DIGITAL DRAWINGS
2026
The Island Energy Map was created by Isobel Holbourne and depicted in the book The Decline and Fall of St. Kilda in a chapter dedicated to her native island of Foula, a sparsely populated island located in the Northern Scottish Isles.
The map serves to depict the input and output of an island with the aim of finding an energetic equanimity that will document either its successful longevity or its inhabitation through a state failure of ingoing resources.
Working within the frame of Lindsay Drury's aesthetics of remoteness, in these images the Island Energy Map has been applied to a domestic symbol of the Celtic Tiger, the familiar domestic archipelago of the Kitchen Island, and allows us to observe its fall from a status proclaiming connection to a remoteness of alterity.
Ellen Whyte Duggan is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Dublin whose work specialises in small islands, both real and imagined, and in the broader study of islandness.
Her work centres on Scotland's northern isles, where she completed a master’s in island literature at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Orkney.
Ellen has previously been selected as an RHA Young Art Writer and has acted as a writers delegate for the Dublin Literary Festival. Her work has been read at both Temple Bar Lab and Gutter Bookshop.
Her recent Dublin Digital Radio show, Circadian Oradian, focused on popular conceptions of islands, with readings from island memoir and island-related literature interspersed with sound. She will shortly be directing a series of three workshops as part of BOHS Scoil boheamach, focusing on island literature, ecology and the island symbol in popular media