers yet.

Part of the pleasure of this stage is allowing the information to accumulate without deciding too quickly what it should become.

Family, place and belonging

Fair Isle was also an opportunity to explore my own family connections to the island.

My three-times-great-grandfather was born on Fair Isle at Shirva, leaving the island for Westray, Orkney in 1832.

Knowing that connection made the journey feel different from a visit to somewhere entirely unfamiliar. I was travelling to a place that had been part of my family's story long before I was born, and I was curious about what it might mean to experience it for myself.

I didn't want to arrive expecting to feel an instant or overwhelming connection simply because of that ancestry. Instead, I wanted to give myself time to explore, to notice what resonated with me and to let the experience be what it was.

The trip brought together several things that are important to my practice: landscape, memory, place, movement and belonging.

It also reminded me that a connection to somewhere doesn't have to be straigtforward. Places can be familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. We can carry one landscape with us while discovering another. We can feel drawn to somewhere without being able to explain exactly why.

I left Fair Isle with more questions than answers, which feels like a good place to be as an artist.

Coming home with a head full of ideas

I'm now home, surrounded by the evidence of the trip.

Hundreds of photographs to look through. Sketchbook pages to revisit. Little labelled collections from the shore. Lists of colours and words. Notes about the weather, the sounds, the tides and the things that surprised me.

It's a lot to take in, and I don't want to rush through it.

I'm excited to get back into the studio and start experimenting. I can already see possibilities in the darker blue-greys of the sea, the flashes of red, the many greens and the golden autumnal yellows. I'm curious about how the roughness and power of the coastline might translate into marks and layers, and how the quieter moments (especially those sketching with the seals) might find their way into the work too.

But first, I need to process it all.

Thank you

A huge thank you to VACMA Forth Valley, Falkirk Council and Creative Scotland for making this research trip possible through the Visual Artists and Craft Makers Award (VACMA).

The funding gave me something incredibly valuable: the time and space to step away from the everyday, travel north, spend time in a place connected to my family history, and properly immerse myself in looking, listening, sketching, collecting and thinking.