Remembering Together Artist Showcases: Malcolm Innes
This exhibition in Mareel's Upper Foyer showcases the work of one of our artists, Malcolm Innes, during Phase Two of the Remembering Together project.
Remembering Together is a nationwide project, where Greenspace Scotland, in partnership with the Scottish Government, funded memorials in each local authority to commemorate the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shetland Arts, alongside Shetland Islands Council, commissioned an artist to conduct a community consultation around what the community would like a memorial to look like here in Shetland. From that, 5 artists were then commissioned to work across Shetland responding to it. They worked across art forms, and often with collaborators and community input. There were a further 4 artists commissioned to capture this process into a film and a book.
The film and book will become Shetland’s COVID memorial.
The film can be found online here. The book will be distributed across Shetland in public spaces shortly.
Malcolm Innes
This exhibition showcases one of the artists’, Malcolm Innes, processes during the project.
Malcolm’s project, “Back to the Light”, had 2 components: “Together” was a large format interactive digital outdoors projection at Mareel, where quotes collected by Christina Inkster from Phase 1 were projected on the façade of Mareel and the boating shed along with images. “Apart” consisted of a series of small-scale projection interventions spread across various locations in Shetland. The light projections were accompanied by music composed by Michelle Henderson.
Through “Together”, Malcolm wanted to help people experience and reflect upon the togetherness that ‘was missing from everyone’s life during the pandemic.’ This contrasted with the second part of the project, “Apart”. Malcolm explains: “Apart is about the time we spent away from our loved ones and our friends and our families. And then the Together. The stuff we were missing before and the stuff that gradually has come back - although everyone was very scared at the beginning, of having too much together time.”
Whilst working on “Back to the Light” Malcolm has found himself cast back into a time which seems increasingly unreal: “Everything seems to be back to normal in the world around us and you almost have to pinch yourself that it [lockdown] actually happened at all.”
'Back to the Light' Music Compositions
Michelle Henderson was commissioned to compose music to accompany the light projections in this project. You can listen to the compositions by following the links below.
