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Suite 2, The Coal Shed,
402 William Street, Wiarton, Ontario

roguegoat@hotmail.ca

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The elegant repose of an indolent house lamb on a languorous day.

Little Philip Larkin is doing very well, but believes that I am his mother, despite my repeated efforts to introduce him/her (I name things with complete disregard for gender) to the outdoor chickens. I’ve been sleeping on the couch on my back with Philip in a toque on my chest under the covers for the last few nights. The trade off in discomfort (how do back sleepers not feel like they are drowning?!) is for quiet, as Philip frantically peeps away if not nestled into his substitute hen bosom. I am fully aware that other motherless chicks are left to sort themselves (in tortuous, constant light), just as I’ve heard some human children sleep alone in cribs & that other people don’t take their lambs to work. I am also aware that the majority of our followers are not particularly interested in the messy business of attachment parenting non productive domestic animals with pretentious literary names. I’m aware of all these things, and yet....I’m just going to keep doing things my way. 😜

This little one started hatching in the basket on the way up the drive to teach Taryn about candling eggs, so we stopped & watched (and gave a teeny helping hand). We had three broody hens & now have 12 chicks (a few met with natural, forest chicken accidents) but the last to become a mother abandoned the nest this morning. We don’t have an incubator so hopefully I can get this little one through the day with a hot water bottle & lamp & then sneak it back under the bad mother at night fall. Also, baby bunny feet! It’s a day for keeping ones attention focused on the insistence of life on being quietly miraculous.

Pop up opportunity! Would you like to host your own pop up within our studio this summer? We are offering makers the opportunity to use our space on Sunday’s from June 17 through August 26. You may set your own open and close hours for the day, but must commit to a minimum of 12-4pm. As this is our first year here, we have no way of knowing what traffic to the park may be like, but it’s already quite busy (out through the giant water view windows that I studiously ignore people looking through 😜) There is a new Producer’s Market on Sunday’s on the other side of the park with live music and food trucks. We will promote your appearance through our communication platforms & local print. Accommodation possible...a great way to have a mini vacation at the base of one of the truly most beautiful regions in Ontario, the Bruce Peninsula! This cannot be your first rodeo! You must have some experience with presenting your work at markets/shows, a professional body of work, established communication (web/instagram etc) platforms & freestanding displays. No fee or percentage or other responsibilities...we simply would like to see the space used! The studio is quite large so this could also work well for groups/collectives needing to promote other locations/studio tours/events etc. Please DM or email of interested!

Home! There was a day in London in between but it’s insignificant compared to long haired boy giggles & lamb binkies. 😍

Last days always have a tension between wanting to infuse every last moment with something significant & already being gone in your mind. Like the end of a relationship you know is over but are still going through the motions, with some good times but mostly an escalating outrage at trivialities. I’m terribly sunburnt & should stay out of the sun entirely but compromise with an early stalking of sheep tracks on the beach & reading Enid Blyton, such a staple of my childhood, in the Croft museum. It’s unstaffed, this simple stone house, kept as it was when the last crofter died & I have it to myself. I say goodbye to Hamish, Rosie & Bob and head to the caves. Massacre cave is where the entire island of 400 (except one old granny, legend has it) was slaughtered by a rival clan, in the 16 th century. Bones still rise to the surface, which is intriguing, but the sun dissipates the bloodthirsty veil of history, makes it banal. They used to hold catholic masses in Cathedral cave, which you can only reach at low tide. You feel it, the awe of these natural places, the reverence that turned to religion, forging storytelling and the extraordinary. They play the bagpipes as the ferry departs and it sounds exactly like leaving. In Fort William, five of us are quickly ushered away from our train car to a taxi, which will take us to Edinburgh. The broken air conditioner initiates one of the most terrifying & beautiful car rides I’ll ever take, as the sun sets in the highlands & our driver from Inverness speeds & brakes dramatically. He confesses he hasn’t been “south” in many years. We get to Edinburgh three hours early for our connection to London, so three of us, a folding bike designer, a charity project leader & I, head to the pub. Scotch makes things go a little sideways, the fog & full moon render a stunning city unearthly, portend romance or violence. But that may be the scotch and too many Inspector Rebus books. We find our way back to the train to sleep our way to London.

2 of 2. But today it’s not the surface of the earth that catches my mind so much as the surface of time, grown transparent & layered on this single road that so many will have walked on this ancient island inhabited since the Bronze Age. It is the road of now & yet also the dirt track rendered by wagon wheel & also the fainter path of foot & hoof when community began here. I think about the leaving of this island, by this way. During the Highland clearances, when land for sheep became more valuable than dignity for man & whole villages were expelled. During the Potato famine, when desperation flung families across the sea. For first one & then a second war, duty bound. Would you stop here, at the top of the hill and look backward at your home and those of your neighbours, set against the ridge you know like your own cheekbones, better perhaps, and try and fix it in your mind? Would you steel yourself to not look back and be caught instead here, past the fertile valley of Cleadale where the sky descends to Kildonnan where the Vikings landed & the St. died & the mainland reveals itself? Would those distant shores spell hope or banishment? Would you falter here or would you harden your resolve? Or would it be here, as An Sgurr defines the sky & the docks draw nearer...would your fear bubble in your throat & your hands grip your belongings as ballast? Or...would you be the one left? Would you follow and memorize their back, the shape of them, would you steal every last glimpse until they were gone? Or would you stay in your blackhouse and free your loved one of your pain & need of them, let them unwind themselves from you, alone along the road? And when the ferry sounded, would you wince, a wound, the sound of nothing to ever be the same? Would you get back? Would your foot rejoin this road and your bones sing in unison with the land, this patch of earth infused with the blood & sweat of your people? Would you know, at the last, that the leaving and returning, the road between, the grace of that, belongs to every living thing...and yet, yours was this one, as it could only ever be.

1 of 2. The sheep awoke me earlier than usual so I decided to try to outpace the heat of the day (I did not, and also forgot sunscreen). I was to meet my uncle at noon at the pier at the other end of the island for lunch & planned my rambles accordingly. I followed the single road that spans the island & saw no one for hours except sheep making their way to different pasture or panting in the sun (you feel for them, the heavy sweaters) & the rabbits using the road as a throughway to the next set of bramble hedgerows they were interested in (can you spot them in the ridge photo?) And birds, high on the winds from the sea & low in the bracken, raucous & songful on the wing. I thought of Thoreau’s conviction that walking can seek and find something holy, in the truest sense, outside the dogma of theology & I feel this to be true. Although the word has always had a bit of a insouciant quality for me, I have loved this since first I read it...”sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.” Henry David Thoreau While walking alone, my mind is clear. Drawn to profundity (close to fecundity, also apt) & irreverence (see?) in equal measures. I don’t like referring to myself as an artist, I prefer painter or maker, but at heart...saunterer.

Today I found my way to Singing Sands beach. The sands are quartz and do not sing, they squeak like bad shoes. Neil told me that the Gaelic translates as such, but the English felt the need to romanticize the translation. The Scots feeling like they have done the right & necessary thing and that the English have done a daft thing is a fairly common thread here. 😜 I followed sheep tracks, scrambling up and down the cliffs, inevitably putting my hands in nettles when I got distracted looking too hard at things; eagles, water trickling off different layers of rocks, flowers, seemingly suicidal sheep, so many birds, little caves, more tide pools, full of anemones & crabs. I found a dead sheep, the staves of the rib cage elegantly sitting in a nest of wool, like a delicate cathedral in an exceptionally durable cloud. I took so many photos of Perfectly Average Domestic animals that my phone died. My eyes started gravitating to patterns and abstractions more than the whole of what I was looking at & I couldn’t tell if I was being artsy or was really fucking dehydrated, so after five hours of rambling around I headed home. I passed by a house that hosted an impromptu cafe & sat for tea with a new dog friend named Bob & a chat with the very entertaining resident/ proprietor. He makes a bit of extra cash running visitors or their bags back to the pier & offering by donation tea & cake. A nap, a simple supper & dabbling at patterns from my day as the sun sets...there isn’t a middling view on this island. Greatly supported by something very unique about Eigg...there are no visible hydro lines. Eigg uses almost 100% renewable, sustainable energy generated by an electric company created and owned in trust by the islanders, which they created when they raised a whopping 1.5 million in donations to buy the island from the last laird it will ever have. They chose to have all the electrical cable buried, each household gets 5Kwh per day & the long history of Crofting culture; respecting the land, working together & frugality has triumphed as self sustainable stewardship of this tiny isle.

3. I napped for the afternoon, finally at home with a bed & a bit of space and divested of my crinkling Saran Wrap & then made my way to Laig beach, just down the hill beneath me. Scots have “the right to roam” enshrined in law...meaning that, presuming a respect for land & property, you have the right to cross almost all land and water. It’s a deeply held freedom which,unlike the more limited English right to open spaces, does not seem keen on signposting nor maintaining paths. You have to rely on directions & landmarks, accustom yourself to the assumption of access. I met a new friend, Haddock, on the beach and played a bit of toss for awhile before exploring the detritus on the water line, the tide pools & caves etched into the rock that was formed by volcanoes so very long ago. I sat quietly for ages, just being here, being alive, watching. I watched the waves crest & the different shapes they take, how exactly the water falls over itself, the reach of the wave across the sand & the different patterns inscribed by the forces of the sea & the wind. I watched the gulls dive & dance on the currents, move inland & back to sea, constantly seeking. I watched Haddock’s human play with his grandson, the tumbles & sand eating, the constant shifting in hope of a bit of peace from a toddlers constant discovery of things to fall upon or taste. I watched a very intense photographer stalking the perfect shot of Rum’s heights across from us, intent on this one perspective while a world of interest danced on either side of him. I watched a Plover run to the tide pools, calling, calling, and then back to the edge of the rocks that line the small creek feathering into the sea, over and over again. And started to notice a pattern, that it was drawn to return to the same spot and was not leaving it to seek but to distract, and in a tiny cleft in the sand, a new fledgling. Impossibly fluffy, small and vulnerable, disguised. I returned to my bothy to watch the sunset with soup & sandwich & will read until I fall asleep to the song of wind whipped round thick stone walls & the crackle of wood fire.

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