Heading Norse

By Greg Thomas, 09.10.2023

Ebbe + Flow box, Box installed in MOCA Dunoon photo courtesy of David Faithfull

Alastair Noble and Kathy Bruce’s whimsically named Dunoon MOCA is a small, beautifully presented gallery for text-art and visual poetry located in a former shop-front in Dunoon. Since it opened last year, it has exhibited artists’ books, miniature sculptural tableaux in matchboxes, hanging paper-boat mobiles, and more. Earlier this year it welcomed David Faithfull and Imi Maufe’s (w)ORD EBBE + FLOW, a touring sea-chest of wonders. Featuring works by nine artists based in Scotland and Norway, each piece unfurls from a bespoke compartment in the custom-made wooden box that stores them. I caught up with David after visiting the show on a sunny, late-summer day on the Firth of Clyde to talk trade winds, the Nordic inheritance, and dragging flags over the earth.

GT: How did the idea for a group show connecting up Scottish and Norwegian artists come about?

DF: I’m the Scotland-based curator and Imi is an artist based in Bergen and the Norwegian curator. We’ve known each other for a long time and our practices have overlapped in the past through printmaking and artists’ books. It was in 2017 whilst I was on a residency at Bergen Ateliergruppe (BAG) Art Camp when we decided to launch a collaborative project, with the Society for Scottish Artists as a promoter in Scotland and BAG supporting us in Norway. Imi and I selected the Norwegian artists during my initial residency in 2017 and the Scottish artists from the 2018 SSA annual show in Edinburgh.

Initially, we had the idea of doing two new residencies. We hosted the first at a remote cottage on Mull in 2018. We met linguists, geologists, seafarers, naturalists, people like that—got guided tours around the landscapes and got to know the terrain culturally, historically, botanically, etcetera. The next year the Norwegians reciprocated. We went to a similarly isolated property at Tjuvika, near the old Viking parliament at Gulen, where they would have made decisions to raid places like Iona Abbey, right near our Mull site. So that was quite an interesting connection! There was no specific work produced on the residencies, but we decided shortly afterwards it would be worth trying to bring something together as a group.

GT: How did you seize on the idea of a portable show in a box?

DF: The idea of the box was based on traditional chests that we’d found in both residency spaces. We loved the idea of a seaman’s chest full of art: a travelling box, drifting with the tides from east to west, with the flotsam and jetsam of trade, culture, language....I’d say Imi and I are both influenced by things like Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise, that idea of a miniature, travelling museum. We also liked the idea of not just presenting things in a book or gallery setting, but providing something tactile that people could interact with, and not in a white-gloves kind of way.

We got the box custom-made and screen-printed in Dundee. The top forms a display case when it opens up and it has all these hidden storage areas for the work. Imi and I spent a lot of time designing it during lockdown. We had the idea during the residency that each artist would have a space in the box, and depending on the size of the gallery, more or fewer things come out. Dunoon MOCA is quite a small space so there is a smaller selection on show. But for bigger exhibitions, like the one we did at USF, the United Sardine Factory in Bergen in 2021, we were able to display everything.

The format of the box means works can unfold, as it were, in interesting ways. For example, one of the artists, Calum Wallis, has these tightly rolled canvases that stuff into one of the storage spaces but unfold into these massive hangings, which are now at the back of Dunoon MOCA. During both residencies he dragged these heavy canvases across the landscape everywhere he went, recording the routes while picking up all the mud, cow-muck, seaweed stains, etcetera.

GT: The name of the show is a little linguistic riddle. Where did that come from?

DF: Well, we had this phrase “ebb and flow” in our heads. And neatly, “ebb” in Norwegian is “ebbe,” and “flow” is “flo,” so by adding an e and a w, standing for “east” and “west,” we were able to switch each word from one language into the other, as it were. It works typographically and we prefaced it with (w)ORD, encompassing “ord,” the Norwegian for “word.”

GT: Tell us about some of the works in the show.

DF: It’s interesting sending these works across the sea, as we have done for the shows in Norway, because some are quite fragile! I have carved a piece of cannel coal into a symbolic stag’s horn and for another I’ve carved a wooden bottle with contour lines on it. Imi has been working with monoprints, using the surface oil on the peat bogs in Scotland transforming these glistening surface into a textured iron toned book.

Other people are working more with language. Rhona Fleming was interested in the names of all the oil rigs located between Norway and Scotland: Goldeneye, Fulmar, and so on. They all have these lovely bird names. Sarah Jost is looking at the mis-identity of plants across Norse, English, and Latin, how the names for different plants merge and diverge.

And then others are interested in boats. David Lemm’s wooden constructions are all based on the superstructure of oil tankers and cargo boats. He’s created a type of font from the securing, tie-shaped bits of metal on the decks, almost like runes. Randi Anni Strand has been looking at the shape of birlinn boats, creating wooden carvings that emulate the clinker-built design. And Marit Tunestveit Dyre is working with nautical symbols, making semaphore flags. She’s also made a lovely film where she stood on a promontory with a head torch, turning round as the sun went down to turn herself into a kind of human lighthouse.

John MacLeod has made these things he calls quid squills, wooden sculptures based on the shape of the cuttle-fish bone inside a squid. It’s to do with the use of notched objects in Inuit culture which tell you where the next bay or hunting spot is as you’re travelling, a kind of tactile map.

GT: Where have you been with the show and where are you heading next?

DF: We showed at a few venues in Norway in 2021, including the United Sardine Factory, BAG and Galleri Rustica in Frekhaug, then we headed to Scotland for shows at An Tobar on Mull, the SSA in Edinburgh, Taigh Chearsabhagh on North Uist, and Grinneabhat on Lewis over 2022-23. We’re going to Duncan of Jordanstone College next, for the Festival of the Future, and then finally up to Shetland Museums for the Up Helly Aa in January, which bring it neatly full circle, as it all started at the Viking parliament and finishes with a Viking Fire Festival!

See (w)ORD EBBE + FLOW at the Duncan of Jordanstone College’s Festival of the Future, which runs between the 11^th-15^th October