Whichever Way the Wind Blows, an Installation by Hugh Watt will be exhibited at An Tobar on the Isle of Mull from 8 April – 4 May 2005.

The  installation being shown in Gallery I draws upon artist Hugh Watt’s interest in isolated remote, coastal areas. Whichever Way the Wind Blows consists of three pieces of work using the mediums of super 8, 16 mm film and digital video work. This work articulates the artist’s concerns re our understanding of time and space.

“Places in Mind”, is a floor projection which takes the viewer to the land’s edge.. It gives the impression of the tides flooding in from under the wall of the gallery, as if to steal back that which was it’s own. Separation and enclosure, within this space, projects nature as hypnotic and soothing as well as that of a threat.

‘Lookout Post’, is a 16mm black and white film of an abandoned building supposedly used as a lookout post during the Second World War, on the west coast of Ireland. “I moved the camera slowly around the lookout post observing, that which observes”. The audience become the last in a long line of observers.

 ‘Whichever Way the Wind Blows’, is shown on a post card size LCD screen. Shot from a fixed point of view using a super 8 camera, a windsock continually indicates the direction of the wind in poor winter light. For the artist the winds which move the windsock were the same winds as those which would have carried the native not only outward but also back to a place of origin and thus changing their understanding of that place and tradition they belong to.

With this installation the artist wants to use the individual works and the dialogues that operates between them to describe, a relationship to time and space, where a sense of place is in part defined through that which is missing rather than that which now exists.

For more information contact Lee Hendrick on 01688 302211 arts@antobar.co.uk
www.antobar.co.uk