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SPIRIT

SPIRIT: An Exhibition of Nature and Extinction Photography from the Scottish Small Isles

In February 2025, we organised a photography exhibition to showcase the results of the three photography workshops held in the Scottish Small Isles between 2022 and 2024. Here are some of the writings that accompany the photographs:

 

 

Amy Bartlett  

Passage  

I wonder if those who came before looked to the birds for meaning  

 

— to the trees, the clouds, the earth 

to the waves which carve odysseys into rock 

now trodden by scientists and writers and ants — 

 

shouting to the same old gods in a language I cannot know 

sputtering vowels and bitter consonants  

all of this wrong grammar spilling back into the sea  

where seals shift into myth and bone 

and make music out of seafoam  

whilst we cast meaning into their eyes from our place on the shore 

 

 

Sicily Fiennes 

Awe and Extinction 

As we coasted through the foggy waters of western Scotland, it had me pondering my biases toward the natural world. Until now, the indescribable awe of seeing a rare seabird or a cheeky cetacean friend such as a common dolphin or minke whale is incomparable to seeing an unusual plant or lichen. I’m as guilty of this as the next person; I’m a recovering conservation biologist who’d probably feel more suited to the field of political ecology by now. However, many people in their natant discipline of conservation biology have made the awkward and uncomfortable divorce from an area so intimately rooted in colonialism and whiteness.  

Some wildlife I’d only seen for the first time during this trip. Even though I know not everyone finds extinction sad, I couldn’t help but feel a deep sadness and loss that I might never see a golden eagle again or watch a pair of otters frolic in molten waters in the morning sun.  

To quote J. Drew Lanham from an article in Orion Magazine: ‘Humans have always looked skyward for inspiration, imagining themselves unbound by gravity or the weight of oppression. Flight means freedom.’  

When I look up to the sky and catch sight of a bird, something lights up inside me: awe, joy, a separation from our stressful existence. A recent study from the University of Sheffield warns of the homogenization of diversity – species becoming more alike. It is thought that for birds, we’ll see more boring species as we lose the more striking, awe-inspiring birds. To begin with, this revelation felt bland, colourless and full of grief. However, after gaining a more intimate understanding of photography from this trip to Scotland, I indulged in the glory of taking a picture of what I might have previously considered mundane; a rock, a small piece of lichen, my dark reflection in a rockpool or a simple daisy.  

On this trip, we had many discoveries of lichen, fungi and what we thought was a sighting of the elusive slime mould. I crept on my stomach along some stones to take what felt like a treacherous photo of two mating dragonflies. I was absolutely mesmerized by them; what I’ve learnt most is to follow your individual curiosity; your perspective will be different to everyone else. That difference is what I think makes photography so nice as a research practice in itself. 

 

Published as part of the Land Lines project, https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/awe-and-extinction-by-sicily-fiennes/ 

 

 

Anisha Gamblin 

Minke Whale Skull  

We were quite taken aback after discovering this. The whale's rotting carcass was found a few metres away from the skull, washed up on the rocks on the Isle of Muck. At first, I was overwhelmed with sadness at the sight. The smell was also horrific - it was definitely a moment of sensory overload! Somehow the whale's head had been removed from the body (we weren't entirely sure how), but unlike the body, the skull had been completely stripped of its flesh and had only a few scraps of seaweed and debris attached to it. At the risk of sounding too macabre, it was interesting to see the difference between the whale's head and body, which had been eroding across different timescales by the sea and the sand. Ultimately, the whale's remains were now slowly assimilating into the landscape, its body lying bleached and weathered among the rocks. 

 

Rachel Grandey 

Footprints, Midas Touch, Ghosts 

 

Footprints 

Sand through an hourglass, the shore a transient palimpsest 

Shards left behind 

Marks washed away, cleansed by the tide. 

 

Midas Touch 

Kelp a carpet of gold 

Sleeping dragons lie under the water 

Cloud-forest kingdom below 

Tread lightly through air not your own. 

 

Ghosts 

Skuas glide, Terns wheel, Curlews call 

Harrier ghosts over barbed-wire horizon 

Eagle-down trapped in tight-fist fronds 

Dances, luminous, on the sea breeze. 

 

Gannet-skull stares empty-eyed at empty sky 

From its nestled perch: a dry stone wall. 

Death-pellet, tombstone of beetles’ wings. 

Iridescence a form of resurrection. 

 

 

Alfie Howard 

Earthworks 

A tiny life is quietly entombed, 

Concretion ’round a body now unknown. 

An ancient mollusc, rotting through the years, 

Made earthworks, ramparts cutting through the stone. 

The carcass of a boat with missing ribs 

Lies rusting, ghostly in the light of day; 

And like the ruined croft upon the shore, 

A lobster cage’s turquoise ropes decay. 

The nettles and the colonising swamp 

Consume its buckled frame, and through the rust 

The ox-eye daisies dance, and on the beach 

The dead are shot then slowly turn to dust. 

And all of us that live are vital grime 

Concreting on the battlements of time. 

 

For many people, the appeal of western Scotland and the Hebrides lies in the idea of wilderness – of pristine natural landscapes, craggy mountains and remote beaches untouched by human feet. Like most places with this reputation, western Scotland and the Hebrides have been inhabited by humans for several thousand years, and most of the islands that we visited still have permanent populations. The photogenic concretions in the Bay of Laig, for example, are only a few hundred metres from a church, a post box and a tea shop that acts as a collection point for the wonderful Eigg taxi service. 

On these islands and peninsulas, it is difficult to escape the evidence of conflict – conflict between humans and non-humans, in the form of the old lobster traps, scuppered fishing boats and working trawlers; and conflict between humans and other humans, in the form of Bronze Age fortifications and – much younger, though they don’t look it – the remains of homes that were abandoned during the Highland Clearances. These lands are undoubtedly beautiful, but they are not pristine, nor are they untouched by humans. 

And anyway, it would be impossible for me to take a picture of a place where there were no humans, because I myself am a human, and I would be there, taking the picture. To get the photographs shown here, I rode over the waves on a motorboat, trampled across heather, scrambled over barnacles. I didn’t just have to be there to take these pictures; I had to get there, and that is an act in itself. In searching for a wilderness that doesn’t exist, we can forget who we are and what we are doing. That is one of the greatest dangers of the modern world. 

There is another image, taken on the final full day of the trip, which I tried to incorporate into the poem above, but I couldn’t do it in a way that didn’t feel contrived or nonsensical. The image is of a white horse standing on a beach on the Isle of Muck, where the sand and seaweed-covered rocks meet the bright blue water. There was something strangely calming about seeing it. Not that the horse necessarily looked friendly – in fact, all my photos of it were taken with maximum zoom, as I was reluctant to get too close. But it looked quite content, standing at the intersection of sand, stone and sea. It wasn’t somewhere you would expect to see a horse, but there it was, being a horse. Of course, I’m projecting; perhaps it wasn’t content at all. But it was certainly beautiful. 

 

 

Jenny Kennedy  

Microcosms 

The beach at Pabay is a montage of colours. There are thousands upon thousands of shells, from the earthy reds of what were once snails to the chalky white of clams’ husks. And it was here that I spent an entire morning, entranced by the many patterns – smooth spirals, curling contours and sharp lines. 

Scotland’s west coast landscape was as I imagined – deep narrow inlets bounded by jagged mountains. It was not for the lack of material and inspiration that I failed to capture the true vivacity of the Scottish landscape. Rather, a lack of experience, equipment and skill rendered my images flat. Abandoning the idea of capturing the perfect panoramic image, I turned my attention to miniature landscapes. Focusing on the rich minutiae that I had often overlooked, I spent my time concerned with the smallest details. 

On Pabay, there was so much natural detritus the sea had washed up. The many shells that had once been part of living creatures, some of which had eked out an existence in the ocean’s depths while others traversed the shoreline. Photographing them, I saw not only the husk of an animal, but I also imagined what they once were, how they might have moved, and where in the ocean they might have lived.  

Other debris came in the form of washed-up seaweed in earthy colours of red, orange and brown. One piece of seaweed, burnt orange, was punctuated with specks of red and had a fleshy appearance that resembled the jaw or tail of some strange mythical sea creature. 

On one of the Scottish Small Isles, Eigg, I encountered glaring green seaweed juxtaposed with rock formations covered in patches of yellow and orange lichen and asymmetrical patterns, giving an otherworldly appearance. And there was so much to see within this landscape – impressions of the earth’s past in the form of a shark fin fossil; testaments to life’s dynamism in the multitude of rocks pools that teemed with life; and reminders of death’s place within the cycle of our existence as seen in animal remains. For some, animal skeletons are an ugly aspect of a landscape that should be ignored. For me, they are a potential subject, even in their grotesquery. And although the seabird I captured likely died of natural causes, photographing its carcass reminded me of the ongoing avian flu, which has been hitting seabirds hard and causing devastation in several important colonies in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. 

Throughout the week, I learned how to use my camera. I played clumsily with aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Imperfectly, I practised how to arrange and capture the visual elements in my frame. I learned how to study detail, appreciate it, and attempt to capture it. But mostly, I learned how to see microcosms that often go unnoticed. 

Published as part of the Land Lines project, https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/microcosms-by-jenny-kennedy/ 

 

 

Abby Meyer 

Palimpsest 

There is a language in the lichens here: 

the yellow rings on basalt stacks. 

 

Lines to follow in the deer tracks, 

mountains, bays and columns, 

of Rum, Canna, Muck and Eigg. 

If this landscape is written over 

and over, neither whale-stench, 

 

nor wildcat, nor little ringed plover 

leave without trace. Even trees 

 

are photographed stills of wind. 

 

The white markings of the eagle 

read like a sacred text. 

 

The elements of the landscape that I took photographs of were the ones that made me feel something. Neither photographers, nor researchers in general are neutral observers, but active participants with our own thoughts, feelings and biases, which impact what we choose to include in the frame. I was most interested in the clear, visual relationships between the different elements of the landscape: a stone cottage overgrown with moss, a blue lump of plastic made smooth like the stones around it, or lines of seaweed following the outline of rocks. As a group, we discussed the metaphor of landscape as a “palimpsest” (Schein, 1997, p. 622) – a text that has been written over and over – continuously changing as it is shaped and reshaped by various actors. I am also part of the landscape. I shape it and am shaped by it. At Gallanach Bay on the Isle of Muck, we saw a dead minke whale. I grappled with the idea of photographing this beautiful animal in its decaying form, but felt that what is left out of the frame is as deliberate a choice as what goes into it. When you are on a beach with a whale corpse, it is hard to forget it for more than a moment, before the wind blows its smell towards you again. It doesn’t matter if you turn away from the sight – your experience of the landscape can’t help but be affected by it. Neither can you. Landscape is not just affected, it affects. It is capable of provoking the kind of intensity of feeling that compels people to think or act differently, or even just to take a photograph. This is difficult to capture, but I enjoyed trying. 

References 

Schein, R. H. 1997. The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87(4), pp. 660–680. 

 

 

Sarah Oakes 

Salmon Farm, Muc 

Industrial farming models are dependent on the ecosystem services provided by natural environments. When delicately balanced ecosystems are upset by human-induced activities like the dumping of waste and overfishing, the impacts are widespread. Salmon farming in the area has recently been devastated by jellyfish attacks, seen by environmentalists like Dale Vince, eco-industrialist and founder of the Green Britain Foundation as: “the latest example of how the fish farming industry is failing to cope with environmental challenges. We routinely see them using the land and sea as a sewer for their toxic business, and now nature is fighting back. 

Basalt Columns, Canna 

Basalt column cliffs tower above the crystalline waters of Canna in the Scottish Small Isles. Sun and shadow animate rock formations, and the emerging faces that appear and disappear allow viewers a new perspective on living history.  

Boulders on Bàgh Rubha Mhoil Ruaidh, Rùm 

The lack of human residents leaves space for other residents to flourish, like the lichen formations we see here on these millennia old boulders, a merging of past and present life forms.  

 

 

Jon Roberts 

Small Isles Sounds 

As this exhibition shows, observing and engaging creatively with a landscape can generate knowledge which both enriches and challenges knowledge generated by traditional monodisciplinary approaches. This is true of both visual and sonic approaches. As you walk round the exhibition you will hear a mixture of field recordings and music. Both explore the places and landscapes of the Small Isles, in different ways.  Three of these tracks were improvised in the Small Isles, as I responded to the sounds and landscapes around me. Others were recorded later, as reflections on the places and experiences of the trop, and as attempts to encapsulate some of those places. 

All the recordings are mine, except for 'Gallanach Bay' I and II and 'Duet with the Sea' which were recorded by Tom Jackson; and 'Shearwater Rising' which was co-written and co-produced by Bayun the Cat (Dmitry Postalov), with bodhrán by Connail. 

If you would like to listen to the recordings, they can be found on my Harebells and Heather album. 

 

The Entangling Sea 

Travelling across Knoydart and the Small Isles by boat – the Mary Doune, skippered by Andy and Dave – is a powerful reminder that the sea has always been a pathway. The roads, where they exist, wind their leisurely way around bays and headlands, but the boat takes the more direct path across the waves. Travelling by boat from the coastal hamlet of Doune to ruined crofts and ancient brochs lends an immediacy to the knowledge that the sea links each bay and islet along the coast.  

The sea not only enabled our travel, but also shaped our routes. Some days, with the wind against us, we were forced to abandon our plans and choose from among the possible routes which the sea had gifted us. 

The sea is an ecosystem; it is the entanglement and interaction of countless organisms, some too small to see, some as dramatic as the dolphins who sported in the waves as they investigated the Mary Doune. The sea, and the chemicals and organisms that compose it, shaped our journeys and experiences, just as it shaped the forms of the fragments of driftwood and smooth pebbles we met with on the beach. 

The sea reaches across time. Those fragments of driftwood, shaped by the organisms that fed on them and the sea that bleached and eroded them, tied us to the time of their abandonment to the waves. The crofts, now entangled in the most physical sense with the roots of heather and bracken reaching through their ruin, linked us to the history of the crofters. The trauma of the crofters, forced from their homes and betrayed by their chiefs, seemed embodied in the croft’s lonely forms and empty doorways, sheltering plants and insects as they endlessly awaited the return of those whom they were built to shelter. 

The sea too reflected a profound sense of loss. Just as the empty houses signified lost people and a lost way of life, we marvelled at the wildlife – shearwaters, dolphins, gannets, whales – in an awareness that the populations of many of the species we admired were crashing. There was a time when people might not have shared our giddy excitement at seeing whales and eagles, and there may yet come a time when visitors will, in our guide Colin’s phrase, ‘be excited to see a seagull’. The sea became a mirror, reflecting back our sense of loss on a dying planet, just as the ruined crofts reflected the loss of human communities, linking us to pasts and possible futures through mournful absence and joyful presence. 

The soundscape of the sea linked us too to everyone across time and space who has listened to the roll of rocks drawn across the beach, the playful splashing of the waves among the boulders, the trill of the oystercatcher and the cry of the gull. The music of the birds is instinctual, but also chosen; the birds choose when to call just as the musician chooses when to play, and the rolling of the waves and the rushing of the wind complete the soundscape. Speculation is not history, but it is tempting to imagine seafarers through the ages listening to past iterations of this multispecies music, unique in every moment, composed on the fly by a different cast of individuals and species each day. 

The seafarers left their marks on land and sea, in burial mounds of Viking kings as in rotting lobsterpots and abandoned rope. Each of these has been colonised by other species; barnacles and bracken exploiting the habitat which humans have left them. Each heather-clad croft, now hosting bees and butterflies, stands testament to the entanglement of human and nonhuman. 

We participated in our own, rather less romantic, entanglements with the ticks and midges, whose bites physically connected us not only to themselves, but also to the deer and sheep on which they normally fed. We crafted our own host-parasite interactions, as we adopted increasingly rigorous attempts to foil their feeding as the week wore on – that failed to entirely prevent their biting but certainly created new challenges for our unlooked-for companions.  

The sea, the ruins, the wildlife and the parasites: each entangled us, reaching across time, space and species, as we explored our place in a world of encounter and interaction. Throughout it all, the entangling sea carried us onwards, and we watched what the waves would show us. 

 

 

Kate Simpson 

Standing on the shore of Tarbet Bay, on the Isle of Canna, on 2 August 2023, my coordinates, as ever, were not only geographic, but temporal. I was 57.05684°N, 6.55186°W, but I was also, in the Holocene epoch, within the Cenozoic era, within the Phanerozoic eon, part of the Homo sapiens. I was photographing basalts formed in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a major warming event that lasted approximately 100,000 years, some 55.8 million years ago, extinguishing nearly half of all benthic foraminifera (single-celled planktonic animals crucial to the health of marine food chains).  

The images stay close to their subject – cropping sea and sky from the frame, as well as footprints and other anthropogenic detritus. I document my remote relationship with an inaccessible geological time that both pervades and eludes the picture. These photographs, whilst shaping mine and the viewer’s “reach”, also highlight negative truths about a temporally specific world. I consider all the details I chose to omit, the larger geological structures beyond the lens, and all those I couldn’t help but omit in a still visual medium, modelled on the human eye. In these images, I inadvertently exclude the rapid cooling of lava, and the eventual columnar jointing of its resting structure. I exclude the causes behind a warming event, the volcanic eruptions, a global release of greenhouse gases, and concurrent species death. I exclude the causes, and include, only, the effect – only the remnants of the effect.  

I consider the words of art critic John Berger, who writes, in Ways of Seeing (1972) that “[w]e only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. As a result of this act, what we see is brought within our reach.” The final frames reveal truths about our species’ limited spatio-temporality. As we consider extinctions of the past, and those yet to come, these images “detect” a flattened, temporal view, and the “indetectable”: the threads that invisibly bind our actions and landscapes through time. I am reminded of the chronological bias that informs our thinking, and, in turn, our destructive behaviour, living in short-term human time, as opposed to deep time. These photographs consider the impossibility of an omnipresent, all-encompassing perspective, and acknowledge the longer autobiography of the Earth.  

See also Simpson K. E.. ‘clocks replaced with     :        ;       . [Deschooling Time in the Small Isles]’, Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, 2024, http://doi.org/10.1017/ext.2024.6.  

 

 

Serena Turton-Hughes 

Photography as a Tool for Enhanced Interactions 

Awe. I struggle to think of aperture or composition, or what to cut out of the frame. I am overwhelmed. “Look for what speaks to you.” It is good advice. What if everything speaks to you? What if the mountains sing and the lichens chime and the moon calls you onwards and gives you butterflies? Which stories do I choose to tell? What do I cut out of shot? 

I start with the stories moving in slower time, akin to Roy’s (2017) ‘tree time’: I fill my camera lens with lichen near the shore’s edge. Crustose lichens grow slowly, perhaps 1mm a year (Gilbert, 2004), living in a timescale even slower than tree time, not as incomprehensible as deep time. Lichen time is incremental and long: It grows old, living here for hundreds of years. Around it, violent changes in weather, coastal erosion processes, people. It lives as fungi and algae in symbiosis on this rock throughout it all. I choose the photo where the fruticose lichen looks strong and wizened. 

We move locations and it is raining. Bad for camera lenses, great for lichen. I spot lichen with huge lobes, a striking feature in the miniature landscapes on tree trunks and rocks. This is a lungwort lichen: In south-east Britain, lungwort lichens experience regional extinction. Here, the air remains clean enough, the lichens resist extinction.  

I resist the urge to move. Examining intermingled mosses and lichen, looking for those that speak to me, forces me to quiet and slow down. Not quite to lichen time, but enough to spend time with the lichen and stroke the mosses. I interact with lichen in this time. Showering ‘green walls’ (Knapp, 2019) in attention and taking tens of photos, I hope to frame the individuals and community as stars of the show. 

I slip out of my lichen time. I do battle with my labelling brain: ownership and power. My untrained eye is tempted to label ‘wilderness’. To equate awe with ‘untouched by humans’. Our skipper for the week tells me that the original inhabitants of Doune Knoydart were forced from the land in 1853. I learn, piece by piece, of The Clearances. From Andy’s snippets and a little reading on the side, I come to realise we might now term The Highland Clearances a cultural extinction: Gaelic banned from schools; clan leaders kept purposefully busy away from their people; the ejection of those living on the land for centuries in favour of sheep farming; and pieces of ‘legal’ paperwork to say a wealthy man truly owns that land. I am reminded of terra nullius in colonial Australia, a term used to claim land without inhabitants, empty land.  

Except it wasn’t empty or unmanaged. I am reminded of The Nutmeg’s Curse (Ghosh, 2021) and the repeat pattern of colonisation, still occurring. Andy tells me they found bloodstone arrowheads on Rum dated back 7,000 years. Jon and I explore an abandoned dwelling on the hillside of Loch Hourn. A long history of human entanglements. Now time: I choose to keep the canoe in my shot. 

I flit between now time and slow, careful attention. I increasingly turn towards trying to show more-than human agency: the power of lichens as pioneer species; birds bringing treasures, foreign invaders, nutrients and noise. I watch a group of oystercatchers, their cries like squeaky dog toys; their run, comedic. Now time: I capture a shot of two birds, taking flight after I startled them. I wonder at photography as interspecies interaction. 

On the Isle of Rùm, I hunt for the less-noticed, my back to the sea and the picture-postcard views. I find slime, several species enmeshed within. I poke it. I know what it’s not, but I don’t know what it is. Friendly enthusiasts in an online community group point me to it, with the help of my photographs: Nostoc, cyanobacteria. I wonder at photography as a web of interactions with enthusiasts.  

I pay more attention to excrement as a playful way to say this place is more than pristine, more than ownership, and more than human-managed. I include dung in my visual messages, cut into the shot. I find fruiting fungi. I wonder at the power of the camera as a way to enhance interaction with harder-to-spot species, showcasing the liveliness of excrement and soil. I remember the recently discovered fungi in Cairngorm soils (Mackenzie, 2022) and wonder how much is yet undiscovered. 

Jellyfish and ctenophores surface: reminders of other worlds I am blind to. Atlantic coral flung to a grassy headland of Muck. How much we’ll never know.  

I look for the entanglements of species with one another: life brought by decaying corpses of the recently deceased. The flashes of orange and black as carrion beetles get to work on a lifeless badger, not so lifeless. 

I try to take a shot from the perspective of a snail. 

Awe. I struggle to think of aperture or composition, or what to cut out of the frame. I am overwhelmed. “Look for what speaks to you.” What if everything speaks to you? It seems interacting with more than humans is where powerful entanglements happen and connections grow. Interaction brings mosses out of the ‘green wall’; lungworts out of epibionts. Stroke that moss, photograph that lichen. Trying to identify mystery species, with the aid of my camera, I become more invested in communities of enthusiasts, located around the world, connected in joys of fungi, lichens, and mosses. Extinction of experience (Pyle, 1993) leads to ceased opportunities for live, organic interactions, personal to the individual: a loss for both sides. Interaction resists muteness, allowing a degree of agency on both sides. For me, it seems photography enhances interactions. Providing I can find what speaks to me. 

References 

Ghosh, A. (2021). The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. University of Chicago Press. 

Gilbert, O. L. (2004). Lichens: Naturally Scottish. Scottish Natural Heritage. 

Knapp, S. (2019). Are humans really blind to plants? Plants, People, Planet, 1(3), 164–168. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.36 

Mackenzie, L. (2022, July 14). Never seen before and ‘unknown to science’ fungus is discovered in the Cairngorms. Herald Scotland.https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/20275319.new-species-fungus-unknown-science-found-cairngorm-mountains/ 

Pyle, R. M. (1993). The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland. Houghton Mifflin.  

Roy, S. (2017). How I Became a Tree. Rupa Publications. 

Published as part of the Land Lines project, https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/photography-as-a-tool-for-enhanced-interactions-by-serena-turton-hughes/  

 

 

Pip Wilson 

Haunting the Small Isles  

We haunt the landscape long after we are gone.  

We are there in the marks left on the sand,  

the bodies left behind,  

and the life that continues…  

 

This is our Spirit.  

 

You have an impression of us; you know we were here.  

Some of you may care;  

that we are gone.  

May preserve what remains of us,  

out of love for what you have lost,  

wonderment for what we once were,  

in grief, determine that life must flourish again.  

 

We are still here.  

Our spirit lingers in these open places.  

Our life lingers too,  

clinging to the rocks, the waves, and paths…  

 

To you.  

 

This collection of photographs seeks to represent what is left behind. After death, after extinction, after change. Much has changed in these isles over the centuries. Different peoples have come and gone. Some migrated in and out again, some forced from the land, and yet more moved on by climate change and habitat loss. This has brought about much change. And yet the past is always present with us. A ruined house; a monument to human loss. The imprint of a jelly fish on the shore; a reminder of an individual’s death. The empty sea; a solemn silence for our impact on our land and seascapes. These things pull the past not just into the present, but also the future. They affect our choices and how we understand ourselves and others. They are a spirit haunting the Small Isles, through both beauty and precarity calling us to engage with them, to chart a future together. A spirit for today and tomorrow.  

 

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Materials from the trips to the Scottish Small Isles have also been published as: 

Alfie Howard, MT Talensby, Jon Roberts, Sicily Fiennes, Lydia Woods, Serena Turton-Hughes, and Jenny Kennedy (2023), ‘Extinction in the Small Isles’, photo blog, Land Lines Project, https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/extinction-in-the-small-isles-2/. 

Roberts, J.D., Stirbyte, A., Prosser, K., Simpson, K., Bartlett, A.J., Brown, T., Oakes, S., (2025, in press), ‘Extinction Studies in Focus: Reflections on Photography at a Time of Ecological Decline’, Cambridge Prisms: Extinction, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-prisms-extinction 

 

The fieldwork trips were led by landscape photographer Colin Prior. The exhibition was curated by Tom Jackson and produced by Thea Pitman.