The Sound of
Taransay was my art college degree film and it really
split audiences at the time. They either loved or hated it.
It was a film that was designed for broadcast being 28
minutes long and was transmitted on Yorkshire Television in
1995. Clip at the end of this page.
I had spent a large slice of my degree time travelling
around the Western Isles of Scotland. Obsessed by
waterfalls, high on the smell of burning peat and
intoxicated by the rhythms of Gaelic, it was natural I
would make my degree piece in the Outer Hebrides or
Western Isles.
The central idea behind the piece was to make a film which
was going to bring video art to the masses! I tried to fuse
a pseudo-natural history film - the sort of Bill Oddie
springwatch-style tv that has become so popular in the UK,
with a more oblique flight of video fancy.
For the first five minutes, it looks like a pretty
convincing natural history documentary on the island of
Harris but then it appears that the video tape breaks down
and the island starts making it's own documentary - in
Gaelic! The presenter disappears from the programme for a
whole 10 minutes and meantime, three cellos come in and
subtitles aid narration on some melancholic subject matter
as disparate as Thora Hird and the now-defunct Scottish
Television series Take The High Road.
At the time Edinburgh College of Art wasn't producing video
art in the film and television department - if you did a
tapestry degree, you could have easily submitted this kind
of thing as your degree piece. If you don't believe me -
just ask any ECA tapestry graduate circa 1990-2000!
The clip below was edited by the video artist Daniel Reeves and I.