In 2009, Taigh Chearsabhagh invited Fred Schley to come to the Outer Hebrides for a short residency to enable him to create the body of work in this exhibition. His atmospheric renderings of the epic aspects of these islands manage to capture, beautifully, the mysterious and mercurial nature of the light on the land and sea.
The absence of any evidence of human existence in these paintings is a telling one. It not only imparts a timeless quality of past millennia when our impact on the planet was more benign – they also forewarn of a future where life in these islands continues to become unsustainable as it did on Mingulay and St. Kilda and even more recently on many other hebridean isles.
Taigh Chearsabhagh gratefully acknowledges support from the National Trust for Scotland in the production of the exhibition publication in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the evacuation of St. Kilda.
