PEOPLE ON the land make and tell things that are thousands of years young. People on the sea are the same. The Flow Country to the west is unique in the entire world and bird life and land wildlife is so special that nobody in Caithness pays much attention to it.
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Heritage? Standing stones in virtually every field, archaeology that is so unique but accessible that many special sites haven’t even been labelled or excavated. Stone Age. Iron Age. Pict. Gael. Viking.
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Katrina has accomplished a lot and feels there is a long way to go, with future projects ranging from glass and song, to orchestral music and heritage projects. Katrina has a musician’s perspective on this challenge.
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“The most important thing I learned at the Royal Academy of Music was how to play at the same time as listening across the orchestra. This is a surprisingly transferable and useful skill for this job as a co-ordinator. I’m always listening - to artists, to teachers, to children and occasionally even to bosses, while I get on with the job in hand.”
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Caithness is described in many ways, but “crossroads” is one that needs some explanation. It was and is the centre of a sea empire, in fact “south” of many lively places, including Orkney and Norway. Some people hurry through Caithness in order to get to the mountains of Sutherland or the sites of Orkney, but a surprising number of musicians, artists and arts companies want to come here as a destination in itself.
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So bringing culture in, from the time of the Vikings onward, is not a problem. Locally, we now have this opportunity for a worthwhile programme that could depend almost entirely on co-ordinating the schools with what is happening in Caithness and bringing it into the schools as talks, workshops, and events.
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I have to get personal for a minute. I grew up in post-war working- class Canada. My father was a motorcycle mechanic, my grandfather a wheat farmer. I would never think of their immense intelligence and heritage as culture. If “culture” ever lived anywhere near, I never knew it.
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Yet, this is the case anywhere that is far from the centres of “power”. There are many remarkable individuals in Caithness who could be figures of international renown for their knowledge and remarkable skills. Their friends and neighbours don’t see them as culture though they are genuine representatives of it. Katrina Gordon’s real job is probably just to remind people that their own culture is abundant, right here and now.
Tom Bryan is the Arts Development Officer for Caithness.
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© Tom Bryan, 2003 |
