An Lanntair’s Artist Gatherings are monthly social events for island artists of all disciplines, from music, film and theatre to visual art and design. You do not need to be established or professional to come along. Everyone is welcome and we are here to support all forms of creativity.
Each month we invite two guests to share and talk about their work. Our November gathering will bring together Naomi McDougall Jones, who is visiting Lewis from the USA for a writing residency, and Lewis-based visual artist Sonja Witts.
Naomi McDougall Jones is a 15-time award-winning storyteller, changemaker, and future-weaver whose work spans books, film, television and the healing arts, and challenges entrenched narratives to expand what’s possible. She is the author of The Wrong Kind of Women and the forthcoming American Selkie: One Woman’s Journey Back to Wildness, Ancestral Wisdom, and Magic (Penguin Life, 2027), which she will be reading from at this event. Naomi’s feature films have won 14 festival awards and been distributed worldwide, and as co-founder of The 51 Fund she has executive produced multiple Sundance award-winning films.
Sonja Witts is a fine artist printmaker using stone lithography and woodcut techniques, who has been based in the Isle of Lewis since she moved here from Edinburgh in 2020 in a gap between lockdowns. Her art practice has always had a connection with the sea, revealed through concerns with island culture, migration and vessels as means of travel and transportation. For our Artist Gathering Sonja will share experiences from a recent trip to the Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, which was supported by one of An Lanntair’s travel bursaries.
If you’d like to share your work at a future Artist Gathering, contact Andrew Eaton-Lewis at andrew@anlanntair.com. All contributors will be paid a fee.