Emma Dove is an artist and documentary filmmaker originally from the Black Isle and currently working between Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands. Her work is interested in exploring relationships to place and stories hidden within the seemingly banal.

Mark Lyken is a multimedia artist based in Glasgow, he was first introduced to Dove during his Sublime artist’s residency at Cromarty Lighthouse during 2012. Lyken creates painting, sculpture, film and sound work with a current focus on installation and composition. Recent work has been concerned with revealing the musicality of the environment and beauty within the ordinary.

Mirror Lands is a film and sound installation exploring diverse relationships to The Black Isle.

The work weaves together sonic elements of the natural world with an original score. Contrasting local voices intermingle, rise and fall, sharing their personal memories, feelings and perceptions of place. Preconceived ideas of Highland life are challenged and the complex interactions between nature and culture are brought to the fore in this unique audio-visual experience.

The project is a collaboration between Mark Lyken, Emma Dove and Aberdeen University Ecologists from the Lighthouse Field Station in Cromarty.

Mark and Emma took some time to answer some questions about their process and the creation of  Mirror Lands:

What your workflow has been like from day to day?
The first four months of Mirror Lands were basically the inverse of what the last four months have been for us. From July to October last year we were outside every day, cycling to and from the Lighthouse Field Station in Cromarty where we were based, gathering shots and audio quite intuitively and speaking to lots of local people. The last four months, on the other hand, we’ve barely been outdoors and we’ve hardly seen a soul! To begin with it was sifting through hours and hours of audio and video, gradually refining what we wanted to use, then gradually piecing together something that felt representative of those first four months. The project also gave us a chance to realise a long standing dream of setting up our own “Soft Error” label. Our first release is a Mirror Lands box set that launches at the films Premiere with Cryptic at the CCA on March 6th.

Where do you look for inspiration?
Our friends are very inspiring folks and are probably the first port of call for us when bouncing ideas around. Living in the Southside of Glasgow, The Glad Cafe is definitely a hub of grassroots creativity and has a vibrant community vibe – you can just pop in there and soak it all up.
We could fill a whole page with the films & filmmakers that inspire us but a few special ones would be Nicholas Philibert’s “La Ville Louvre”, Thomas Reidelsheimer’s “Rivers and Tides” and “Sleep Furiously” by Giddeon Koppel. We are still discovering a lot of fantastic work – we recently watched ‘Silence’ by Pat Collins and we were literally in awe! On Mirror Lands we were thinking a lot about how different sounds and images work together, so I think we took a lot from sound artists who work very creatively with field recorded material, such as Cathy Lane, Annea Lockwood, Chris Watson, Yannik Dauby. We are lucky enough to have both Cathy Lane and Chris Watson joining us as guest speakers at our preview night. The fact we are opening with Cryptic and have two of our influences lending their support to the project is huge for us! In a more direct sense, we also drew a lot of food for thought from the research being carried out at the Lighthouse Field Station in Cromarty where we were based for the summer. There’s definitely a lot to be said for coffee breaks with a bunch of scientists in a Field Station staff room.

What tools do you use?
A compact run and gun style camcorder, which is especially useful when your main mode of transport is by bicycle! We also use a digital recorder for field recording and some different microphones, including some ‘binaural’ headphones and an underwater hydrophone, which are great fun.
As ever, the more equipment you work with, the more you feel you need… But budget and, as I mentioned, bikes, help rein that in!

Why did you choose The Black Isle?
It chose us, ha, ha. Emma was brought up on the Black Isle and Mark was an Artist in Residence on the Sublime Residencies at the Lighthouse Field Station in Cromarty in 2012. It was through both having worked with the Field Station during Sublime that ideas for Mirror Lands began to percolate and we then decided to return and work on a collaboration together.

Was there a reason you chose to focus on the sea?
The Lighthouse Field Station research focuses primarily on marine mammal and seabird behaviour as there is a large dolphin population in the Cromarty Firth and wider Moray Firth. We had previously joined the Ecologists in their research rib on Dolphin ID field trips – an activity which gives you a very specific experience and relationship to that patch of sea. The initial idea for Mirror Lands was to explore different people’s understandings, perceptions and relationships to that same patch throughout the community. This developed in to exploring a wider understanding of place, but I think the sea is fundamental to most people’s experience of the Black Isle, whether active or passive, it’s impossible to ignore it completely…

What sort of relationship is there between nature and culture and what made you want to explore it?
Our starting point for exploring the relationship between nature and culture was looking at the representation of the ‘natural’ world in natural history programming. But when you start thinking about the question of what is nature and what is culture you realise that neither exists independently of the other. In a chat with Prof. Paul Thompson at the Field Station about this, he mentioned, ‘But what is natural to an animal in the sea? Do they differentiate between a cliff wall and the harbour wall?’ I think this sums it all up quite well… But what we did come to realise is that there is far more that we don’t know about both the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ worlds than what we do – we barely touched upon an understanding of place during our time in Cromarty yet we learned so much from a handful of different conversations. Of course the more questions you ask, the more questions you have…

The film launches as part of Cryptic Nights at the CCA in Glasgow on 6th March and then moves on to Inverness Museum & Art Gallery (IMAG) from March 8th-29th.

Mark: Website | Facebook | Twitter
Emma: Website | Facebook | Vimeo | Twitter

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What:
A major new interdisciplinary project for the Year of Natural Scotland 2013, Imagining Natural Scotland was initiated by Creative Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and the University of St Andrews. Imagining Natural Scotland aims to encourage cross-sectoral engagement and knowledge exchange, among environmental historians, scientists, ecologists, artists, creative producers and curators.

Central to the first phase of the project was a funding stream for collaborative projects where teams had the opportunity to apply for up to £10,000 to support their work.

Why we like it:
Fifteen projects have been awarded funding including artist Duncan Marquiss who will make a film observing his father, the biologist Mick Marquiss and Stephen Hurrell for a short film on the marine environment of the Firth of Clyde. Also funded is a collaboration between electronic composer Mark Lyken, filmmaker Emma Dove and Aberdeen University Ecologists, exploring Scotland’s ecological consciousness through a deconstruction of natural history filmmaking. For a full list of all successful applications to the Imagining Natural Scotland project fund, please visit here.

More: Website | Vimeo | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

Right now I’m sitting in a hotel in Thessaloniki, Greece. I’m here to speak to some design students and help them plan a wall painting project. Before arriving in Thessaloniki, I spent the day in Athens, doing research into the work on the streets there. I was fairly blown away with all the political imagery and also the amount of graffiti in the city. I guess because of the financial situation, certain areas are being cleaned less often, which has led to this build up. The reason I mention all this in relation to The Canals Project is that this type of trip is one of my favourite ways to find artists for future projects. I was doing the same thing in Sao Paulo, Brazil around five years ago, when I first came across the work of Zezao. I remember seeing a couple of his works in the downtown area and learning about his working process. How he paints in tunnels and sewage systems under the city and so on. It made me love the work even more. Eventually I managed to track Zezao down and interview him. At the time Zezao didn’t speak much English and I didn’t speak any Brazilian. So most of the interview was done with a translator. These days Zezao speaks English pretty well, however my Brazilian has not improved.

Zezao / The Canals Project

When I first heard about a street art project for the canals of East London, Zezao was the first artist I thought of. I knew he’d love the idea and his work, with its strong links to waterways would be the perfect fit. I usually find artists in these unusual ways. I’d done a small project with Scottish artist Mark Lyken a couple of years ago, and found him really good and easy to work with. So when I saw the collaboration he did with Teo Moneyless, from Italy, I thought it would be amazing to bring both of them to London. I’m really excited about the new work these two will do. One of the most interesting trends in graffiti and street art over the last few years has been artists playing around with abstraction in public spaces. Mark and Teo do this with an amazing amount of flair and just a bit of sci-fi geekishness. Another artist duo in the project is Interesni Kazki (Interesting Tales), from Ukraine. Their work is already has a fairly big international following, so I’m hoping their UK debut will be popular with audiences. I’m also happy to be bringing some Eastern European vibes to the project. The last official artist is Remed, who is probably the most established of the group. Remed’s approach to image making is fairly fluid, and his works typically mix text with figuration. I’ve known his work for a while and have always been a fan. I like the way it often mixes sort of Cubist styling with a contemporary spin. But with Remed, every work is always different, so we’ll have to see what he comes up with. I’m sure it’s going to be brilliant. Added to this we have unofficial artist, Ekta Ekta, from Sweden, who we’ve managed to squeeze in. Ekta is actually going to do a residency at the Gainsbourgh School in Hackney Wick and collaborate with the kids to make some new work. He’s done similar things in Gothenburg and the results have been amazing, so I’m sure he’ll do something equally awesome with the kids in Hackney Wick.

Mark Lyken / Teo Moneyless / The Canals Project

Another trend that has grown in the last few years is the growth of the citywide mural project. I’ve probably helped with the growth of this trend in some small way with my previous project on Tate Modern’s façade in 2008. For The Canals Project however, we are working with spaces that are not so huge in scale, but more intimate and within a fairly contained public area all along the canals path around Hackney Wick course. Added to this, we have to think about the fact that works of street art already exist in the areas we are working in. For me, it is interesting to try and integrate the commissioned pieces with the uncommissioned.

I’m already way over word count and I haven’t even mentioned the film events we’re doing with Hackney Picturehouse cinemas or our street art and politics research day at the White Building in June!

Interesni Kazki / The Canals Project

Street Art Film Festival
The Canals Project (Street Art for the Waterways) and Hackney Picturehouse have teamed up to present a mini-series of films which explore the past, present and future of street art and graffiti. Selected by curator Cedar Lewisohn who has picked films which have influenced the history of street art and graffiti or which comment on its future direction. A selection of short films will accompany the features. With thanks to Moniker Projects for helping with the selection of the short films.

4 May
Downtown 81
preceded by short films Dreams (Jo Peel) (with intro by the artist) & Chile Estyle (Pablo Aravena)

5 May
Wolfen
preceded by short film Your Eyes are Dead (Alexis Milne) with intro by Alexis Milne

11 May
They Live
preceded by short film Dots: Before Cameras

12 May
This Space Available
preceded by short film Open Air (Lou J Auguste) plus intro and Q&A with Lou Auguste

8 June
Seminar Day with Walking tour & discussion
The White Building, Hackney

More:
Website | Facebook | Twitter

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Sublime by Emma Dove.

Artists, Stephen Hurrel and Mark Lyken discuss their residency in The Lighthouse Field Station, Cromarty where they explored how sound and light within the physical spaces we inhabit affect behavioural patterns.

What:
Last Days of Analogue is a project by artists Stephen Hurrel and Mark Lyken exploring what has been lost and what has been gained from the shift to digital.

Why we like it:
Hurrel and Lyken have invited artists, writers and musicians to respond to the loss of analogue technology in whatever way they wish. Check out Matt Warren’s Broadcast 1 (Blinking Billy) as it’s made entirely from analogue television, vinyl records and AM radio broadcasts.

Find out more:
Website

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

1. Sepe by Recoat

2. Luring Law – Acrylic On Canvas by Conzo

3. 0.08 Derm by :Derm:

4. Unamed. Lyken Love. 2010 by Lyken Love

5. blockhead by pussydomesticus

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See more of our Top 5 selections here.