Paper short abstract:

How do human acts of artistic creation and the form-engendering and form-dissolving propensities of ecological processes reciprocally illuminate and transform one another? I explore this question via experimental works shown at Papay Gyro Nights Art Festival, held annually in the Orkney Islands.

Paper long abstract:

How are the impersonal forces of "nature" felt and manifested through the humanly wrought artifacts of "culture"? Conversely, what affective engagements, insights and understandings do, for example, art works yield into the material processes that such works simultaneously appropriate, transform and carry forward? Papay Gyro Nights is a week-long art festival held annually on the island of Papa Westray (or "Papay") in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland. It takes its name and inspiration from a mythic giantess commemorated in folklore and masked and costumed performances across the North Atlantic region and associated both with the interface between land and sea (combining marine and terrestrial attributes) and with powers and presences existing beyond the human realm. The festival brings together artists and works in a variety of media from around the world to respond both to the figure of Gyro and to the physical environment of the island. This presentation is less an ethnography of the festival than an attempt to think and create with and alongside the featured art works. It explores through a combination of text and visual imagery the ways in which human acts of artistic creation and the form-engendering and form dissolving propensities of ecological processes reciprocally illuminate and transform one another. In doing so, it suggests that art's inescapable engagement with the material substance of its media is revealing both of its own complicity with and of its inevitable displacement from within by the other-than-human materialities from which it is fashioned.