Louise Bichan: Out Of My Own Light
Pier Arts Centre
Stromness, Orkney
01856 850209
www.pierartscentre.com
Until May 30
Tue-Sat, 10.30am-5pm
They say a change of scenery can work wonders, but when Louise Bichan's grandmother, Margaret Sarah Tait, found herself "restless and unhappy" in post-war Orkney and unable to decide between two suitors for her hand (one, her fiancé), she decided to take that notion to something of an extreme. Voyaging, as she put it, "out of my own light", she left the family home in 1950, aged 25, and set off on the long trip to Canada. Sixty-five years later her granddaughter decided to follow in her footsteps. The result is this exhibition of journals, artefacts and images charting Bichan's own voyage of discovery into the Canadian side of her family and her grandmother's long-lost past.
"I'd never really thought much about my grandmother's life before I knew her, so it's been quite emotional at times," says Bichan. Tait's diary entries stop abruptly on the voyage over to Canada, the subsequent volume lost. All Bichan knew was that Tait spent six months with her Canadian relatives, returning later that year to marry the man she wasn't engaged to. Bichan has written music for the project, in part based on the discovery of a recording of her grandmother singing on CBC Radio in Winnipeg.
Bichan herself graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2011 with a BA in Photography, although she splits her time now between work as a folk musician (winning the Danny Kyle Open Stage Award at Celtic Connections in 2013 with folk group Gria) and as a photographer. She now plans to concentrate on her musical career, and is crowdfunding to take up a scholarship place at Berklee College in Boston later this year.
Sarah Urwin Jones
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