CRITIC’S CHOICE

AFTER the popular North Uist artist and teacher Katharine Barr (1935 – 2014) passed away, an annual award was set up in her name to run for four years, a bursary given for the first three to visual artists from the Uists and Barra, and in the fourth year to a poet, for Barr was also a poet.

Three/Tr[i] is a showing of the work of those three visual artists at Taigh Chearsabhagh, completed as a result of the award - Margaret Fenton, Peter Ferguson and Margaret MacLellan.

Barr’s own work was concerned with landscape and light, not least the ever-changing light on the water beyond her own North Uist window. Fenton, Ferguson and MacLellan each contemplate the landscape and the artist’s relationship to it, in different ways.

Fenton’s work (pictured), some three years in the making, is an exploration, a documentation of the Locheport Road from its passing places. MacLellan, who is herself a lecturer at Lews Castle College and was friends with Barr, has produced work from her proposal to walk from her home, exploring the coastline “accounting the changing weather fronts”.

Her work includes drawings, paintings and etchings, traced in different seasons, the shore and her path the anchor.

Ferguson’s work is his own response to “the sense of flatness in the machair edges: from the weight of long horizons and tall skies.

Of moveable edges, such as waves and tidelines. And the indistinctness of rain and wind … there are elements of both the repetition and the differences you find in living within one place over the seasons.” It is, in all, a fitting tribute to - and legacy from - the woman for whom these awards were named.

Three/Tr[i], Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, Lochmaddy, North Uist, Western Isles, 01870 603970, www.taigh-chearsabhagh.org Until 26 Feb, Mon - Sat, 10am - 4pm