I grew up on an island in the Outer Hebrides called, Vatersay, there were 60 inhabitants, white beaches, turquoise waters, sea eagles, otters, whales, dolphins and all the lobster I could eat as my Dad was a lobster fisherman.I hated it! Truly I did, I couldn't wait to leave and bathe in the bright lights of cities and art school... So off i went......I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a first class honours in Sculpture and the Andrew grant bequest scholarship for highest academic achievement, then i partied, then I went to Devon via Liverpool, to Dartington College of Arts where I graduated with an MA (with Distinction) in Time Based Arts. I taught and lectured for a while and I started some PhD's in some places...I am finally finishing one entitled, 'Autobiography and its landscapes'. 
In recent years I have worked among other things as co-director of Catalyst Arts and as artist in residence in North Down, Craigavon, Dungannon, Armagh, Banbridge, Cookstown, Fermanagh and Belfast. I have worked on a number of community and public art works and have continued my own practice, recently exhibiting a major solo show in Belfast. 
 
I live back on an island now and wouldn't swap it for the world.
It was a good journey though.
 
 
Artists I have chosen to take part in ART ODYSSEY and who I am proud to say have agreed include:
 
David Holmes
 

David Holmes is a Belfast born DJ & producer. In his varied professional life, he has produced five albums and fourteen films oundtracks. His most recent album, The Holy Pictures has been widely critically acclaimed, & has been recently nominated for the Irish Choice Music Prize and also the Meteor Awards. David’s first solo record, This Film’s Crap, Let’s Slash the Seats was released in 1995, and plugged into his most enduring and vital source of musical inspiration – cinema.  1997 saw the release of Let’s Get Killed and 2000’s Bow Down to the Exit Sign was created as the soundtrack to a not-yet-made movie, and which featured a unique collection of collaborators including Martina Topley Bird & poet Carl Hancock Rux. David staked out new creative ground as part of the band, Free Association & in 2003 David Holmes Presents the Free Association was released. Like his solo efforts, the album received commercial and (massive) critical acclaim.
 
In recent years however, David’s work for film has flourished. His successful partnership with director Steven Soderbergh was developed on films Out of Sight (1998) & Ocean’s 11(2001), and this has continued through sequels Ocean’s 12 and 13.  With long-time collaborator Steve Hilton, David also worked to create the acclaimed soundtrack evoking the dystopian near-future world of Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46.
 
In 2006, with lifelong partners Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, David founded Canderblinks Film and Music, a film production company. Its first short film, The 18th Electricity Plan, played at various international film festivals, including LA Shorts Fest, Clermont Ferrand and Cork International Film Festival, where it won a Special Mention in the Best New Director category. Earlier this year he worked with Leo Abrahams to create the score for the award winning film Hunger, this & his score for the edgy, contemporary coming-of-age film Cherrybomb were nominated for Best Score in the Irish Film and Television Awards 2009 - Hunger subsequently won Best Score. He has recently completed the score for Five Minutes of Heaven, a drama set in 1970s Northern Ireland, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, which has just won ‘best director’ at the Sundance Film Festival and whose film Downfall was Oscar-nominated, and 'Perriers Bounty' starring Brendan Gleason and Cillian Murphy as well as scoring The Gentlemen’s Tea-Drinking Society his first composition for theatre.
 
David is currently in pre-production for his next feature length films that include Good Vibrations, a film set in the heart of the punk-rock scene of 1970s Belfast, written by Glen Patterson and Colin Carbury and co-produced by Andrew Eaton of Revolution Films it will be the first feature film from Canderblinks Film. He is also completing production duties on the debut album for new Northern Ireland hopefuls CASHIER NO9

 
Miriam de Burca
 

http://www.thethirdspacegallery.com/mdb2_01.html

Miriam de Búrca grew up between Germany (her place of birth), Ireland (her nationality) and Austria (where her grandparents lived). Her nomadic childhood and youth (she also lived in Glasgow for six years) have given her a perspective on identity that has developed into a very fluid attitude towards the idea of home and belonging. De Búrca came to Northern Ireland to study in 1998 and has been living there ever since, deciding to stay and make it her home. Living in Belfast she encountered evidence of sectarianism and segregation every day, and found it impossible to ignore the fact that Northern Ireland’s troubled history has been perpetuated by two divergent ideologies founded on the nationalistic idea of one true homeland. For the past four years she has been carrying out practice-based research about this impasse over territory in an attempt to understand some of the complexities of human psychology and behaviour. She has been making experimental films and installations around this subject, producing her films entirely by herself or in collaboration with other artists. Recent exhibitions/screenings include Projector, FOUR Gallery, Dublin (2009), AWingBigCell, Belfast Film Festival, Belfast (2009), Do Not Touch When the Fire is Lit, 3rd Space Gallery, Belfast (2008), Passengers, Warsaw (2008), You and Me, Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2008), AWingBigCell, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York (2008) and AWingBigCell, Gimpel Fils, London (2008).

 
Factotum (Stephen Hackett and Richard West)
 
www.factotum.org.uk
 

Factotum is both an arts organisation and artists' project that was formed in 2001 by Stephen Hackett and Richard West. They publish The Vacuum newspaper, put on exhibitions, publish books and make films. In the past they have also run a choir, staged contemporary dance events and organised talks. In 2005 Factotum won a Paul Hamlyn Award for the Visual Arts and participated in Northern Ireland's first showing in the Venice Biennale. In 2007 they were selected for the Irish Curated Visual Arts Award by the artist Mike Nelson. Factotum's work often involves collaborating with a wide range of other arts organisations, artists and writers.

 
Dan Jewesbury
 

Daniel Jewesbury was born in London and studied Sculpture at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. He moved to Belfast in 1996 and subsequently studied for a PhD in the Media Studies department of the University of Ulster at Coleraine, which he received in 2001.
Daniel's work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Having used many media in the past, including video, photography and radio, Daniel is now concentrating on the use of 16mm film. His solo exhibition at Void, Derry, in 2007, featured two new works shot in 16mm, No Special Place and 10 Monologues. Both works were two-screen installations with multichannel sound. No Special Place, a particularly ambitious piece of work several years in planning, appropriates elements of the 1954 novel Bhowani Junction, by John Masters, set amongst the Anglo-Indian community immediately prior to Indian independence; its fractured narrative of unreliable memories investigates the uncertainty and mobility of one's sense of self.
If the curious interrelationship of memory, biography and narrative are persistent themes in Daniel's work, so is a concern with place. Both in artworks and in published writing Daniel has expressed an interest in the politics of regeneration and redevelopment, and the way in which individuals come to understand and express their relationship to the places in which they live.
Daniel is currently working on three new pieces of work, one filmed during his residency at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Celje, Slovenia, during 2008; one commissioned for the group show Prehistory of the Crisis II at Project, Dublin in July 2009; and a film entitled New Lodge Road, the first part of a series of 'film portraits' of Belfast.
Daniel's writing is widely published, in such titles as Source, Mute, Third Text, Variant (of which he is a co-editor) and, of course, The Vacuum. He has also written three catalogue texts for Willie Doherty, including the essay 'What we will remember, and what we must forget', for the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Daniel is also the Northern Representative for Visual Artists Ireland

Seamus Harahan
 

Harahan's work uses video footage of his environment, its incidental detail and fugitive nature.
Seamus Harahan (born Belfast, 1968, lives in Belfast) uses his video camera - a relatively accessible and moderately affordable technology - to take hand-held, seemingly amateur footage, the contents of this footage locating Harahan through found activity occurring around him. The light is often unfiltered and the image over-exposed, implying a mode of filmmaking that prioritises recording before thought, the absent-minded gaze.
Music is a vital element in all of Harahan's works, with songs used as soundtracks or informing the composition, title or duration of individual pieces. The artist takes songs from an eclectic range of sources, including reggae and hip-hop as well as traditional English and Irish music. The recording style can be equally telling, from scratchy track-intros (Picking Up Change in the King Fu Theatre, 2004) to a John Peel introduction to a live session track (Free as a Bird, 2006). These seemingly disparate musical sources are laid over Harahan's footage, often coming with references to war and conflict, including lyrics intending to motivate or comfort soldiers and freedom fighters. The marriage of such lyrics to footage of Belfast, but particularly to images that focus on the minutiae of found activity, strike a balance between a sense of political conflict and an intuitive response to individual human concerns.
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Duncan Ross
 
www.dfross.com
 

Duncan originates traditional and digital illustration, graphic design and animation for clients in the commercial and arts sectors. He also works on self-initiated projects and has exhibited in London, Frankfurt, Lisbon and Harbin (China). Duncan has worked on a number of public art commissions, community art projects and has been awarded numerous art residencies. He is currently Creative Director at Queen Street Digital Studios, Belfast.