St Kilda - A True Place

St Kilda has a habit of both existing and not existing. The very name on English language maps seems to have been an error. Not even a strange Anglophone transliteration of the Gaelic ‘Hiort’ but something else entirely made from some mapmaker’s imagination or lack of it.

Perhaps in Herman Melville’s sense St Kilda ‘is not on any map, true places never are.’ And the truth of St Kilda is as complex as that of any other place. It is to such complexity that many artists have responded over the years, and yet there is always more to do. In these photographs Alex Boyd adds another layer of visual exploration to this island group, not simply through his extraordinary ability to use the camera as a tool of aesthetic discovery but through his keen sense of the cultural and geological paradoxes of this place. Not least of those paradoxes is that St Kilda found thousands of years of continuous habitation unsustainable in the first part of the twentieth century, to be replaced only by the military shift patterns of the Cold War. It is interesting to note that Boyd’s work is literally in the tradition of that great seer of cultural landscape, Fay Godwin for many of these photographs were taken with a camera which was once in her possession. Alex Boyd is a worthy successor.

Professor Murdo Macdonald, University of Dundee, RSA

Note: This text was included as a preface to St Kilda - The Silent Islands (Luath Press, 2019)