Hamish Halley is Edinburgh Art Festival’s first Early Career Artist-in-Residence. His new installation pairs two collections, documenting both the clearing-out of his grandparent’s possessions after their death and the transfer of Perth Museum’s natural history collection. Through this process, Halley looks at what it is that makes a person: whether that’s the things we own or the living legacy of earth that we belong to. What touches us more, and which immortalises us: the personal or the universal?
You’re one of the early career artists with EAF – can you tell us about what that physical residency opened up for you?
It was really great for giving me the time and space to focus on the work for this exhibition in particular. I was spending a lot of time reading and reviewing footage and then also a lot of time outdoors. I would go in for lots of swims in the streams near the site and found myself connecting with insect life again in a way that was really helpful for the video.
That insect focus is interesting – what do you mean by that?
Well, the two sites of filming are my grandparents’ house, as my family move into it after my grandparents pass away, and the Perth Museum, as they extract their natural history collection from their art gallery building. A lot of the books my granny had in her house were, as you might expect an older person to have, books of British pond life, wildflowers, things like that. That kind of led me to consider frog spawn and tadpoles and mayflies and these insects that have such cyclical lives. But then they also feature in museum education and natural history. I saw them in a much more experiential way: of putting your hand in a river and feeling them swim over you, as opposed to reading about them.
Personal collections almost allow a person to continue living on – what do you think about the idea of art making that happen for singular moments?
Thinking about how I’ve made work before, it’s often drawn from an experience, a small event or a feeling which feels symbolic. There’s also something introspective and private in the experiences I’m describing that allows them to have a life longer than the little blip that they were. By focusing on something for so long in order to make an artwork about it, it gives it a weight that wouldn’t be there otherwise.
In a different sense, it’s kind of a documentation of a museum that doesn’t look that way any more, and a house that doesn’t look that way any more. So it has a very practical documentary aspect as well, whilst being through an artistic lens that tries to capture more than just how it looked.
As an artist, how do you approach the medium of video? I know you work a lot across textiles and printmaking, but how do you pick your mediums?
I was discussing with someone recently that I love video but I don’t like cameras, so I’m doing it for the outcome. It’s a brilliant way to capture imagery so quickly. I think that my editing approach is also similar to collage or writing more than documentary filmmaking. I’ve seen links between how I treat textiles and how I treat video in terms of looking at what happens when you sew these two things together. There’s a patchworking methodology that runs through them, maybe.
When I speak to artists, some seem to never care about the afterlife of a piece in terms of audience reaction, and others think quite deeply about the emotional response that they want to elicit. On which side do you think you fall?
I definitely feel closer to the second one you described. With video, it’s often in my mind that this is the first time someone’s seen this image, so how long do I want them to see it before we move to the next one? Does it need to repeat to remind them? I think the viewer is definitely in my mind for video work in particular.
The subject matter is quite intimate and personal, especially the part with you clearing out your grandparents’ house. There’s loss there; there’s grief. Has it been hard putting your focus on the subject for such a prolonged and intense period of time?
The only way I can imagine processing grief is to turn my focus to it. It’s been kind of a heavy thing, but it’s also been enjoyable in some ways. My family and I live in that house now, so it doesn’t look like my parents had it. Living a bit longer with the house as they had it, though, meant that the work was really enjoyable. I got to sit with that world for a bit longer.
And finally, how will the exhibition work within the venue?
It’s in the People’s Story Museum, which is already an amazingly rich space to visit, so that’s both exciting because of the content of my work, which does well when presented in a sort of oldfashioned local history museum, but it’s also a bit of a challenge to know how to fit it in. There’s already so much in there, not in terms of physical space but breathing space.
I’m excited for the install so we can figure that out. It hasn’t changed since the nineties or something! The layout of the museum is an artifact in its own right. I’m hoping to use some of the language of a museum video which you find, on closer inspection, is an art piece in itself.
Hamish Halley’s installation will be shown during Edinburgh Art Festival, from 7th August till 24th August, at the The People’s Story Museum, Royal Mile, Edinburgh. More info here.
All video stills courtesy of the artist.
Main Photo credit Arthur Hack
