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Place and the art of belonging

Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University

This paper explores the connections among place, identity and visual art with reference to the Harris Tapestry, created to mark the beginning of a new Millennium on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. I focus on the material practices through which the Tapestry was created and the historical and cultural metaphors evoked through its embroidered motifs with a view to considering what it means to belong on the island. As a site where people’s stories of the past and present are translated into the visual field, the Tapestry is a deeply politicized aesthetics, making visible social relations through which both island and aesthetic spaces are constituted. Centrally, these concern rights to land, the Tapestry exposing tensions through which metaphors of belonging have been challenged and resisted through time. In this sense, the Tapestry is iconic of a ‘culture of resistance’ (Said, 1994) whose geography is island-centred rather than globally peripheral.

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