WIP: Frances Scott, Untitled (Walking Orkney)

When Frances Scott was a child her pilot father would take her up in an aeroplane on Sundays to look down upon the islands of Orkney. He taught her to recognise each one by its shape alone. “To give you a feel of the place, to make you aware of your heritage and understand where you fit in.” Over a three-year period following art school, Scott flew over Orkney more than a thousand times. She worked as a steward for an airline that served the Northern Isles. In the ten minutes of take off and just before landing Scott would see through her window slithers and fragmented shapes of those familiar islands and she longed to make them her own.

Slack water is a point of stillness in a tidal flow. It is a point in time when, for a moment, opposing forces are in balance and the water appears not to move. It is a phenomenon that is strangely pleasing to see. Slack Water was once the working title of Scott’s project to map the islands of Orkney through walking their coastlines. It is no surprise that title was discarded as almost everything she records on her journeys through photographs and writing, and the drawings made by her own body passing through the land, is in motion. For various reasons, including the separation of her parents when she was a baby, her whole life has been in motion with time split between living on mainland Scotland and in Orkney, (and constant travelling in between the two).

Scott's Ordnance Survey maps, annotated with cryptic hand written notes from her walks, read like unintentional poetry:

“Seapink + sunbathing

Amazing rocks like another planet

Watched Hamnavoe leaving

Starling murmurations

Flock of lapwings

Strange ruined wall, tide marked

Seals howling

Yellow sky, starlings flying low

Lights on Hoy

Head torch needed, hunting for gate”

Scott also makes precise observations about time and distance. How far is the 'coastal distance' of the route. How far is the total distance walked including the return along roadways. Results from the tracking app on her phone have been transcribed into drawings and shown in exhibitions in Orkney alongside photographs that were themselves made using her phone. Scott prefers to travel light on her walks unencumbered by camera gear. Her lightness of touch, the centrality of walking within her practice, and the use of text, maps, photographs and simple drawings as a record of her walks are all reminiscent of British Land Artists, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton. Her motivations seem different however. Scott is concerned with deepening her understanding of and connection to this one group of relatively small islands. 

Islanders can be particularly exclusive in accepting who is of that place and who is not. Due to complications in her mother's pregnancy, Scott entered the world in a hospital in Aberdeen rather than in Orkney. Then for a period of seven years between the ages of two and nine she lived in the borders with her mother and commuted up and down the A9 on a regular basis to see her father in Orkney. She then returned with her mother to Orkney only to leave again aged eighteen to study in Glasgow. Scott is an Orcadian, but there will be some Orcadians who would not fully accept her as such based on their strict criterion. Who knows when the walks will end, but at this time in her life it appears that making and recording these walks, mapping each island, is her own way of staking a claim to them as home. Some people never fit in. Others take a long time and travel a long way before finally they feel and understand that they do.

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All images © Frances Scott

https://frances-scott.co.uk