Views over the Sound: imagining (Northern) isles as grounds for alternative narratives of becoming non-modern

This chapter draws together various strands within it – such as exploring what islands offer in terms of being non-modern at the intersection of visual perception, landscape, along with autobiographical approaches to situatedness, as prevalent in more recent engagements with ecology, place and landscape. Powerful memories are views across the sounds of the Northern Isles, such as those that separate Skye and Lindisfarne from the mainland, and the different isles of Orkney, of views and passages engendered by visits and work residencies on Skye, Barra and other Hebridean Islands. Views of islands, and being on them, prompt to think of them as particular relational, practised, processual spaces meriting consideration from 'non-representational' perspectives which stress forms of creative enquiry with an emphasis on affective becoming. The bare fact of an island – an area of land surrounded by sea – offers affordances, due to the nature of terrestrial non-aerial life's difficulties of dealing with movement across, and through, water