Meet the Artists: Cat Meighan, Hector MacInnes and Sinéad Hargan.
Remembering Together Highland have appointed their artists to co-create memorials with communities. Meet Cat Meighan, Hector MacInnes and Sinéad Hargan.
Cat Meighan (image by Paul Campbell), Hector MacInnes, Sinéad Hargan
Cat Meighan is a socially engaged contemporary art practitioner and producer, whose practice looks to the expanded field of painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Her work within communities brings about opportunities for discourse, action, and autonomy in creative projects for communities’ continued benefit and development. She is currently a member of the Highland Culture Collective working creatively with women and children impacted by domestic abuse. She is also a founding member of Circus Artspace, based in Inverness, a collective that is committed to making contemporary art accessible to a broader Highland audience as well as supporting recent art graduates from the area.
Cat’s website | Cat’s Twitter |
Hector MacInnes is a sound artist, musician and producer from the Isle of Skye on the west coast of Scotland. He works with installation, text, composition, radio and speculative design among other things, often in collaboration with other artists and with communities. Hector is a member of the Highland Culture Collective, creating with communities impacted by the criminal justice system and by mental health. He is also working towards a PhD at Creative Research Into Sound Arts Practice, UAL, where he is exploring practice-based research around sounding and listening in remote areas.
Hector’s Twitter |
Sinéad Hargan is a multi-disciplinary artist working with live performance, participatory performance, sound, and film. Sinéad’s work is often centred around acts of collective grieving, she creates new rituals and radically reshapes old traditions in order to access a deeper understanding and care for the world around us. She is currently the Caithness Artist in Residence for the Highland Culture Collective hosted by Lyth Arts Centre. This residency focuses on the environment and coastlines of Caithness using the methodologies of co-designing, co-creating, and collaborating with communities so that the work is participatory, inclusive of many voices and is rooted in the communities that live here.
Sinéad’s website | Sinéad’s Twitter |
Cat, Hector and Sinéad say: We’re looking forward to bringing our shared collaborative practice to this project, and to working with a range of communities all across the Highlands. We understand that this is a really diverse and expansive region, and we want to respect that, while finding shareable, possible and Highland ideas about commemoration. We’ll start phase 1 with the following three things in mind.
Firstly, we’ll take a holistic approach to the Highland pandemic experience - acknowledging grief and loss, but also exploring change, looking to the future, and celebrating resilience and commonality in local contexts.
Secondly, we’ll start by asking questions to which shared answers are possible - going to communities with creative explorations of sense and memory, asking what remembering the pandemic might look, sound, smell, taste or feel like.
Thirdly, we’re looking forward to a challenging, exciting, and democratic exploration of what memorial could look like – we understand the need for hyper-locality within regional delivery of the project, and to accommodate a wide range of views about the pandemic’s meaning. We will let communities guide us through new ways of working with memorial.
We’ll work with communities through different layers of activity, hosting public events, but also contacting specific, perhaps underheard, communities and opening up other ways for the public to get involved. We know this could be a project that’s hard to take part in for all kinds of practical, emotional and political reasons, and we want to overcome as many of those hurdles as possible.