Timespan presents Milly Thompson’s The Moon, The Sea & The Matriarch, a celebration of the pleasures, woes, cellulite, and desires of older and middle aged women.

Lavish in orange blossom, salty hair, moist thighs, disco skies, heavy lashes and hot breezes; shrug off the manufactured drug of youth and beauty and laugh with collective sisterly joy at the neuroses and anxieties fabricated to sell you a lifestyle which gives you migraines. Glow up and spurn the role of the neutered, invisible older woman and embrace that liberation comes from a transformative and unified women’s joy, not playing a constrained, soporific Stepford Wife.

The Moon, The Sea & The Matriarch includes a solo exhibition of Milly’s Cougar paintings, luscious portraits of older women indulging and enjoying themselves, soundtracked by My body temperature is feeling good, a song in three parts tracing an older woman on a solo beach holiday, solitary, gregarious and rampant.

The project will command the whole village – banners will be raised on the lamposts; the Timespan building turned luminous gorse yellow; our geology garden revamped in crystal and Call to the Sea posters flyposted each week. FACE THE HILLS will be painted onto the harbour with a view looking out to sea, and directly opposite this FACE THE SEA towards the hills, forming a psychological trap, echoing a sometimes dark and imprisoning anguish of a woman’s enclosure.

Milly has worked with herbalists and perfumer Eliza Douglas to produce a collection of three perfumes: SHATAVARI: INVISIBLE; PROPOSITION and VOLATILE. During the project, Timespan will be running an alternative wellbeing and pampering clinic. To launch Milly’s project, an all woman local choir wearing the colours of a sunset will sing sea shanties and fisherwomen lullabies on a boat procession down the Helmsdale river and out to sea into twilight.