Relate North - inspiration!!

Relate North 2016 - what a whirlwind four days!

As soon as I arrived in Sumburgh on Monday and was driven to Lerwick hostel by Pat, a student on the new Fine Art degree course, there was plenty to be doing. 

The exhibition was being set up at Mareel, the main arts centre, and the nearby Gutter's Hut, a brightly painted tin building used in the past for fish processing. Artists had arrived from the Komi Republic in Siberia, from Iceland, from Canada and Lapland, and were busy in the Gutter's Hut negotiating wall and floor space for their pieces.

hanging the show in the Gutter's hut

I helped with clearing the room ready for the pieces to be hung, and discussing hanging arrangements for our Northern Exchange exhibit. We were sharing an alcove room with another exhibitor, and had to work out the best arrangement for our two monitors of film and four ipods with speakers to play the participant interviews from Iceland. Susan Timmins and her husband Davy set to work installing the wall fixings, while Roxane took me up to Shetland College for a planning meeting with the other helpers. We started to collate the delegates packs. I was responsible for organising the labels for the exhibits, using the details from the conference catalogue that had been designed and printed in Finland.

Planning meeting

The conference proper at the Museum started on Tuesday afternoon after the Arctic Sustainable Art and Design meeting. Delegates continued to arrive during the morning. 

'Dome' being erected in the  Sail Loft

One issue was finding a space large enough for us to erect the Northern Exchange replica 'radar dome', on which the thoughts and memories of participants had been recorded in Iceland in UV pen. Liz Crichton and I trialed the dome at Mareel, but there were health and safety issues by a fire exit, so we had to explore our final option - the 'Sail Loft', a stone boat house opposite the Museum. I managed to persuade a Museum assistant to help me move 3 large wooden boats to make a space for the dome, and Liz and I re-erected it there, on the flagstone floor. We had had plenty of practice in Iceland, so we were just in time to head across to the Museum for the first papers. 

The conference itself was very inspiring. Although it coincided with the election of Donald Trump, its whole focus on collaboration, social transformation through creativity, and the importance of nature and place, helped to dispel some of the the gloom over money-driven politics. The theme of Relate North 2016 - Practising Place - Heritage, Art and Design for Creative Communities, was brought into focus as more relevant than ever to today's world.  

There were many highlights. The lives and work of Scottish women film-makers Margaret Tait and Jenny Gilbertson were a feature of the first day. I was particularly interested in Tuija Hautala-Hirvioja's paper on Sami artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa and the way in which he used landscape drawing to strengthen a Sami sense of place and social inclusion.

That evening Liz and I worked until late bolting the UV-inscribed triangles onto our dome, and I worked around the exhibition placing labels next to the exhibits in both Mareel and the Gutter's Hut.

Ruth Beer and protest weaving

Wednesday was the longest day of papers, and absolutely fascinating. Janette Kerr, a landscape artist based in Somerset and Shetland, spoke about taking part in an artists' voyage to Svalbard, and about a northern sense of place. Professor Herminia Din joined by Skype from Alaska to talk about a wonderful multi-year collaborative project and book about using public spaces for communal winter artworks using snow and ice. Professor Vladimir Durnev from the Syvtyvkar spoke about indigenous ceramics, referring to ceramics as the 'first art from nothing'. Jaana Erkkila, Professor of Visual Arts from the University of Lapland, described creating cross-disciplinary 'Travelling Laboratories for Artistic Thinking', which have important implications for sustainable tourism and sense of place. Timo Jokela, Director of ASAD, spoke about the need for Place-appropriate public design. Ruth Beer, Professor of Visual Art and Material Practice at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, and a campaigner of long-standing for indigenous rights and environmental protection, was particularly inspiring. She is involved in a federally-funded action research project entitled Trading Routes: Grease Trails, Oil Pipelines, which uses a radical form of counter-mapping to explore the complex dynamics of resource extraction and indigenous rights. This relates in particular to the demise of the indigenous oolichan fishery as a result of river damming and development, and the recent approval of a pipeline to carry oil to the coast from the Alberta Tar Sands, crossing 30 tribal areas.  There were many other interesting speakers. At the close of the day Roxane Permar presented our Northern Exchange project, and I was one of the panel for questions.

That evening I enjoyed a curry with Timo Jokela, Glen Coutts, Mirja Hiltunen, Elina Harkonen, Susan Timmins and Davy Stane - it was good to have longer to chat and to get to know some of the other organisers better. 

Thursday was the final day of speakers and the grand opening of the exhibition. Once again the standard of papers was high, with Gina Wall speaking on the traces of colonialism in Glasgow, Mirja Hiltunen on art projects to help integrate refugees into Finnish communities, Keith Smyth on some progressive thoughts on learning as a broad public good that should not be limited to academic institutions but extending to public spaces.   

Ruth Beer knitting

Icelandic collaborative project - letters

The most inspiring paper was given about what, in my view, was the best collaborative art project of the whole event. Asthildur Jonsdottir, who had worked with us in Iceland, collaborated with five other Icelanders, artists, a psychologist and an anthropologist. Their project created links between Iceland and Shetland in a range of interesting ways. The five instigators wrote to Shetlanders by letter, asking them to describe the sights, sounds and smells of a favourite place. They took the resulting descriptions and translated them into colours and pictures, then took Icelandic wool of the right colours with them to Shetland and held a participatory knitting and story-telling event with a Shetland knitting group. The knitters used the Icelandic wool to 'knit' the colours of the places described, while being filmed telling stories. Finally, images of this event were beamed back to Iceland, where the remaining Icelandic participants put into words their emotions and experiences of the whole project. These words were read out at the symposium. The resultant installation was interactive; participants could continue the knitting process! I thought it was a wonderfully intricate and intimate way of connecting two cultures in ways that combined the traditional (letter writing, knitting, painting) and the high-tech (Facebook, email).

The final event of Thursday was the opening of the exhibition - here are some photos...

Roxane with artists and visitors to the exhibition opening

 This is a participant listening to the Northern Exchange installation, which included film and recorded interviews. Thanks to Davy and Susan for all the technical wizardry!  

All in all, I learned a great deal from the experience of being involved in helping with the organisation and running of this amazing event. The feedback on Relate North 2016 was overwhelming and positive. Very inspiring!!