Friday 16th May Burrastow House
Introductions and Inputs
 


Carole Gray (CG): The introductory session involves the Lab Director, Susan Benn, PAL; the textile designers and designer knitters from Shetland including Margaret Hamilton, Hazel Hughson, Norma Anderson, Sanna Isbister and Mary Thomson; artists and designers including Gordon Burnett, Christine Arnold, Freddie Robins and Stephanie Tristam, Frankie or Frances Geesin, as well as Heather Delday and myself from Gray’s.

Everyone, without exception, is nervous – some very reluctant to describe what they do. However, we all say something and connections begin to emerge.

Susan Benn (SB): I am very conscious on this first evening of how helpful it is to begin every Lab with the benefit of a completed Welcome Dossier. (This is the first time this document has had to be a work-in-progress affair). The mix of people and skills and experience is balanced despite the way the group came together at the last minute. Better pre-lab communications between Stephanie, Maggie and I and the participants and a longer lead in time after choosing the participants to secure the biogs for the Dossier would have sorted this problem. But it is a small group and I feel confident people will get together in it in a few days. I feel I too want to make things here. Stephanie is not keen I do this as she feels I would be neglecting my duties as a Lab Director. I debate this, but not for long.

CG: The pressure is taken off us for a while by the storyteller’s session. Mary Blance, in a fantastic Shetland dialect, reads us a number of poems and stories –intriguing things about the ‘allover’ (Shetland jumper), and another one about sheep. We are entranced – like children again having bedtime stories read to us! Heather recognises lots of Orkney words especially ‘riven’ (torn physically and emotionally), also Mary tells a ‘selkie’ (seal/human) love story from Orkney and she speaks very highly of Tom Muir, the storyteller there. We ask her if she invents her own stories. She doesn’t but she would like to. Susan suggests that maybe Mary could tell contemporary stories, current affairs and so on. This would be good because folk tales are always so old. New folklore and stories need to be created. Both Heather (Delday) and I are struck by the ‘visual qualities’ of the storytelling that connect us with Mary (B). Christine (Arnold) asks the storyteller about the tradition of laying the brightly coloured textiles onto the croft landscape.

It’s been a long day – everyone travelling (some 600 miles) and coming together at last.

SB: The atmosphere is predictably promising by the end of the evening with a good meal and fine story telling. The idea of contemporary story telling spawns a new idea for me for a future Lab on the island led by Mary (B) with some of her fellow journalists, playwrights, poets, filmmakers with other story tellers from the islands to develop current events through the storyteller’s medium. Great idea for children and for artists too to draw narrative sketch books while the stories are being told.

I am very pleased that we invited Frances Geesin as she fits in perfectly.

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