Màiri NicGillìosa

Bail àrd Bhuirgh ('High Borve')

Màiri NicGillìosa
I visited Màiri’s studio when she was living in High Borve on the north west coast of Lewis, she gave me a tour of her studio and I could see straight away how enthusiastic she was about her practice. I later invited her to create work for a show at Baile na Cille church in 2021 called ‘Plastic’ where I invited several island artists to respond to the issue of plastic within our environment. Màiri focused on a positive benefit of the material, using up-cycled animal feed tubs in her installation ‘Plastaig’ to hint at the ways crofters have always recycled and reused the materials to hand.
Màiri is an artist and Gaelic woman from the Lowlands of Scotland. She has a strong sense of home in the Gaeltachd and currently lives in Uig on the Isle of Lewis.
Her work spans across different mediums often with sculptural outcomes and her creative practice is embedded and embodied in ‘Place’, exploring Gaelic ways of seeing and our relationships between species and spaces.
"My arts practice is quiet activism, feminist in energy and strongly informed by Gael identity. I explore the Gaelic-feminist landscape - a space that considers how culture and nature interact, and how social relations are shaped by the land, belonging sensitively to a wider ecosystem.
I spend time outside in the landscape where I live in Lewis, moving bodily through the seasons, interacting with bedrock, flora, fauna and exploring the connections with people who have been in the same spaces before me- only separated by time.."
Màiri studied Sculpture at Edinburgh Collage of Art, Horticulture at SRUC and has a postgraduate Masters degree in 'Learning and Teaching Gaelic Arts' with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
