Lewis MacDonald began using art therapy four years ago. Art therapy is a form of relational psychotherapy which uses artmaking as a way to explore the self and challenges in life.

Towards the end of his art therapy journey, Lewis found through the rekindling of his creativity a renewed interest in both wildlife and photography and developed a desire to learn more about the environment and conservation. Encouraged by his sister, he invested in a camera and began taking photographs of the natural world outside his home on the island of Beinn na Faoghla. His photography became increasingly focused on birds, particularly the owl, and the stages of the moon.

In the culmination of the art therapy process, Lewis began working with his photography to explore images of birds in their natural island environment in conjunction with developing ideas about his cultural context of Indigenous Gàidhlig history and belief systems. Drawing on the archives of Gàidhlig traditions which relate specifically to the owl and the moon through Tobar an Dualchais (n.d)1 and The Gaelic Book of Proverbs (2011 ed.)2 led Lewis to make the mixed media artworks in this exhibition, which also reference through the coloured rope the viewpoint of the archetypal fisherman. The symbolic references in Lewis’s work relate to his own therapeutic process and the personal significance of the island home Beinn na Faoghla, literally meaning ‘hill of the ford’, where he was born, brought up and in which he remains. Drawing attention to what needs to be pulled up into view with an eye on the necessary conservation of ‘the more than human’ (linares 2025 n.p)3 is a core theme.

Locating the photographs in Tagsa Uibhist’s Community Gardens, a semi-external space used for contemporary cultivation, reflects Lewis’s feeling about the importance of connection between human lived experience and wildlife. The humidity and exposure to weather will continue to affect the images over the next three weeks as they take their place within the community gardens. Both art and environment are mutually affected by the introduction of these images to the space. Artist and gardener both faced with the ongoing changes to the work that might reflect something of transience and time passing. Lewis’s image of the waxing moon is deepened by the reference to older Gàidhlig belief about the interconnection of human cultivation and the stages of the moon; in itself a reference to the natural cycles of time passing.

This exhibition, held under the umbrella of Tagsa’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Service, aligns with our ethos of maximising the interconnecting of therapeutic elements inherent in the arts, natural environment and our Indigenous Gàidhlig culture, all of which we continue to endeavour to (re)validate as ways our service users can creatively find their own path to more meaningful existence.

Lewis Macdonald (Artist) with Catriona MacInnes (Art Psychotherapist) 22/07/2026

...and the references referred to in the text:

¹ Tobar an Dualchais (n.d.), https://www.tobarandualchais.co.uk.Accessed 17/06/2026
² Nicolson Alexander (ed.) ([1888] 2011), A collection of Gaelic Proverbs and Familiar Phrases, rev. ed., Edinburgh: Birlinn.
³ linares, annais (2025), 'Co-creative accompaniment: Building renewed relationships through arts-based kinmaking', Creative Studies in Improvisation/ Etudes critiques en improvisation, special Issue: 'emergent and Convergent Scholar-Practitioner Worlds: Improvisation and Social (In)Justice', 16:1,https://doi.org/10.21083/csieci.v16i1.7664.