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2022 was a year of bringing to fruition On Sonorous Seas, a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project which began in 2018 when a whale carcass washed ashore on the Isle of Iona, where Mhairi lives. The project interrogates the power of, and reliance on, sound as a survival tool for whales and the military, and the complex relationship between the militarisation of Scotland’s seas and their existing ecosystems. On Sonorous Seas represents a development of focus within my practice around the question of extraction in the Hebrides as a consequence of the presence of the military, and whether this particular presence has resulted in a psychological disarticulation between a specific culture and its immediate environment.

On Sonorous Seas has created an enquiring energy around this question and wider topics such as our relationship to the non human worlds around us, in this Anthropocene age. Mhairi's hope is that the project will continue in further iterations, inspiring and informing itself by creating space for conversations and thinking about the issues raised by the work.

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We hope that its presence might hold a space at Grinneabhat, reflecting the ethos of the centre by welcoming people in to share conversation and stories around the whale, about the whale, of the whale. As an artist, being in residence with the whale, the centre, and its visitors, gives Mhairi a chance to extend the On Sonorous Seas project outwards, whilst reflecting inwards on further work. In this way the space becomes studio, exhibit, and salon as she open her practice up and out; drawing, thinking, reading, sharing and inviting a curiosity about what connects an artist to place, to an idea, to a feeling, to a purpose.

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Mhairi will bring the whale's story back home and hopes to recieve others. Come along to the events to learn and to share stories on whales and whaling.