Wednesday 19 March 2014

Why I'm concentrating on the good things

This year, there are lots of thoughts flying around about what it means to be Scottish. I'm English by birth, but I've lived in Scotland for nearly 23 years and I class myself as a Scottish artist. It's a strange mixture: this notion of feeling Scottish, but not being Scottish, and it's one that all immigrants have to live with. 

Patriotism is something that I've always been intrigued by. I was a teenager in the cynical 1980's, so it was a very influential time for. The national front was on one side declaiming what they thought it was to be English, and the 'lefties' were on the other side, regretting everything England had done to the world (and the rest of Britain) for the last 500 years.

I veered towards the left's version, and by the time I left to study photography in Edinburgh I had very little patriotism for England. I still love to see the pride that Scotland, Wales and Ireland have for their countries, and I still wish that I had that pride too. So, even though I have a deep-rooted love of Scotland and Scottish culture, I will never have the same degree of in-your-bones patriotism that the Scottish-born have.

All this is a very longwinded way of saying that I love Scolawi  explores the love that people have for their country. The project is about looking at the great things in life, and wanting to share those great things with a completely different culture on the other side of the world. My own artwork will be complementary to the community aspect, and will portray what I love about each country, both pictorially and culturally.

There is a lot of hate in this world, but there is also a lot of love. Hate and violence often comes about through fear of difference, and fear of the unknown. The best way I can find to combat this hate is to create links between the love.
It's a start.

It is a total chance that I'm doing this project in such a momentous year for Scotland. I originally planned to go out to Malawi in October 2013, but realised it would be cloudy and I need sun to take my pictures (October is the start of the rainy season). Sometimes serendipity happens, and it feels like the timing of this project is just right.

Thursday 6 March 2014

Why I Love Scolawi

Choosing A Name

One thing I find very difficult is creating names for my projects, and I spent an awful long time coming up with this one. When you consider that my last project went untitled at exhibition, and even now sits on my website uninspiringly called 'Falkland Estate' you can recognise the efforts I've gone to for I Love Scolawi.

As this project started to get bigger, I realised that I needed to give the project a catchy name that would grab peoples attention, intrigue them, and make them want to know more
(congratulations on being these people!).

There are many strands to this project, and I wanted the project title  to represent the whole ethos of the project: to show a sense of equality and unity, to link the two cultures together, and to show people's patriotism. I also wanted the title to convey that both countries were equal in the project, and they both had something to offer.

My first attempt centred around using a word like 'unity' written in both English and Chichewa (Malawi's official language). This was inspired by the credits for the TV series 'The Bridge' whose title is 'Broen:Bron' - the Danish and Swedish words for Bridge.

Unfortunately I didn't speak Chichewa, and was also told that there was unlikely to be a direct one word translation for such words, as the language is very descriptive. This was a bit of a blow, so I ignored the problem hoping that inspiration would strike, and I wouldn't have to put a lot of effort in.

No such luck. So I decided to ask the fans of my Red Cabin Studio Facebook page. They were wonderful, and gave me lots of new ideas to play around with including Loch Malawi which I liked a lot. To emphasise the links between Scotland and Malawi, Loch Malawi became Loch Malawi I Presume? This still makes me laugh, but I didn't know how many people in Scotland would have heard of Lake Malawi, and it didn't give any inkling into what the project was about.

By this stage things were getting a bit desperate. On my first funding application form  I was stumped by the first question: What is the name of your project? So Bill (husband) and I sat down for a brainstorming session.

We went through lots of ideas, and came up with some hilarious titles - none of which have survived unfortunately. At one point we started playing around with the words Scotland and Malawi, and mixing them together .

Malaland just sounded odd, but Scotlawi felt like it had possibilities. Saying it out loud made me realise that it was quite difficult to say, but I really wanted both countries to have four letters in the  amalgamated word.

Gradually I realised that this was a stupid thing to cling onto, and I would need to get rid of either the L or the T. Scolawi sounded better than Scotawi.

The I Love prefix was inspired by the I [insert city/country name here] tee shirts and mugs and other tourist tat. On the advice of my teenage daughter, I tried to call the project I Scolawi for a while to be a little 'cooler' but I very quickly got annoyed with it, so went back to I Love Scolawi.

As I mentioned at the start, I really struggle to create names for my projects. If you have any ideas that might help me, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks