Still from Balnakiel

Shona Illingworth's recent exhibition, Balnakiel is a unique exploration into collective memory. The exhibition consists of a 30-minute film in which a young girl on the verge of adolescence roams the vast landscape of Northwest Scotland’s Balnakiel community in the midst of harsh weather conditions and military training activity, as well as particular interior spaces. There is also a short video featuring the sea during a storm, drawings, and a black and yellow life sized painting of a grid often found on military bases. The remote, unforgiving landscape that Balnakiel and nearby local village Durness occupy were home to the artist from age two to seventeen. She and her family were considered “incomers” as they were not indigenous to the area, but rather were craftspeople looking for an escape and a new start at the edge of the world. Nevertheless, as the artist adamantly points out, this work is not about her personal experiences, it is about her investigation of cultural, social, and collective memory.

SCT:This project is a bit more personal than The Watch Man, for instance. Why did you choose to return to your childhood community and what is your connection to this work?

SI:It is personal only insofar as the film is set in the where I grew up. Of course, it is difficult to quantify how much of your own experience directly or indirectly impacts on any art work. I realised that many concerns that I can see threading through my work in some way related to my experience of growing up in such an extreme place. The relationship between such an intense sense of enclosure within a vast landscape mirrored that kind of psychological sense of an interior world and negotiating that relationship with the outside world. I have been working with memory for a long time. In this respect I am interested in the point where art meets science.

SCT:How did you come to work with neuro-psychologist Martin A. Conway?

SI:We met in 2003 while working on the exhibition Memory and Forgetting, where artists were invited to work with scientists to explore human memory. We established such a rich, creative dialog and we did not want it to end. Central to our conversations is an exploration of autobiographical memory and the idea that one can never have the same memory for an experience twice. Each memory is a mental construction and influenced by where you are now and so that makes memory an incredibly dynamic and active agent in the present.

SCT:Would you say that you conversations lean towards psychoanalytical themes?

SI:There are references to psychoanalysis in our conversations but they are also about research, neuroscience, clinical research, it is difficult to separate all of those issues out.

SCT:Between the harsh weather and the RAF activity, what was it like to grow up in Balnakiel?

SI:Isolated. There is a 50-meter single-track road, there are very few trees and little grass, the landscape is ancient, with very early geological formations. It is a landscape that does not easily sustain life, and is sparsely populated. The Military presence has been there since WWII. The local community has a past history of oppression, a dark violent history from the period of the Highland Clearances, which in some senses remains largely unresolved, there are lots of ruined townships in the area.. The “incomers” [who are referred to in the film] were craftspeople who moved to the area because they were looking for an escape, they established themselves in a a former military early warning station there, albeit not communal. They were idealists who were looking to make an independant living and to escape societal pressure. There were three diverse communities – and tension existed between them due to cultural and social differences. For the locals, this area is the centre of the world, for the military it was the front line, and for the “incomers” it is the edge of world.

I am more reserved about my personal memories; if I identify those then it can skew the reading of the work too much, so I would be reluctant to reveal any one particular personal memory. I will say that in the film there is a definite interest in different scales of activity and also different levels of permanence and viewpoints and so you have a number of protagonists, the weather, which in a way is constantly pushing air, wind, intense weather sweeping through the landscape, that has an echo in the way that memories operate, there are individual memories and there are also cultural memories and collective memories and also the legacy of these long histories that permeate the present and have crossed down from generations. If you imagine that as a kind of system then there is this constant shift in pressure and tension and one’s own private memories might not correlate with the collective memories and the ways in which a place is represented, these contradictions interest me quite a lot. The military uses all kinds of systems, radio, charting, radar, procedures, in order to create some sort of order in the way that they occupy the terrain. This also involves things that are unpredictable and things that break down, but they have this aerial view, which is in some way a privileged viewpoint, in the watchtower, a 360-degree view.

SCT:Was the girl in film a representation of you?

SI:That was not my intention, I choose a girl at the peak of early adolescence because that is such a curious age and a critical age in memory, when memory begins to have a cultural context. My objective for using a girl of that age was to socially contextualise the work; she is right on the cusp of childhood and adulthood. Interestingly, she is the last the child in Balnakiel, there are not any other children that live there. For the viewer the girl provides another access and a contrast to the military world. The bird is also used as a symbol and contrast, it is a goshawk, which is one of the fastest birds, compared to a missile because of the way it hones in on its prey, it has a very limited memory, one could say it has an internal world unfettered by memory which does not affect its sense of purpose and direction.

SCT:What are the main themes of the film?

SI:Ownership and belonging are central themes in this work. I was interested in exploring the particular juxtapositions, such as the bus and the helicopter, which are like capsules in comparison to the military men in the watchtower and the jets flying overhead. It is also about military and civilians occupying the same vast landscape. The military training entailed dropping bombs and civilians felt that if they did not hear the bomb then they were safe. The bombing at the end of the film [a rock is bombed during a military training exercise] is silent because this is something that I wanted the viewer to internalise, you could almost hear it even though there is no sound. The military activity is based another memory process, achieved through repetition and exercise, rehearsing. I was also exploring scale, the small personal radio in one of the buildings versus the large radio used by the military, and ranges, small interiors versus sweeping landscapes echoing in some senses the sweeping cultural memories.

SCT:Why did you choose the medium of film to investigate memory?

SI:Film is a segment of time, there is a definable length of, duration within that you can create a multi-layered space, layers of elements, a contestation of space and shifting intensities that creates an allusion.