Dùthchas | Home is an exhibition of work exploring the concept of home by the artist Fiona Pearson. Fiona has lived, worked and made her own home in Uist for over 50 years.
Please join us for the opening preview of Dùthchas | Home, in Gallery 1 on Saturday 4th April, 2-4pm.
All are welcome to join us for the Artist in Conversation event on Wednesday 29th April, 2-3pm. No need to book, please come along and hear Fiona Pearson talk about her work.
Since prehistory people have inhabited these islands, the underdeveloped landscape bears the marks of over five thousand years of living. Meanwhile the island itself has been slowly altered and changed by the shifting shoreline, with a blanket of peat leaving it increasingly barren in places. Disturb that peat and you will find past lives written in buried stone structures alongside tools and artefacts. Also visible in the landscape are ruined houses, abandoned in the face of challenges both past and present – from the clearances to climate.
Uist is a place where people and their homes are closely linked to the land:
“If I was not born there and the very dust of the place dear to me I would quit tomorrow.”
(Witness to the Crofting Commission in the 1950s, explaining the disadvantages of his holding.)
Migration, with its comings and goings, has always been part of island life. Questions of permanence, security and belonging are as important now as they have ever been.
The road home passes a loch, where the swans are strung across like a string of pearls. A late evening journey offers the sight of a single white swan over the rich colours of the moors.
Every spring and autumn, Whooper Swans make the long journey between Iceland and their wintering grounds in Britain and Ireland. Some gather on the lochs in Uist as in Ireland, and as described by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney:
“The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans”
Island homes are surrounded by a tapestry of land and water. There is restless movement with the wind and changing light creating new landscapes. The outlook is so well known, a heron’s still outline is startling.
Inside or outwith, homes are central to us all. Here or elsewhere home is both place and people.
Dùthchas | Home is free to view in Gallery 1, from 4th April – 18th July 2026, Monday to Saturday, 10am-4pm. If you would like to support our continued programming and enable us to keep offering free events, please consider making a donation to Taigh Chearsabhagh.
Image credit: Man in Doorway, Fiona Pearson, Collagraph (2025).