The Admiral's House, Residency on the Isle of Skye

Driving through Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands on my way to the Isle of Skye. The deep umbers of the gritty rugged mountains deeply etched in my memory.©Amy Guion Clay 2022

Earth, Sea and Sky

One thing I’ve come to know over my years of doing artist residencies, is that each residency will organically present a theme or focus soon after arriving. I rarely have a specific predetermined idea of what work I will be doing - instead I prefer to allow the environment to indicate to me the most inspired direction.

In the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, it was clear that it was all about landscape and the elements of sea, air and earth. This might have seemed obvious as I’ve been to this part of Scotland before, but now I was fully immersed in the landscape, living for a month with a window on the world of the ever changing North Atlantic mercurial moods.

After painting the cover of my Skye journal, I realized I had directly responded to the colors before me without realizing it.
View from my studio. ©Amy Guion Clay 2022

There was just one other artist for the early part of my stay (there are usually 3 artists at a time there), but then I was informed for the remaining 3 weeks I would be on my own. I won’t lie, at first I felt quite vulnerable and alone (what if I had a heart attack!), and without a car I would need to walk 2 hours one way for groceries to the nearest town of Portree (which I did), or pay for expensive taxis back and forth.

But I soon embraced the solitude amidst the ever changing Hebridean elements, and the quiet magnificence of the atmosphere made me greedily cherish every moment that I was there. When the month was finally over, I wept, longing already for my neighbors - the dolphins and seals, the black faced sheep, and the sea birds of all varieties.

The truth is that every residency is so different, which is why my work changes a lot depending on the place. For example, my February residency in Santiago de Compostela was all about pilgrimage (being the destination of The Camino - aka The Pilgrim’s Way), and I spent most of my time walking the city, going to exhibitions about walking, and creating my animation about walking. (That hand painted animation will be exhibited at my show in Boulder this summer - check my News for more information).

But on Skye I was called to be fully present in the elements of the wild, windswept maritime world before me. I spent hours motionless just watching the weather blowing in from the north west, shifting the light across Raasay Sound, the horizon moving in and out of focus as the mists would descend and lift and dissolve into more precipitation. This couldn’t help but hugely influence the work that would arise out of the presence of being there. It also helps that I’m forever pulled to the dark and dank northern landscape!

So if you consider doing a residency in the future, be aware that you often just don’t know what you will be presented with. This is both a blessing and a challenge at times. But most of all, if you can relax into the flow of not knowing, you will learn how broad is your bandwidth to live freely in the world without fear. This will serve you in every other aspect of your life - creatively and otherwise.

My studio with works in process. ©Amy Guion Clay 2022

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