Iameuga 1829 two-channel HD video installation (17 minutes 25 seconds)

In Iameuga 1829, James Mackay revisits childhood traumas in a fever dream. The film flits between Mackay's sick-bed, his memories of his family's clearance from Gleann Leireag in 1812, and a recurring dream which always ends at the Gleann Leireag burn. The film is narrated via a series of letters which James Mackay believes he has written home to his sister Isabel but, which the film reveals, cannot be the case.

Iameuga 1829 was conceived as a direct response to a late eighteenth-century dress, held in Lakeland Art’s collection at Abbot Hall, which I encountered during a residency period there; the dress has no recorded historical provenance. The film is also a response to my time spent living in Assynt in Sutherland. The video imagines that the Abbot Hall dress belonged to Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, first Duchess of Sutherland (1765-1839), who is primarily remembered as one of the main actors in the Highland clearances when thousands of people were dispossessed of their farms, lands, and homes. This is a historical episode which continues to exert a tangible influence upon the present day; it is an inescapable part of the culture and society of many communities in the north and west of Scotland. Some of those dispossessed in the clearances chose to emigrate to the British colonies in America and the Caribbean where they became embroiled with other diasporas.

This film probes the past's haunting of the present and how historical traumas can transmit from generation to generation across time. The film also addresses the fallibility of memory: are James Mackay's memories real? Perhaps they are inherited? Or maybe they are a smokescreen for something that he'd rather was forgotten? Just exactly what and how much is shown to the audience is a matter of choice for James Mackay and the artist, who happen to be one and the same.