Caol Áit, meaning “thin place” in Scottish Gaelic, refers to a site where the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds is understood to be porous. Annie Faichney’s installation, Caol Áit is an exploration, disrupting and blurring of boundaries – between digital and organic, self and place, body and mind, her world and the viewer’s.

Video is projected large-scale through overlapping, irregular forms, low to the ground, leaking across walls, corners, floor, and organic matter. Lichen, moss, sticks and dried flowers boundary the work, with an opening for the viewer to step inside, or a bench to sit at its threshold. Organic materials intermingle with their digital depictions, shadows from branches and flowers fall across enlarged close-ups of Scottish nature. Forms dissolve and morph into one another, distorting to fluid abstraction or beams of pure light.

Caol Áit is somewhere and something to contemplate. It is an invitation to immerse deeply in nature, sound, self and place, to be drawn towards a threshold of presence, to sink into a sweet void space and catch a glimmer of clarity.

Sound made in collaboration with Lewis Henry Cook at the Glasgow Library of Synthesised Sound (GLOSS), and the FORM! Kula.