Between The Tides with Jack Lockhart

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Jack Lockhart – I’m a visual artist working a lot with film, and in 2018, I also set up Screen Argyll with my wife, Jen Skinner. 

So I wear two hats – one as an artist in my own right, making my own work and delivering workshops, and another with Screen Argyll, supporting film activity across Argyll and the islands. 

That can mean anything from running workshops in animation or film to supporting screening events and working with community cinemas across the region. 

Where do you live?

I live on Tiree, and have been here since 2015.  

Before moving to the island, I worked at the National Media Museum in Bradford as a workshop leader, as well as for different theatre companies. 

We already knew Tiree well – my wife’s grandparents lived here, and we used to come here every year on holiday. Then, in 2015, when the National Media Museum was restructured, we decided to make the move here – initially for a year, and then permanently.

Tell us about Between The Tides, your project for Coastal Cultures. 

Between The Tides is a project here on Tiree looking at the tides and tidal themes around the island.  The coast and the tides are things that everyone on the island shares and is affected by, so it was a very interesting theme to explore.

There were different strands to the project – I was the lead artist, so firstly there was my work, making films including time-lapse of the beaches and tides, and speaking to people about what the tides mean to them. 

That will be edited into one film, which we hope to offer to other coastal and island communities to screen, and to create some connections through doing that.

Then there was also involvement from Screen Argyll to show a number of films, and from other individuals to deliver workshops. I always want to make projects as accessible as possible, so we also made some collaborative, large-scale sand drawings on the beach. 

We’re spoiled with our huge beaches on Tiree. They are these amazing flat, open spaces, and we thought it would be fun to use them in the project to create art. 

The fact that we knew we would create these big pictures together and then the tide would take them away was fun but also really ephemeral – it worked like a giant Etch-a-Sketch.   

Who else did you work with on the project?

We’ve got a small team of people we work with a lot in Screen Argyll, including Alasdair Satchel and Jim Parkyn, and we worked with them here.

Jim is brilliant to work with – he’s worked with Aardman since 2000, on productions including Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. He brings some celebrity status to our projects! He’s about to move to Dunoon, so it will be great to do more with him.

He also runs the Amazing Scene Machine at different events – he uses an ornate frame to create a background out of Plasticine and then gets participants to each make a character, which he brings to life in a scene. I’d always wanted to get him to bring it to Tiree, so this was a great opportunity to do that.

Alasdair Satchel lives on Mull and is a filmmaker and theatre writer, and is also a fluent Gaelic speaker, so it was great to have him on board as well.  He led a guided walk of Tiree’s coastline, and created a podcast recording with the participants. 

What was the response to the project like in Tiree?

What we were always hoping to achieve with the workshops was to bring people together, especially post-Covid as community events are still recovering.

Lots of different people got involved, both tourists and locals, which was great – it was all very positive.

More work still needs to be done to bring people together, but we had brilliant feedback from the events, and it’s been really helpful working with CHARTS to get that. That’s already proving to be useful looking at what we do next and how we build on the project.

Were there any unexpected outcomes?

There was an amazing outcome – we didn’t know it as we were planning the project, but there was a space that became available for us to use at the Hynish Centre for six months.

That was so important for the work I did myself on the project in speaking to people about what the coastline and the tides mean to them. I was able to invite people into the space and engage with the community in a way we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

What’s next for you?

Something really exciting is that in the first part of 2024 we are launching a new dedicated arts space on Tiree, which will host lots of events and workshops. 

Between the Tides has been really useful in allowing us to think about what that’s going to look like, what it could offer and what people might want from it. It was also helpful in engaging with the community on Tiree.  We’ll be working with a new team on that Including Jen Skinner, Brodie Sim and Hannah Wright.

Placemaking can obviously mean a lot of different things, but in this project it feels that’s been really successful – we’ve actually made a place.

Learn more about Coastal Cultures Islands Residencies and Between the Tides here

Coastal Cultures is funded by Creative Scotland and supported by The Scottish Government, Argyll and Bute Council and Bòrd na Gàidhlig