Our rural riddle: Contemporary art in the Highlands leaves the cityscape far behind for a farmhouse

I'M SITTING in an immaculate white cube of a gallery, watching The Time Machine In Alphabetical Order, a brand new and rather fun piece of video art by the artist duo Thomson and Craighead, that takes the badly dated Sixties movie version of the HG Wells classic and transforms its narrative by the simple expedient of re-editing the entire dialogue in order from A to Z.

• Your hosts: for Eilidh Crumlish and Geoff Lucas the H-I-C-A gallery is a labour of love.

But as the story reaches the letter W and I'm pondering just how many wheres, whats and whens the original scriptwriter can be forgiven for, I'm also struck by how remarkable the where in this case really is. For this smart contemporary gallery isn't surrounded by the usual cityscape of coffee bars and shops. Instead it's perched high on a windswept chunk of Scottish hillside.

On one side is a small cottage garden inhabited by a brood of hens and a gentle collie dog and on the other is a steading that forms part of a working sheep farm. The stunning picture window, upon which the artists have emblazoned the words "The End" - turning a scenic view into a movie's closing credits - frames the garden and a view over Loch Ruthven.

Only a half hour's drive from the centre of Inverness, it's not exactly remote, but on the sleepy side of Loch Ness, high on a moor near the end of a single track road, it certainly feels it.

This, then, is the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art. Despite the name, H-I-C-A isn't some lottery-funded slice of modern architecture, but the small, personal and part-time labour of love of artists Eilidh Crumlish and Geoff Lucas. It is carved out of the small Victorian farmhouse they rent and tiny slices of support from bodies like the Scottish Arts Council and the Henry Moore Foundation.

"Having this gallery in a farm makes total sense," says Lucas, over coffee and some fine home-made fruit loaf. "In the city you have old industrial buildings turned into galleries like Tate Modern, but what would suit the Highlands would be a farm building. Of course it does have its absurd side, and the name kind of reflects that."

Until three years ago, the couple - she's from Edinburgh, he was brought up in Hackney - were living in South London. What do they miss? "Well, there have been quite a few exhibitions, we'd like to have seen…" What are they glad to leave behind? "The neighbour situation… one of the things that's really heartbreaking in a city is that everything changes all the time." The new neighbourhood is a lot quieter, then, but the welcome is warmer. Visit this venue - it has four shows a year and opens mainly on Sundays or by request - and you'll end up staying for a chat.The gallery, which has shown such established British artists as Alec Finlay and Jeremy Millar and will have an exhibition by the Boyle Family in the autumn, places a great emphasis on discussion.

"Because it's in our house it is slightly different from coming to an urban gallery," says Crumlish. "We leave people alone to look at the work but we almost always end up talking about it afterwards over a cup of tea. You can watch artists take a deep breath when they come to work here, it takes things down a notch. You get really good discussions out of that."

Both of the couple are working artists and the gallery started as an exploration of Lucas's interest in the concrete art movement and its offshoots in music and poetry. For a tiny artist-led initiative, their programme is remarkable in its international ambitions and single-minded pursuit of the artists and ideas that interest them, but it also fills a notable local gap.

"We were just going to have a small project space, to invite some artists we were interested in to make some work," says Lucas. "But discussions with other people in the area, the realisation that there wasn't much of this kind of art being shown here, has meant it has become more public."

While they don't use the space to exhibit their own work, it's clear that one of the great inspirations for their project is the late Ian Hamilton Finlay's great art work, his garden Little Sparta, itself situated on a hill farm. While generations of artists have gone rural, this couple, like Finlay before them, view the countryside as a place of engagement rather than retreat.

"The internet and email are fantastic ways of keeping up," Lucas explains. "We've found a whole network of galleries around the world that share our interests. For quite a long time our website was busiest with visitors from Germany and our Facebook page with friends from Brazil. And here we are, a gallery in a remote part of Scotland."

When the Boyle Family show here later this year it will be hot on the heels of a show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Future plans include a project by Dutch artist Esther Polak and a drawing in smoke signals by the Brazilian Camila Sposati. H-I-C-A, it seems, has the where, what and when pretty well sorted.

Thomson and Craighead runs until 25 July at H-I-C-A, Dalcrombie, Loch Ruthven, Inverness-shire. www.h-i-c-a.org