CRITIC’S CHOICE

This multidisciplinary exhibition at An Lanntair weaves – and knits, at times – around issues of memory, mixing contemporary art and craft with historic documentation, with threads both local and international. Memory is a part of language and there is much memory in the construction of Gaelic words. The Harris Oral History Project, too, is full of memory, represented here by a series of audio recordings of people from

Harris, imbued with recollections of places and people gone, and relating here to community land ownership. Working from folklore to modern reality, international artist collaborators Eyes as Big as Plates (Finnish-Norwegian duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth) take the everyday figures of Nordic folklore and expand it into “a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature”. The results, here, are a photographic project involving a variety of retired people, from fishermen to opera singers, dressed in sculptural concoctions made by the wearers from natural materials in collaboration with the artists, and subsequently photographed in natural surroudings. Hebridean artists are also represented in the exhibition, including Uist knitter and artist Gina MacDonald and Intelligent Textiles researcher Lucy Robertson who present their Sonic Flock, a knitted collection of birds, made by knitters around the UK who responded to a call for contributions, with sonic “interventions”. And then there are the physical representations of memory, the historic everyday objects, no longer in use, collected from Harris and held in the Highland Folk Museum in Kingussie – including a fiendish-looking puffin snare and a traditional ciosan (a woven basket made of the ubiquitous and highly useful marram grass).

Cuimhne/Memory Exhibition, An Lanntair, Kenneth Street, Stornoway, Lewis, 01851 708 480, lanntair.com, until 26 May, Mon-Wed 10am-9pm, Thur-Sat 10am-late. The Laxdale Gaelic Choir will perform a live tweed waulking and accompanying waulking song in the gallery.