Robin Tarbet

The Eilean Shona Residency 2024

I’ve never set out to deliberately spend time on my own, so I wasn’t totally sure how I’d deal with being alone on an island with only occasional signal from my mobile phone for an entire month... but it turns out I’m quite good at it. Working as an artist in a studio is a solitary act, so relocating to an island was not the big leap out of society I’d feared.

For my residency on Eilean Shona, I took with me boxes of old photographic paper and cyanotype solution, a sculpture kit of mold-making and casting supplies, my camera, and a large roll of bright orange gaffer tape. I crammed a month's worth of food supplies from Fort William Morrisons into a car and then a boat, and the journey to Eilean Shona was a spectacular and scenic introduction to what was in store.

Sculpture is at the heart of my practice, but I’d also planned to incorporate making work in print and photography. The island was the perfect setting to combine analogue photographic processes with physical forms and tactile surfaces, enabling me to create prints from a very sculptural mentality. Being away from the digital world seemed the ideal place to look back and play with camera-less processes like Sir John Herschel’s cyanotype printing as used by Anna Atkins, an English botanist and photographer, in the latter part of the 19th century. Her book, ‘Photographs of British Algae,’ is widely considered the first book published illustrated with photographic images. The temperate rainforest climate of the woods on the island itself created an intriguing sculptural landscape. En masse, the moss was such a dense blanket that covered the ground, but in isolation, each stem looked like a mini tree, and I liked the act of collecting and printing individual strands of moss as specimens, maybe to make my own moss collection book from the forest.

In an environment where the weather ensures nothing is permanent, finding curious perishable material to petrify as solid forms via mould-making and casting was always on my mind. I often found myself drawn to the abundance of seaweed lining the shores and the lush moss that blanketed the forests as sources for inspiration. Being on the small island looking out across the sea loch to neighbouring yet disconnected places felt quite filmic in itself, and I can see how J.M. Barrie would have been inspired when he visited here in the 1920s.

One of the first things I moulded and cast was a small green sea urchin shell that I found perfectly intact on the beach. Such a delicately intricate little gem somehow survived being washed ashore amongst the craggy rocks and seaweed. I also made a series of small plaster cast sculptures by silicone moulding the detached anchors from kelp seaweed that had washed into the loch. Out of context, the undulating forms of the root nodules looked almost alien against the white sand on the west sea-facing bays of the island. These were always intended as material tests, and now I’m back in my London studio, I’ll aim to cast these forms in a more durable material. As tactile sculptures (and their origin namesake implies), they seem too inviting not to be held. As well as casting individual objects, I used the seaweed en masse, pressing it into clay to create a series of bas reliefs. Again, I liked the intertwined, entangled density of the seaweed as a texture. I intended to use whatever resources were at hand to make work while away from my familiar surroundings and find my own visual language on the island. In the cottage, I embraced a DIY approach and turned the corridor space by the fridge into a makeshift darkroom. I constructed pinhole cameras from empty food containers and located them out in the landscape. Going analogue enabled me to create long exposure images that recorded the same light duration of lunar cycles as I physically had on the island. By preparing a set of pinhole cameras on the day I arrived, I have images that represent a complete month's worth of time.

I’d decided before I left London that I was going to take a range of art materials so I could make a variety of physical responses, and a good toolkit to allow me to adapt to different ways of working as my ideas on the residency developed. Without the pressure to create finished work, I saw this as a space away to freely develop ideas and playfully experiment with whatever I found around me. Being disconnected from both the internet and ‘the art world’ meant the noise and baggage in my head, often reinforced by social media and art industry insecurities, faded, and I soon stopped concerning myself with operating as an artist, and I just got on with making work. With the door opening onto the loch, I found the studio a really productive place to work between the world outside and the ideas in my head. The studio was a place to get on with the content and realisation of making work, which I already know will act as a catalyst for more substantial outcomes in the future.

I spent a lot of time at all hours of the day and night in the forests and down on the loch side - and neither was as dark or as silent as I’d imagined. Stars are bright, and wildlife is loud. It was an amazing feeling to be able to just roam around and experience the constantly changing light and atmosphere of the island. From the spectacular view of the sun rising over the distant mountains from Red Cottage to the sunsets down by the loch. As the island is located in a sparsely populated area of west Scotland, on a clear night the sky is blanketed by an array of stars and a well-defined moon. I wanted to respond to the feel of the island and create a series of soft, grainy works from within my temperate forest surroundings using very long exposures. Images that take a long time to capture have the visual record of the time that passed while the camera was there. I liked the sense of mystery and non-definition within the forests at dusk or dawn, quite opposite to what we now expect in sharp digital images.

Maybe it was being away in an ancient landscape or simply the isolation of being on my own. I found myself thinking a lot about the ephemeral nature of the things around me and how to capture a sense of alchemy in the work I produced during my month on the island. I’d initially taken the photographic paper to make pinhole cameras, but by playfully disrupting the light-sensitive material, I could also make photograms, again much like the camera-less photography of the 19th century. My old Silver Gelatin Paper produced lumen prints rich in colour that were further enhanced by the changing light, long exposures, and playful contaminations from the things I’d foraged. As a way of creating images, lumen printing required no chemical processing, which seemed the ideal process on an island with a keen legacy of green practices and environmental conservation. The notion of venturing onto a wilderness island on my own to create a set of forever unfixed photographic works that can’t be shown to anyone seemed almost magic in itself.

My aim with this residency was to step away from city living and take a breath to explore a sense of wonder about the island while being off-grid and out of signal. A rare opportunity to slow down, go walking, and make curious discoveries. To think about deep time, big landscape, and being alone, digitally disconnected in the wild. Being outside every day and physically active in all weathers felt healthy, and having a living connection with the natural world in contrast to the city was a real thrill. Being able to focus on making work away from my everyday distractions in the beautiful island setting of Eilean Shona will be one of the most enriching experiences of my life. I have left with an abundance of material experiments, and it has invigorated a new sense of escapism in my work.

- See more of Robin’s work at www.robintarbet.com @robintarbet (instagram)

- Read more about the Eilean Shona Residency here: https://shona-projects.squarespace.com/residency-gallery ) Awarded by The Royal Society of Sculptors, and kindly supported by Vanessa Branson. Thank you!

https://sculptors.org.uk/awards/eilean-shona-residency