Mystery women unveiled at gallery

Magazine’s writers create identities for subjects in portraits

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THE portraits of nine mystery women that have been stored away at Inverness Art Gallery are now having their moment in the limelight thanks to a novel exhibition.

Originally the gallery planned showing pictures with the simple theme, Highland Women.

But they had a problem because many of the female subjects were unidentifiable.

Museum learning and access officer Katey Boal said: “In some cases, this was because the pictures had never come with full identification. We can often discover what their husbands or brothers did but we know very little about the women themselves.

“We came up with an innovative solution to the problem of how to label the pictures when we got in touch with the local literary magazine, Random Acts of Writing.”

The result is the exhibition, called Reflections, displaying original fictional writing by contemporary Highland writers about the women in the portraits, and displayed alongside the paintings. Set up three years ago, Raw aims to promote new writers from the north of Scotland.

It had recently published a series of short stories of under 100 words and it was these that caught the attention of museum’s staff.

The writers featured in the exhibition include Katharine Stewart, author of A Croft in the Hills and Anne Macleod, author of The Dark Ship, as well as new writers supported by Raw magazine.

Accompanying the exhibition is a special edition of Raw magazine, featuring colour reproductions of each painting and the full text of each story or poem.

Jennifer Thomson, editor of Raw and co-organiser of the exhibition, said: “This has been a fascinating and challenging project and I am really excited by the quality of writing and the calibre of the writers involved.

“Not only have they produced some original work but their research has also uncovered valuable background information about the pictures for Inverness Museum.” The exhibition is on now until November 26.