I made this silent film for the project, 7 Short Sails: A Series of Creative Chinese Whispers, conceived by Pat Law and which included 56 artists altogether. The project began with one sailing boat and seven participating artists, all of whom live and work in countries bordering northern seas. Pat Law set sail with no set plan other than to explore the coastline while producing sketches, stories, paintings, photographs and conversations.  This raw material was passed on to seven artists with the request to respond in whatever way they chose. Those responses in turn were passed onto another seven artists and so on, for a total of seven phases.  

 

My film is a response to Ben Stephen's work and was made specifically to be shown on the web.  It appears in Short Sail 3.  I chose to make a video because I was in the middle of our large community based project, Mirrie Dancers, during which I was working with film.  I worked with nearly 300 people in Shetland  through public and schools workshops to help them make films of dynamic colour.  I was working with their films (almost 500) to make compilations for the 30 programmes that formed the basis for the  light projections shown every evening at Mareel in Lerwick.

​

The project was shown at StAnza poetry festival at St. Andrews in 2010,  and the St. Magnus Conference, Orkney College UHI in 2011.  In 2013, the project was included in Peter Davidson's book Distance and Memory. The essay is called Northern Waters and is in the Spring section of the book: you can find the book here.