Entitled simply 'Belonging', the works in our inaugural exhibition invite you to consider what connects you to people, places and objects and how, in turn, you generate your sense of belonging.
With works by artists Olivia Priya Foster, Leena Nammari, Alexander and Susan Maris, Sheila Quillin and Susannah Rose..
Enjoy a slow visit to this exhibition, taking time to ‘read’ these works, thinking about the ways that you feel you belong to your communities and places…
The gentle, honed wood objects crafted by Sheila Quillin during decades living in her beloved home/studio located deep in the native woodlands of Argyll are testament to the strength of belonging that we can feel even after we become displaced and move on to pastures new.
Olivia Priya Foster’s works bring the outdoor world of farming inside this gallery-space, and in doing so, evoke thoughts about the co-dependency at the heart of the farming community, between the people who give their labour and the animals which serve it; the installation is made from sheep-fleeces upon a framed structure of fragile ‘stretchers’ which normally support an artist’s canvas, which invite you to reflect upon the psychological and material heft required to achieve long term settlement in the pasture-lands of west Scotland.
Entitlement to belong is explored through the works of Alexander and Susan Maris, whose long-term research into the native European wolf traces the apex predator through the terrain of central Scotland as it enters the lands of Lorne; the artists follow signs of its belonging still visible in place names which evidence the wolf’s command of vast terrains until we humans eradicated it from this landmass.
What are the criteria for membership of belonging? As a member of a diasporic community in exile, Leena Nammari invites us to consider Haneen, an Arabic concept which reifies and renders tangible the sense of belonging and otherness felt by people dispossessed of their lands and places of origin and heritage.
Through all the artists’ works, you will find gestures of well-wishing and care; Susannah Rose’s artworks invite you to consider the motivation of the goddess/patron-saint St Brigid to provide protection, particularly to dispossessed people, enabling them to achieve the sense of security that lies at the heart of belonging.