The Morrich Project Exhibition
Member Led Events
The Morrich Project Exhibition took place in Inver Hall on Saturday 24th September with support from The Work Room’s Member Led events programme and as part of the St Duthac Book & Arts Festival across the Fearn Peninsula. I organised the event with the support of local artist Rosie Mackenzie and over the course of the day we had 32 visitors, including members of the local community, children from Inver Primary School and others from further afield.
The aim of the exhibition was to share elements of the research process from The Morrich Project: outdoor work made in Inver Bay in July 2021, indoor work documented during a TWR/Tramway residency in December 2021, underwater film research developed in August-October 2021 and community engagement work carried out in Portmahomack in July 2022.
The exhibition included four short films that documented these processes and a range of objects that had inspired the research, including a wooden raft containing bottles created by Rosie for part of the outdoor work.
We also displayed a handmade book containing letters that children from Inver Primary School had made to be put inside the bottles. These letters – in English and Gaelic - contain images and thoughts about Inver and the children’s hopes for the future.
The exhibition was a great opportunity for me to test out a form of presenting and sharing work with audiences that I hadn’t tried before and getting feedback from people about how they experienced it. One of the audience members said that he thought that presenting the found objects and the raft, along with the book of letters, made watching the films more accessible. He found the objects easy to connect with as they were familiar, domestic materials that he was encouraged to handle and talk to us about. And seeing the raft in real life with all the bottles and letters made it much more concrete and tangible than just seeing it on a screen, which helped to bring him in to the more abstract movement material in the films.
I had many interesting conversations with audience members, some of whom had lived in the area all of their lives, and some of whom were just visiting for the day. We talked about living in a coastal community and the impact of sea level rise and coastal erosion due to climate change. We talked about living next to Tain Air Weapons Range and how we become ‘normalised’ to the presence of MOD activity. We talked about the need to come together and share thoughts and ideas, particularly in small communities, where there are limited facilities and opportunities.
The exhibition was also a way to celebrate the year long research process we carried out through The Morrich Project and to bring the work back to Inver.