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In a multi-media performance award winning poet Chrys Salt and acclaimed saxophone player Richard Ingham explore the fascinating stories of Angus MacPhee and Ötzi the Iceman – two weavers of grass separated by 5000 years.Angus MacPhee, a crofter from South Uist went off to war in 1939, fell ill with a form of schizophrenia and was sent to Craig Dunain, a hospital for the mentally ill outside Inverness. For the next fifty years Angus became electively mute, but using the ancient skills of the Islands went about weaving amazing garments from the grass and leaves he harvested from the hospital grounds.
‘A wonderfully touching true story.’ The Sunday Herald
‘This is a sequence of boldness and of sympathy; as unlikely as it may seem – and as mysterious – we may call it a meeting of imaginations’. Tom Pow: poet
Ötzi the Iceman is a well-preserved mummy of a man who lived over 5000 years ago. He is Europe’s oldest known natural human mummy. . Bronze Age man also wove garments out of grass, something Chrys discovered when researching Angus’ fascinating story. The exact circumstances of his Otzi’s death remain unknown.
….an impressive sequence of poems about Otzi, the well-preserved mummy of a man from 5,000 years ago that was found in the Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy, in 1991.(WriteOutLoud)
These poems play on sense with music, involvement, sense of place, history and time… they are full of the music of the grass. Lynn Woolacott review in Reach Magazine
Chrys Salt captures the life and the distress of ‘outsider artist’ Angus MacPhee in language and imagery as natural as his materials – grass-roots, hawkweed, husk and seed, moss, buttercup, vetch and thorn – weaving them into an elegiac evocation of the loss and regret he worked through in his long years of incarceration. Her deeply felt and sympathetic take on a life so nearly wasted leaves the man and his creations ‘caught like a burr on cloth / of dim remembering’ bringing him to life in the deepest recesses of our mind’s eye. Brian Johnstone poet and founder of StAnza International poetry Festival.
A rich and enthralling exploration of mental health, the creative process, human frailty and ancient traditions.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
RBC Film Theatre, Dumfries, United Kingdom
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