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‘It is this it is this, it is this’ is a performative video-essay by Laura Edbrook & Sarah Forrest following research at the Margaret Tait Archives in Kirkwall, Orkney, as a commission for the ‘Footnoting the Archive’ programme. The performance was presented as part of the ‘Archival Interventions’ event as Glasgow Sculpture Studios and went on to be included in ‘Outside-in/Inside-out’ poetry festival, Glasgow, and ‘Of Other Spaces: Where does gesture become event?’ International Symposium at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee in 2016.

A portrait of Margaret Tait: ‘Is is this it is this, it is this’ considers the manner of ‘closeness to’ and ‘distance from’ in Tait’s writing and filmmaking—a close looking and a ‘scouring’ where Tait uniquely captures the quotidian but consistently resists the autobiographical.