Commissioned by Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye, Travelling the Archive is my largest collaboration to date, involving the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre and the Kyleakin Local History Society. The notion of ‘travelling the archive’ is both practical and evocative. In terms of official archives, people typically travel to them literally or virtually, rather than such archives physically coming to them. In this project, the collection was taken from the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre in Portree to Kyleakin in a number of ways, including analogue 35mm slide shows and digital outdoor projections. By bringing together the past and present in these ways, Travelling the Archive encounters questions of shared heritage, living memory and lived experience.

All images from the Joan Wilcock Collection used courtesy of the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre.

A guidebook with a difference

The above link will take you to the souvenir booklet of the project. Featuring twenty-two of Miss Wilcock’s images, the reader is taken on a memory walk around Kyleakin, meeting some of the people she photographed, and others who have special connections to the people and places in her images.

Also available on the ATLAS and Kyleakin Local History Society websites.

For more about the project’s process see Atlas Arts: Travelling the Archive // Sharing Heritage

BBC News: Archive images of Skye in new arts project, images by photographer Colin Hattersley

Travelling the Archive, 2016

Multiple site-specific life-size projections
2 outdoor photo-banners
1 outdoor photo-vinyl banner
Full colour booklet, 38 pages
Memory walk postcard

Commissioned by ATLAS Arts, Isle of Skye
In collaboration with Kyleakin Local History Society & Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre

Supported by
Creative Scotland
The National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund
The Highland Council

Thanks to:

ATLAS Director & Curator: Emma Nicolson
Project Management: Rosie Somerville

Kyleakin Local History Society: Caroline Clouston (Chairperson); John Robertson (Vice Chairperson), Stuart Taylor (Secretary), Anna Belle Robertson (Treasurer); Margaret Macrae, Hector Grant, Calum MacAskill, Hugh Davies, Roddy Morrison, Angus MacLennan (Committee Members).

Sandi Beatson, Ian Montgomery and Ruth Macdougall
Anne MacDonald Archivist, Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre
Will Maclean MBE RSA

The many volunteers who have supported the research, the production of the exhibition and programme of activities

Eilean Bàn Trust
Kyleakin Community Council
Kyleakin Connections

Heritage Site was realised through Cycle 10 Alt-w Production Award and a series of essential collaborations. Members of the Calder History Group shared their knowledge of people, history and place. Artist Clara Ursitti created a pungent and evocative olfactory intervention working with speculative fiction and memory. From the Glasgow School of Art Stuart Jeffrey, Research Fellow in heritage visualisation, brought a background in archaeology, computer science and digital preservation. The initial creative work of Mike Marriott, artist and lecturer in Visualisation, formed the basis for the point cloud animations of house and bings, created by Clare Graham, a postgraduate student on the MSc in International Heritage Visualisation. Mike’s model also formed the basis for the 1:12 physical model, made by Kevin Thornton.

Heritage Site has brought together artists, heritage visualisation archaeologists and local community members to create a way of imaging what lies underground in both practical and metaphorical senses. It was exhibited in the show Alt-w, City Art Centre, Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2016.

Alt-w | Heritage Site: From initial research to final exhibition

Heritage Site with Isabella Mason Kirk from Nicky Bird on Vimeo.

Short video documentation of the Heritage Site installation, and audio extract of Isabella Mason Kirk's story of living in Westwood House in the 1930s

Heritage Site: Animation, 2016 from Nicky Bird on Vimeo.

Animation by Clare Graham, MSc International Heritage Visualisation, Glasgow School of Art, 2016

Heritage Site, 2016

Photographic postcard, photographer R.Braid c.1910
C-type photograph on Dibond, 40 x 135cm
1:12 scale House model
1:12 scale Room furniture
3 scents
Audio 11.53 minutes
Digital Animation 1.40 minutes

Supported by:

New Media Scotland’s Alt-w Fund with investment from Creative Scotland
School of Simulation and Visualisation, The Glasgow School of Art

Thanks to:

Mark Daniels, Executive Director, New Media Scotland
Isabella Mason Kirk & her family
Shelagh Steele, Davie Rennie & Alan Tuffs
Tommy Stuart

“How might we read memory in relation to the family, and how might we enact these memories through art practice? This group exhibition addresses the representation of family memory through the photographic, video and sound works of six artists. Family Ties: Reframing Memory explores the bittersweet aspects of reflective nostalgia, yet also considers the conflicts and contradictions inherent in acts of remembering.”

Read more here

“My practice has usually involved a combination of new and ‘found’ photography, working closely with people who have particular relationships with specific archives and places I have become increasingly aware of the role that listening plays during the art process. The experience of an artist listening is not as straightforward as it might seems. In fact, it is full of ambiguities. The phrase ‘listening post’ – with its defensive, even military connotations – implies the gathering of information by surreptitious means. As the dictionary will tell you, this act summons up notions of secrecy, and operation by stealth, or other improper means. The artist’s agenda or motivation for being at the listening post may seem innocuous enough: being motivated by nothing more than the creation of works of art, which eventually go into the public domain, added to the CV and so on.

I will use experiences drawn from two projects, Beneath the Surface/Hidden Place (2007-2009) and Unsorted Donations (2010). These help articulate two positions of the artist as stranger: one by self-appointment (the self-initiated project), while the other by invitation (the artist residency). While both projects reflect my on-going concerns with the theme of hidden history, my discussion of these positions aims to help tease out wider ethical questions raised by artistic use of narratives, stories, and anecdotes of collaborators told informally during the art process.”

For the full essay
Artist as Listening Post
Developed from a conference paper for Transmission: Hospitality July, 2010

Sam Norris
BA (Hons) Photography, Plymouth University

Sam Norris: where does your interest in archives come from and why you are drawn to them?

Nicky Bird: Initially I think it came from my interest as a teenager in looking at the photographs of Hollywood film stars, and their stories – particularly Marilyn Monroe. These photos and stories would have been in books, magazines and on TV and I had a collection of these materials. In a sense, although I wouldn’t have realized this at the time, I was making an archive – not from my own family materials – but from what is now called ‘popular culture’. I was drawn to Marilyn Monroe as she is portrayed as someone who was a great beauty, a comedy actress but was also a complicated woman in real life. The differences between the myth and imagery fascinated me.

Years later I came across the photojournalist Ed Feingersh’s photographs of Monroe, in which four unidentified women are photographed by him watching Monroe being fitted for a costume in New York. I went to New York and photographed what was left of the original site – where the photo was taken – and then went to the Michael Ochs Archive, who had Feingersh’s contact sheets. It was a strange feeling looking at the contact sheets – like following a long-gone photographer in his footsteps – but also realizing I was looking for more photos of these unknown women. These photos had not been published as they don’t have Marilyn in them – so no commercial value – and this raised all kinds of interesting questions about archives holding hidden histories – if you go looking for them. So although the commercial value of the Feingersh pictures are because of Marilyn Monroe, I became much more interested in these other women, and the lives, histories, untold stories they represented. When I was there, lying on the table was another contact sheet from another photographer. The contact sheet was of Elvis Presley in the 1950s, at a dinner table surrounded by women. There was a picture editor’s pencil mark around his head – indicating that’s the part of the photo they wanted to use. They weren’t interested in the unknown group… That was when I realized how important archives are – and you can look at them in another way, which is what I think photographers/artists do…

SN: What do you look for in your subjects?

NB: I look for what hidden histories may be connected to a photograph, a landscape or object. It is also important that this history still has relevance today – which is why I am interested in finding ways of working with people who have a connection to it in some way. Sometimes these people are literally connected (so they might be descendants to someone in the photograph, other times they might have professional connections such as the Archivist)…

SN: How do you choose the pictures/photographers/subject matters for each project? is it a single image that sparks a project or do you slowly build up a collection of photographs and go from there?

NB: There is usually a found photograph that triggers the whole thing off, so in a way that photograph ‘chooses’ me! For example, Tracing Echoes (2001) began with a Julia Margaret Cameron portrait. I was in a bookshop flicking through a book, when I came across ‘Passion Flower at the Gate.’ I was immediately struck by the resemblance to my sister. It was quite spooky as I knew my sister was not a descendant of this Victorian woman. I took a test portrait of my sister to see if she, and others, also could see the resemblance. The test portrait raised a question: what if I could trace the descendants of Cameron’s women and take their portraits? I realized that I was interested in her portraits of servants and local children. Her most famous works were made on the Isle of Wight, where my sister was born. Originally I thought the project would be a series of portraits, but as the book Tracing Echoes shows, photographs of the house where Cameron lived and worked became as significant as the portraits. Question for Seller (2004-6) began with a group of family photos bought on eBay one Christmas. In this case the actual photographs along with the seller’s statement and cost of the purchase became really important. For Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place (2007-9), it was a family snap of the two boys photographed in the same place where I was a volunteer on an industrial archaeology site. The diptych shown in the book (2010) on page 4/5 became the trigger for that project, and I talk about what happened next in the book and also in the film. What my projects have in common is that a ‘found’ photograph leads to others (photographs and people), and the reason to make a series of new photographs is to explore a relationship to a particular site. You can see the different kinds of archives I have worked in – from the official kind (such as the National Media Museum) to more local, informal types (such as family photos kept in a bread bin)…

Tracy Cornes
BA (Hons) Fine Art, Plymouth University

Tracy Cornes: How long has collaboration with the public been a feature of your work and have there been any challenges in working with the public that have changed the direction of a project or work?

Nicky Bird: Collaboration as part of my practice has evolved since the late 1990s, but has become much more explicit in recent works such as Beneath the Surface. I am not sure that I would describe the people I work with as ‘the public’ – this makes me think of artists like Marina Abramovic or Jeremy Deller (particularly Deller’s Procession, 2009 or Sacrilege, 2012) who work with very large groups of people. My collaborations tend to be one-to-ones or small groups and they are usually connected to artefact, archive, or site in some way. Meeting, talking with such people always influences the direction of a project – and the biggest challenge is always making the first contact. Then it is sustaining working relationships so that people go through the art process with you as an artist.

TC: Do you think one of the nostalgic elements present in the work is the medium, to be specific the development in technology from analogue photograph to digital image? Do you find traditional methods more tactile and engaging than the more modern counterpart, the digital image?

NB: It is interesting, this question. There is of course nostalgia attached to analogue family photographs – and it is interesting to see how people handle, present them. Some photographs even have a particular smell. Although analogue photographs are great props ‘for talking’ the digital image does present other questions. How people behave with digital snaps, and their sense they are speaking to an online audience, is also interesting. But as Dear Photograph shows, digital technology has also created another layer of meaning to the term ‘nostalgia’. Digital technology also means the analogue photograph can be copied easily – and therefore ‘donated’ to an artist such as myself.

TC: What artists or artistic movements do you identify your practice with, and are there any texts you have read that have been seminal or inspirational to your practice?

NB: The 1980s were key – for example, the rise of feminist art but also a shift in attitudes towards photography. I might not have always appreciated the works at the time or fully understood the critical debates about representation that were emerging in the UK, but these have stayed with me. Artists such as Susan Hiller, the Wilson Twins, Willie Doherty, Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle and Christine Borland have been important reference points – some particularly with the theme of tracing and detection. In terms of reading, inevitably Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida; more recently essays like David Campany’s ‘Some remarks on Late Photography’ and books like ‘Locating Memory’ (Annette Kuhn and Kirsten Emiko McAllister), or Liz Wells’ ‘Land Matters.’ Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography has been seminal in reminding us why photography matters. Then there are the interviews with practitioners, which have been so pertinent (such as Willie Doherty) and the short, snappy articles that appear in Art Monthly – usually criticisms on participatory and collaborative art!

TC: Along with your work Beneath the Surface/Hidden Place (2010) I am currently writing about the concepts of house/home in comparison to House(1993), Rachel Whiteread and Living Room (1994) Alison Marchant. Do you as an artist identify your work with the other two works, and do you think that viewers find their own ‘home’ in your work?

NB: I reviewed Alison’s Living Room in Art Monthly so that’s been a close dialogue with the work and the issues. Whiteread’s distillation of presence/absence and loaded/disappearing histories are also obvious connections. I think the implied, shared narratives suggested by either a family photograph or an object is hopefully the way people find their way in to my work. Sometimes it is the landscape itself…

TC: The visual poetry between the past and present in your work to me speaks of the transience of life and the passing of time. Doreen Massey has said that ‘The past was no more static than the present.’ I feel you demonstrate this well in your work as there is a fluidity that although not visually present may raise issues of the future. I have used a quote by Jon Bird that I think resonates with some aspects of your work, ‘The home represents a key component in the constitution of identity, a point of reference in amongst the shifting patterns of our social and cultural formation, a focus for desires and longings, a point of origin and return, the universal experience of acquiring a place in the world.’

The Glasgow Women’s Library provided an excellent opportunity to produce a limited edition for their 21 Revolutions event and exhibition. I was one of 21 women artists and 21 women writers commissioned by the Library to create new work inspired by items and artefacts in their collections. You can see Raging Dyke Network – 20 multi-view postcards – alongside works by other artists working with diverse themes and mediums. You can purchase these and other works to help support the library.

Finally I am looking forward to giving an artist’s talk as part of the Atlas,Talking Art Series on the Isle of Skye, Saturday 10 November, 2.00 – 3.00pm. This programme is for the creation of projects not fixed by, or to, a permanent gallery space. This is a great platform to reflect on how local voices, and their reading of the landscape, helped shape works such as Archaeology of the Ordinary (2011), made for The Peter Potter Gallery’s Lost Landscapes programme.

Raging Dyke Network­ was a group of radical separatist lesbians active in the late 1990s. It spanned across 52 locations from the UK, Europe, Canada and USA. At the network’s centre was an activist in Norwich, who donated materials – including personal letters and zines – to the Glasgow Women’s Library and the Lesbian Archive in 2000. The postcard series aims to represent the network’s scale and make visible a history often overlooked, without revealing the personal and political content that belonged to a group who identified themselves in terms of their separatist gender politics.

The 21Revolutions PDF

Raging Dyke Network 14/20 in the collection of Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Thanks also to the following finders of postcards:

Ben
Chris
Michelle Hirschhorn
Sally and James Maidment
Irene Nexica
Lara Perry

Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place, view the full PDF

The Brink of Erasure
Kirsten Lloyd, Curator, Stills

Processes & Practices
Nicky Bird and Rhona Warwick in conversation

Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice: commeration and loss at Lethanhill
Ray McKenzie

Elaine Mackie, Doon Valley Museum
Jan McTaggart

A Short List of (Re)Sources

Karen Hamilton

Buy this book through Stills online shop

Also see Projects: Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place

Beneath the Surface / Hidden Place, 2010

A 48 page publication
33 illustrations, 30 full colour, 3 B&W
285 x 206mm (landscape)
ISBN: 978-0-906458-07-5

Edited by Cheryl Connell
Designed by Robert Dallas Gray
Stills, Edinburgh 2010