Gaada is delighted to present Welcome to Vagrøy, a new exhibition by Shetland Artist Tristan Rafferty to celebrate the launch of the new book “Vagrøy: A Northern Isles Almanac”

An excerpt from Da Vagrøy Times:

Artist-ethnographer chronicles “The ordinary strangeness of the Isles”

Over the past year, Tristan M. Rafferty has been documenting what he calls “the ordinary strangeness” of the archipelago: two-headed lambs grazing on cliffsides, fisherfolk
naming their catches before consumption, and heidcats sneaking off with what may or may not have been offered to them. The result of this research, his illustrated fieldwork Vagrøy: A Northern Isles Almanac, has just been published through Gaada. It is already being called “a work of ethnographic realism so convincing that it may well have invented its own geography.” By whom, the paper cannot say.

Rafferty arrived by cargo ferry in the backwash of a storm and immediately began his rounds: recording dialect variations in the village of Nesk, gathering seaweed samples near Kvalhamn, and sleeping for a week in an abandoned croft sunk into the bog. He filled a dozen notebooks with local sayings, proverbs, and recipes, all written in his looping, near-illegible script –half ink, half smudge.

Printed on algae paper and stitched by hand, Vagrøy: A Northern Isles Almanac reads like a cross between a field manual and a regional survey. Each page observes the slow rhythms of the islands: animals moving along the cliffs, plants steeped in salt air, and people who treat the sea as a route through, not a line between.

But Rafferty’s ambitions reach further than folklore. His ongoing research reframes the northern basin as a shared commons of story, labour, and survival – a counter-cartography in which Vagrøy serves as both locus and metaphor.

“He’s after mair as just myth,” says Inga Øyvik, a rope-maker from Brennivik who guided Rafferty around Vagrøy on his very first trip here, many year ago. “He’s studying how we mind wir work. How weaving, fishing, an even gossip become ways of knowing.”

Whether he’s a scientist, a storyteller, or something in between is still being debated. But the Almanac has captured something few academic works manage: the rhythm of a place that never quite agrees to stay real.”

Rafferty has hinted that his next volume will turn eastward, toward the shadow of the fjordlands, continuing his attempt to build a North Sea that belongs to no empire, only to itself. “My aim,” he says, “is to worship our land through documentation. To preserve is to adore.”

Until then, the people of Vagrøy continue to spot him at low tide, kneeling with a pen and a purpose, transcribing the murmurs of a world that refuses to stay mapped.

Copies of “Vagrøy: A Northern Isles Almanac” are available at Gaada’s shop and at Havvik Bookshop.

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You can visit the exhibition outside Toogs Artist Workshop Tuesday - Saturday, until January 18th.