ARTISTS TALKING

The project was funded by the Scottish Arts Council, Caithness and Sutherland Enterprise and hosted by North Lands Creative Glass. This marked a return to my art practice following a spell as a multimedia producer.

The project was devised by lead artist Sara Bowler, who created temporary, site-sensitive glass installations in the landscape. The other principle contributors were myself and writer/anthropologist Dr Jane Webb and involved each of us producing work in response to ancient sites undergoing archaeological investigations. My brief was to create a piece of video art as a legacy for the project. Though helpfully open-ended, it challenged me to produce work that was genuinely rooted in the place and events.

During an intensive two weeks in Caithness I encountered a wealth of specialist understanding and local memory focused on two apparently empty sites. Stimulated by both the archaeological context and the storytelling culture, I considered how we look back on previous events and cultures, how our contemporary assumptions frame our view and how, in the future, our own activities will be talked about and explained.

The resulting video, Recollections from the future, imagines the summer events of Excavate Overlay becoming the stuff of local folklore in years to come. The tale mischievously pictures the project and its participants as subjects of the very forces of history they are investigating.

DVD was the ideal format for showing the video at exhibitions planned in Thurso and Wick. Back in London, authoring my first DVD required me to learn new skills at Space Place's Moving Image Suite. This resource alerted me to Space's Individual Learning Plan, a professional development programme, to which I applied and was accepted.

Exhibitions in community venues in Scotland were successful in reaching local audiences. However, in the autumn I considered how the project might be introduced to, and gain feedback from, peers in the arts community. We decided on a brief but focused show – more of an event than a traditional exhibition – for a carefully targeted and professionally interested audience, with the artists present throughout to discuss the project with visitors. Our aim to generate a forum for critical discussion, and our flexibility in terms of the timing of the show enabled us to negotiate an opportunity to use an ideal space. The event took place at the Nunnery gallery, run by Bow Arts Trust in the east end of London, over one weekend in December 2003.

Contact made with the archaeologists' community led to further opportunities. Sara Bowler presented the project at the Highland Archaeology Unit's annual conference in Inverness, where the video was screened to a receptive audience. Recollections from the future was shown as part of a presentation about Excavate Overlay at the Art, Archaeology, Landscape conference at Birkbeck College, London in April 2004.

Excavate Overlay was a very rich experience. It has left me with potent memories, a revitalised creative practice; and an aim to develop further projects rooted in communities, drawing on the knowledge of specialists working in other fields.

For more information on Space's Individual Learning Plan visit www.spacestudios.org.uk