This video and audio installation - with accompanying drawings and photographs by artist Shona Illingworth - is a complex investigation of memory, and its importance in forging a sense of individual and collective identity.

The film at the centre of this project offers a vivid portrait of the remarkable location of Balnakiel. Situated at the furthermost edge of Britain and continually exposed to, even under siege from, a hostile and threatening environment, in which the extremes and vicissitudes of weather are echoed by the intermittent thunder of RAF and Royal Navy manoeuvres around this still-active bombing range. As well as a study of this brooding, melancholy landscape, the work focuses on the lives and recollections of contemporary residents of Balnakiel and the nearby, older village of Durness (which has its own similarly troubled legacy dating from the time of the Highland clearances), highlighting a split between the original inhabitants of several generations standing and a newer influx of arrivals (who came to the area in search of an alternative lifestyle four decades ago).

Within this socially charged context, 'Balnakiel' considers underlying complexities in the interaction between individual and collective memory. Shaped in part by exchanges with cognitive neuro-psychologist Martin Conway, Balnakiel draws attention to the strategies memory employs to attempt to either articulate or suppress strong undercurrents of experience when a sense of self and community identity is under threat.

Balnakiel is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with John Hansard Gallery and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Funded by the Wellcome Trust with support from The Highland Legacy Trust and Danish Embassy.

Balnakiel will be exhibited at Wolverhampton Art Gallery from 6 February to 1 May 2010.

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