Sharing Ideas in Distant Places

Visual artist OLWEN SHONE travelled to Bangalore, and discovered a world far removed from – and yet connected to – her home ground in North Uist, where the project began.

ARTISTS FROM Brazil, Argentina, India, South Africa, Japan, Nepal, Tibet, Cuba and Trinidad standing on the sand dunes looking with astonishment at the stunning landscape behind Newton House near my own house in Lochmaddy, North Uist.  It’s a memory that will stay with me.  The Triangle Trust artist’s residency, Comhla, was the first of its kind in Scotland and was an incredible event to have happened, particularly in our remote corner of Scotland, which became the stimulus for most of the work made there.
 

Four months on, and the communications between the artists taking part has led to myself setting up a short residency in Bangalore, in a place called ‘The Land’ run by an artists’ group called Labyrinth.  This is situated in a small village on the outskirts of Bangalore. The purpose of the residency was to further develop a film installation project called ‘Moving Images’ which will first be shown at the gallery ROOM in Bristol in May.
 

I passed many a family of five squashed onto the back of one small moped, and women in beautiful Saris sitting side-saddle on the back of them seemed to me the epitomy of elegance and then disappearing again, lost in all the dust and smog of the traffic.  The pollution from the petrol fumes is clearly a problem in Bangalore, as many people had masked their faces.
 

One of the arts projects currently underway is a campaign to bring new awareness of this problem to the local people through commissioning artists to decorate the public transport buses with artworks dealing with these issues.  Plans for a new underground train network are also in progress to help ease the weight of traffic.
 

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