Taghairm. Cast Iron. 2019.
Taghairm shares the name of the divination ritual carried out by Ewen Cameron on the banks of the River Lochy, near Torcastle, in the 16th century. Seeking atonement for many cattle raids over his life, he was instructed by Gormshuil of Moy to construct a turf hut by the river and inside it roast a cat. As he did so, the devil appeared from across the Lochy in the form of a large black cat along with hundreds of others and is said to have instructed Ewen to build seven churches to atone for his sins. However, in his book Romantic Lochaber (1939), local historian Donald B. MacCulloch argues it was more likely that Ewen planted seven clumps of pine trees throughout Kilmallie to serve as a living symbol of his repentance.
Some of the seven clumps remain in the area, but elsewhere only traces remain hidden in the moss. In the vicinity of Cnoc Alasdair (Mount Alexander) under the broadleaf canopy of the present day, southeast of Dail a’ Chait (Field of the Cat), where the taghairm was performed, can be seen (and smelt) the resinous stumps of a previous woodland. The trees belonging to these stumps - the descendants of Ewen Cameron’s pines, were felled during the First World War, at a time when the national demand for timber increased to an unprecedented level to meet the needs of an industrial war.
MacCulloch himself describes his memory of the “magnificent tall trees” favoured before they were felled as a foreground in early photographs of Ben Nevis.
Taghairm is one of several casts, in iron, of fragments from these pine stumps. The works seek to give some solidity to the quietly disappearing memory of these trees and the hopes for atonement bound up in their roots.