fragments
- is a discovery of things lost and found and looks to honour that which has been left behind. Creating new stories inspired by the remains, allowing them to evolve as an ever-changing narrative that reflects the time they now exist within.
Fragments is an exploration into the physical discovery of stories and narratives and aims to depict their fragmentation through aspects of the physical landscape. The ceramics and broken pieces of pottery found scattered across the shorelines of Scotland are representations of broken narratives, parts of a whole long lost to the tide. They reflect the way in which Scotland’s mythologies have been fractured, surviving in small weathered away pieces, scattered across the centuries. The Corbie (crow) symbolises us, the scavenger, picking away at the corpses of what has been left behind. Scraps of archaeological evidence, oral storytelling traditions, and the occasional written word. Stories picked to the bone.
Remains I - monoprint on paper
Remains II - monoprint on paper
“So that’s why I keep the bird’s remains, here in this room, my own hybernaculum – if only for a while. It’s just a tuft of feathers in a polythene bag, a tiny skull, and with that silvery ring above its shrunken, black webbed foot. I keep it for the intimacy and for the petrel smell: fusty, musky, suggestive of a distant island in summer. And I keep it out of sheer respect because, in its life, this ounce of a bird had made twenty four return trips the length of the Atlantic. Twenty four at least – which is not bad at all, for a waif, wambling.”
— Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines, page 217