Margaret Salmon, Cladach, 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

As part of the Margaret Tait 100 centenary celebrations, this special screening includes films by Margaret Tait and Margaret Salmon, both exploring coastal ecosystems.

Admission is Free

Margaret Salmon, Cladach (2018)
An observational portrait of a place, the shoreline of the Wester Ross Marine Protected Area, and the community bordering it in Ullapool. Town life and activities filmed provide an entrance into the rhythm of the local, and a space to allow different attitudes and ideas around coastal life to emerge. Following the shoreline as a point of meeting between worlds, Salmon seeks to connect nature and society mirroring the coastal town activities with underwater footage and lyrical sound recordings from above and below the water.

Margaret Tait, Orquil Burn (1955)
This film follows the course of an Orkney burn, from sea up to its source. Narrated by Tait, the film offers a wondrous portrait of a burn which ran past her uncle’s farm, intertwining her memories of the burn with the new sights and sounds she encountered while making the film.

“A poem started in words goes on in the picture; part of quite another (finished) poem is read for the last of the nine. Out of my own memory and thought, I find the external scenes to make a picture from.”

A burn in the Orkney Isles is followed

all the way from its last

waterfall over the

sea banks at Scapa

past distillery and farms

under bridges and

over waterwheels, through

its man-made diversions

and natural

vagaries to its

source

among the heather.

Flowers by the banks,

boys sailing boats,

animals on the farm

and the everlasting

dance and music of the water itself

are the stars.

— Margaret Tait, 1955

Margaret Salmon (b. 1975, New York) lives and works in Glasgow. Concerned with a shifting constellation of relations, such as those between camera and subject, human and animal, or autobiography and ethnography, Margaret Salmon’s films often examine the gendered, emotive dynamics of social interactions and representational forms. Salmon won the inaugural Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006, was recently shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2018 and the 2019 Margaret Tait Award.