A Hebridean Journey

Quite how, and how far, the influence of Richard Demarco reached over our journey did not become apparent to me until well after I had returned. At the outset he and his colleagues from Edinburgh had come to the quayside to wish us well, and perhaps they expressed a frustration that they too were not climbing aboard. In fact we would in all probability never have left our homes but for the Edinburgh Art Journeys instigated by Richard in the 1970's.

As a young man I spent the late 1970's and early 1980's working at Arnolfini in Bristol. It was then newly in its forth home in the Bush building on Narrow Quay. My job was to help produce the publicity for the extensive and highly innovative programme of Visual Arts, Music, Dance, Cinema, Performance, Jewellery that was then on offer. I also was the organisations photographer. There were many highlights - two days walking around Bristol with Barry Flanagan looking out for, and photographing, vernacular urban sculptures being just one.

As a young group I think we took pleasure imagining ourselves as part of a vanguard in British artistic culture. At 10.40 each morning we met over coffee to discuss events and share stories, and I now recall in 1980 how news of the circumnavigation of the British Isles by The Marques filled us all with awe.

Richard Demarco on the Marques 1980.

It was such a radical and wonderfully wild and ambitious initiative, a rolling gang of artists, intellectuals, musicians and writers cavorting like a group of troubadours across the high seas. There was not one of us young hucksters in Bristol who did not wish they were on that ship.

To quote the press release :

"On 18 July 2013 a group of artists, scientists and cultural commentators will set sail from Oban, Scotland on the tall ship The Lady of Avenel, a 102 foot square rigged Brigantine, for a ten days tour of the Scottish Western Isles. The voyage will bring together a group of individuals from a wide range of disciplines, professions and organisations with a clear commitment to strategically profile a concern for our environment in relation to arts education curriculum and policy. Central to the experience of the voyage will be an opportunity to develop a strong network of influence that questions the key issues of sustainability, our environment and the increasingly urgent need to address and culturally respond to the dramatic effects of climate change."

And so on the afternoon of the 18 july we gathered on the north quay in Oban, under the careful supervision of the project initiator and leader Chris Wainwright and the expedition manager Hannah Bird, and under the watchful gaze of the astonishing McCaig's Tower. (Built between 1897 and 1902, conceived and designed by John Stuart McCaig, the tower was never completed and now contains a public park. As folly's go it take some beating.)

This going off on a tangent but fate seems determined that I build on the West Pembrokeshire connection. Mike Perry is a photographer who I first met at Michael Dyers labs in Covent Garden, and he has become a good friend. We both work with 10x8 cameras too. He spends as much time as he can in his house on the Pembroke coast, and seems keen I take him up on an offer to come and stay. So when I do its off to the islands again to watch and photograph the seabirds.

Meantime this has just arrived ! It's part of a larger body of work made from plastic materials found near him on the coast.

As well as reporting and following-up on the matter of seabirds, the blog will at times become preoccupied with islands. We must have passed an awesome number during the trip, as well as stopping off on more than we had anticipated.

One story that links the two themes relates to my friend Martin Lockley, who I met 50 years ago. In 1927 his father Ronald Mathias Lockley took over the lease of Skokholm, a small uninhabited island off the coast of Pembrokeshire in Wales. 

He began to study the seabirds on the island, becoming a leading expert and lived the last years of his life in New Zealand, where he this time became a world expert on the ocean going seabirds of the Southern Palaearctic. (more later).

Shearwaters, Razorbills, Guillemots and Puffins were his early specialties, and many of these were observed over the side of the ship during our voyage.

The Lady of Avenel is a two-masted, square-rigged Brigatine, measuring just over 100 feet long and weighing in at 100 tons. Moored at either Maldon or London Docks, she makes a six week trip to the north-west of Scotland each summer, running a series of of organised trips out of Oban. Photographed here while at anchor, waiting the right tidal flow, off the north east tip of Iona.

Cropped from the same image, what I believe is a Great Northern Diver (but stand to be corrected). One of the pursuits of this trip was an informal study of such ocean going seabirds of the Western Palaeartic. However limited to a fixed lens on a new Sigma DP2 Merrill, the pictures produced are less than ideal for purposes of recognition, though they do convey something of the experiential impression from the boat.