By Anna Charlotta Gardiner
Skaill artist-in-residence / UHI Orkney Fine Art BA graduate
Hundreds of years ago, the decapitated head of a horse was intentionally deposited in the infill of a farm building at Skaill farm, Rousay, Orkney. The excavated skull found in 2019 — small, poignant and damaged — led me to my artist’s residency at the UHI Archaeology Institute dig at Skaill in July 2024.
I am preoccupied by the tangled palimpsest layers of being and meaning. In my art I explore these ideas through what I call “applied animism”, taking the material and immaterial world seriously by engaging it in playful dialogue.
I create costumes for imagined “gods”, allow them to inform me where they belong in the environment, then undertake a performance at that location.
For my Fine Art BA degree show at UHI Orkney in June 2024 (for which I received the RSA New Contemporaries Award) I suspended my performance costumes from the ceiling and projected films of the performances in the space, creating a sort of sacred grove.
One of these costumes was my “dead pantomime horse”, the creation of which led me to meet the horse skull excavated at Skaill.
In preparation for making the mask for the horse costume I wanted to study the skull of a real horse, so I popped down to the UHI Archaeology Institute . With the kind help of Dr Julia Cussans, I visited with the Skaill horse skull, drawing it, photographing it, and simply getting to know it. I am an osteology geek with an MSc in monkey bones, and I just love being around the poetic, sculptural, storytelling beauty of bones.
Through this creative dialogue with the skull the whole costume became associated with the site where it was found. I was compelled to travel to Rousay to film my performance. The wee horse became a god or spirit of the land, walking through the sleeping trenches at Skaill, seeking…something.
On the basis of my creative connection to the site, site co-director Dan Lee invited me for a residency. I set myself the objective of only using waste materials available on the site, making costumes from discarded orange netting and litter from the beach.
Plastic isn’t my usual choice of material, but I was able to discover the costumes and characters that the materials suggested—jellyfish-like beings of the sea. This emergent connection is interesting, considering the horrific impacts of marine plastic pollution on such creatures. This irony was mentioned by some visitors on the open day, who also enjoyed trying on the costumes and inhabiting the remarkably similar characters they discovered, all having a bit of a dance and a wiggle.
In creating the costumes I was lucky to have a collaborator Henry, who came up with many excellent ideas and choreographed a whole performance for the two of us. My fellow artists-in-residence, Aileen Ogilvie and Lara Band, taught me a lot about sound and place, and how to get the most out of a residency.
The archaeologists were generous with their time and knowledge, and I wish there had been time to learn more from them. What I did learn was that the true strength of a residency is in the people you meet.
The creative pinnacle of my residency was recreating my original performance, walking through the now-active dig in my horse costume. I asked the archaeologists to ignore the strange creature in their midst, and they were so immersed in their work that they were genuinely oblivious to my passing. This performance captured the simultaneity of the past, present, and realms usually unseen.
Afterward, placing the costume gently in the trench where the original skull was found, I felt that in some way I was laying the spirit of that poor wee horse to rest.
