Mairi Campbell: Living Stone


Mairi Campbell
Scottish Storytelling Centre

Mairi Campbell: Living Stone

This ancient earth is beset with gifts: fragments of eternity that have seen countless aeons pass around them, only to be bestowed with meaning by fragile and ephemeral beings such as humans. In such a way, Mairi Campbell’s latest art project centres around such a ‘living stone’.

The rock itself, (metamorphic as it turns out) is a large, flat stone with a hole in the centre and was once the family millstone at a croft on the isle of Lismore. Dug up by her family, it has since become something of a muse and the central spoke of the endeavour, leading to an album, a series of drawings and this performance piece.

Mairi is a capable and endearing host, breaking into a cheeky smile when not telling old stories in prose or rhyming verse amidst bouts of singing in both Gaelic and English. The audience is gently co-opted into the singing as well as the latter part of the piece plays out, gently encouraged to lend their own bent to things, as the strange and somewhat scattershot series of thoughts, poems and tales wind onwards.

And that’s really the make or break of this performance, how much the audience wishes to follow the meanders and tributaries which Campbell chooses to stream through, because there isn’t a single theme to the piece other than the stone itself, flitting from history and poetic chants set to a strange form of almost yoga to stories of cruel landlords and impoverished crofters, but also swinging wildly to Mairi’s own bandmates and the best wood to use when building a pendulum.

It’s entertaining, but in a way that borders on the incredulous, and indeed for a lot of people, this will stray far too deeply into the land of hippy-dippy stuff and nonsense. But on the other hand, it's undeniable that the whole is entertaining, kindly meant and something of a delight at times. Some will look at Mairi’s treasure and see nothing more than a flat stone with a hole in it, but to those with the right eyes, it could encompass an entire universe.

Reviewer: Graeme Strachan

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