About the Scottish Gaelic Arts Agency
Pròiseact nan Ealan documents the artistic life of a language that has shaped Scotland for more than a thousand years.
Who We Are
Pròiseact nan Ealan grew out of a simple frustration: Gaelic art was happening everywhere, and almost nobody was keeping a record of it. A touring play would close, an exhibition would come down, a commissioned poem would be read once at a festival and then live only in the memory of the few hundred people who heard it. We set out to change that.
We are a documentation agency, not a promotional one. That distinction matters to us. When we write about a production or a commission, the aim is to leave behind a record that a researcher, a teacher, or a curious reader can actually use in around ten years' time.
The work spans five areas. Some of it is large and visible — the kind of national initiative that takes years to mount. Some of it is quiet: a single sculptor working in a Hebridean studio, or a small theatre company touring village halls. We treat both with the same care.
You can read more about the people behind the work on our Leadership & Team page, and the editorial principles we follow are explained throughout the site rather than buried in a single statement.
Our Purpose
Languages do not survive on grammar lessons alone. They survive when people make things in them — songs, plays, paintings, novels, arguments. Our purpose is to follow that creative activity closely and write it down honestly.
Consider a Gaelic opera. It might involve a composer, a librettist, a translator, a cast, and a venue, and it might run for roughly three nights before the set is struck. The score survives. The reviews, if there are any, fade. What rarely survives is the connective tissue: why this story, in this language, at this moment. We try to capture that connective tissue while it is still warm.
Our coverage is organised into areas that reflect how Gaelic art actually moves through the world rather than how an archive might prefer to file it:
Major Projects
In-depth documentation of large-scale national and international Gaelic arts initiatives. Read more in Major Projects.
Performing Arts
Gaelic theatre, drama, and musical productions, from chamber operas to touring stage plays. See Performing Arts.
Visual Arts & Literature
Gaelic visual culture, poetry, and monumental literary works. See Visual Arts & Literature.
Cultural Hubs
The venues, cities, and communities that foster Gaelic artistic expression. See Cultural Hubs.
Gaelic Heritage
Resources on the preservation and promotion of the Scottish Gaelic language and its traditions. See Gaelic Heritage.
These categories overlap constantly. A poem becomes a song becomes a stage piece — and we follow it across the boundaries rather than forcing it to stay in one.
Documented Initiatives
The clearest way to understand what we do is to look at the kinds of work we record.
Large-scale commissions
Some Gaelic projects are conceived on a national scale and unfold over several years. They bring together public bodies, festivals, and artists who may never have collaborated before. Our documentation tracks these from the first announcement through to what was actually achieved — including the parts that did not go to plan, because those are often the most instructive.
The single artist
A weaver on Lewis working a phrase of Gaelic verse into a woven piece tells you something a festival programme never will. We give individual makers room. Their decisions about material, place, and language carry the heritage forward in a way that scales up to no policy document, and we think the record is richer for naming them.
How we approach a record: Where we can confirm a detail with a primary source — a programme, a published score, the artists themselves, we state it plainly. Where we cannot, we describe rather than assert. This page introduces our intent; the documentation itself carries the evidence, and like any cultural record it remains open to correction as new material surfaces.
Communities and venues
Art needs somewhere to happen. We document the cultural hubs — the halls, the islands, the urban Gaelic networks, that decide whether a new work finds an audience or never reaches one. Understanding the venue often explains the work better than studying the work alone.
If you are researching a specific production, planning your own initiative, or simply want to point us toward something we have missed, we would genuinely like to hear from you. Get in touch through our Contact Us page.