What does the wrapping symbolise? Wrapping a baby in a blanket, security, wrapping a gift, a surprise, a secret, something hidden, ancient burials, a ritual, a repetitive act. Wrapping has the added layer of the invitation to unwrap. Another element that could be explored. Like a promise of something more inside. A revelation of something new. As well as protective and giving, it can be binding, to be bound, bondage, sexual, pleasure or pain. It can constrain or restrict or kill. But it can be a bandage, a plaster, a fix, heal or protect the body from harm. The body, wrapped in cotton wool, experiencing nothing. A person can be wrapped up in themselves, inside their own mind, with layers and layers of thoughts endlessly circling, are they unraveling? Our mind or soul and our bones wrapped in organs and blood and tissue and skin. We are human wrapped in earth and sea and sky. Yet we are connected. We are wrapped in earth islands. Islands are just sea wrapped earth. All of these things - birth to death to sex to self to island to identity are a circle, no, a spiral, wrapped, with connecting points, travelling and transforming, all the way back and all the way forward, and now.

I feel these huge themes and more can be explored in the simple act of wrapping. A spiral, around and around and around. Find that meditative state. Simply find the creative state, and the creation can have no meaning at all, at the same time as all the meanings possible.

I wonder if something more will come of this idea, or will it spiral off quietly into nothing?

I stuck with the wrapping. It linked to the wrapping of my Lairds Witch sculptures in concrete 'blankets', the wrapping revealed their form whilst also concealing them. I was interested in the duality of that idea.

I researched the archaeologists Karina Croucher and Colin Richards findings on wrapping used in Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Wrapping takes many forms, we wrap a gift in paper, a child in a blanket, or the dead in a shroud, they are at once protected, concealed, contained, separated, hidden, and revealed. There is an intimacy between the materiality of wrapping and the object being wrapped

"Perhaps under such circumstances wrapping may additionally be conceived as an embrace of that concealed" (Croucher and Richards, 2014: 212).

If we think of the skin as the protective wrapping of the body, then tattoos become an extra layer of protection against malevolent outside spiritual forces, at the mouth, ear or any opening where spirits may enter the body. There is a metaphorical ‘wrapping’ of the island in rock art seen at cave entrances, suggesting that landscape may be seen as an extension of the tattooed body.
Wrapping in the form of pattern placed upon an object, the body (in this case tattoos) or the landscape (in this case rock art) are all parts of the same whole (Croucher & Richards, 2014: 213).

These insights into wrapping and pattern as protection connects to saining symbols found on Nordic and Celtic objects such as stones, doorways, lintels of houses, and on Shetland taatit rugs. In the case of the rugs, the wearer is in a protective wrapping as they are vulnerable during sleep. Sleep was a time when spirits like the Mara could enter the body (Christiansen, 2024). In this way, something can be physically wrapped, like the sculptures wrapped in yarn or seaweed, but they can also be wrapped by images, like the drawing saining symbols onto the sculptures. The sculptures are intertwining with their environment.