Ruaridh Law // Art & Music   email ruaridh@gmail.com
Lionra (2017)

Outdoor walks, installation and performance for Sanctuary 2017
Collaboration with Dave Donnelly and Eleanor Thomson “Líonra will develop, and be actively developed by, the one true network on site – the visitors and artists – to develop a sense of community through storytelling and folklore.

The piece will begin with a guided walk through the whole site, led by the artists, where an imagined history of the site will begin to form like a tapestry. As the walk is carried out, small transmitters placed in key story areas will broadcast a whispered, at times contrary account, adding more texture to the telling. These Chinese whispers, overheard by the participants, may have as much credibility – or more – than the first-hand oral telling. Each talk will be recorded.

As participants finish their walk, they will be encouraged to attend later walks, either as freshly-minted narrators or as passive listeners to a gradually modified tale.

As those further walks occur throughout the day and night, the progressive mutation of tellers and tales will escalate. Moreover, the artists will layer the previously captured audio into the whispers being broadcast on the site. In this way the stories will grow, be continually re-layered, become more indistinct and yet somehow more authoritative in the telling.

A multifaceted oral telling of the imagined history of the site will develop, linking together all the participants on site and of course, the wider network – people brought together through passing on tales, creating folklore, imaging worlds together.






>Ruaridh Law is an artist and musician based in North Ayrshire, Scotland.

>Over 20 years he has performed in groups, in collaborations and solo across a wide range of festivals, arts spaces, venues and clubs as performer, improviser, DJ and artist. His >mediums include sound and installation art, film and writing. His works have ranged from intimate audio performance and gallery installations to large-scale outdoor works >combining sound walks, improvised performance and experimental storytelling.

>His artistic focusses are on data-visualisation, human voices and their stories, unusual paradigms for performance and composing, and marrying abstraction to a beating human >heart. These have manifested themselves in a tarot deck that generates music, sequential stories told over film and radio, right-wing propaganda twisted and sanitised into more >worthwhile content and a walk through a forest and its imagined mythologies in the dead of night – as well as countless CD, DVD, vinyl and other music releases.

>He runs several record labels and, more recently, No Roof Only Sky, a small press publisher.