Towards Benbecula: Notes from the Journey and the Island
Photographs from a working journey: a desk, island landscapes, an exhibition and the changing light.
I travelled to Benbecula for work. Bringing the photographs together reveals another record alongside the working days: views from the road, a ferry deck, a shared meal, a small exhibition and light changing across the water.
The journey photographs include houses across the water, a road between hills and a curved dam. At different scales, each shows how people establish a presence in a place. The relationship between a structure and its surroundings can become visible in these intervals of a journey.
The everyday shape of work
Among the site photographs is a picture of a desk. A tablet, open notebooks, books, pens and a cup. A similar arrangement appears on a table aboard the ferry. The setting changes; reading, taking notes and working travel with it.
A shared meal and photographs on the beach belong to this record too. In remembering a working journey, I want to retain the moments between working hours.
Fragments and a face
At an exhibition I visited, a face had been assembled from blue-and-white pottery fragments: Fergus Granville’s Impact. Its label explains that the pieces were collected along the shores of North Uist, sometimes below the ruins of old croft houses.
Up close, the patterns and broken edges of individual fragments remain visible. From further away, the face emerges. It offers a possible architectural question: how can existing material become part of a new whole while retaining its traces? This is one way of reading the work, rather than an explanation offered on the artist’s behalf.
An evening record
In the wide coastal photograph, channels of water across the sand reflect the sunset. In another frame, moonlight falls across the water. I want to leave this part of the journey largely to the photographs.
These Benbecula notes record the space that a place visited for work comes to occupy in personal memory. The site, the desk, the encounters and the landscape sit alongside one another within the same journey.
Photographs from the personal archive of M. Burak Tosun.