The following text was written for me by a member of the local community after I asked for those involved to offer a personal perspective on the project.
The Myth of Eilean Nan Ron
When we speak of myths we tend to think of the prehistoric or the fictional, the Trojan Horse, the Labours of Hercules, the Lord of the Rings. We instinctively distance ourselves, living in our everyday modern world, from myths and the process of myth making, as if the stories that we tell about the world around us were somehow different, somehow objective truth.
But every community has its myths, and every member of every community is complicit in the production, and reproduction of these myths. You could say that a community is defined by its myths, that a community is nothing more or less than the collection of people who believe a common set of stories, who reverence a certain mythology.
And we are all, for better or worse, members of various overlapping communities, geographical, cultural, political, spiritual, each with its own mythology, its stories, its truths. Because we are not speaking of myths as fictions, but as narratives and fragments of narratives, threads to be spun together to illustrate the past and sustain the present – we are the stories that we believe.
Eilean Nan Ron has such mythic status in Skerray. The island is a constant presence offshore, the one and a half miles of water a physical separation representing almost 70 years, a lifetime, since evacuation. The life of the islanders belongs now to stories rather than memories, and in that transformation has become a rich mythology, which defines the community that tells and retells those stories.
So what does it mean to make art out of this? Firstly, there has to be the recognition that the island itself has become a community artwork, a narrative in progress that grows, evolves, is embellished and edited.
Second, it could be seen as a corrective, a regrounding – see, this rowing, it wasn’t the work of giants or super humans, just a hard but routine part of the daily existence. And why did we all assume that the lamps would have been visible 70 years ago? Has our bright, shiny, electric world colonised our ancestors’ lives too?
And thirdly, and maybe most of all, this art will become a contribution to the work in progress that is the myth of Eilean Nan Ron, another thread to weave in the story of the island, the lassie who rowed to the island, the community that came together to help and watch, and be participants not just in an artwork, but in a myth.
J
