First Marks
Landscape, Interrupted. Mixed media, 2022.
Sometimes it’s hard to know how to start a new project. This happened to me when I arrived at Cove Park just north of Glasgow for an unscheduled 10 day artist residency.
As this was technically not part of my Stone Stories project, I thought I would start by immersing myself in the glorious landscape here. I had to do a short run by farm car to get some food supplies to tide me over the Easter period and went to a nearby village. As I was driving back, I noticed a huge facility across the loch.
Turns out this is Faslane, the site of the UK’s largest nuclear submarine site. You can’t see it from the residency, but now that I know it’s there, my ideas about art making are shaped by this unforeseen knowledge.
I started making marks about the rocks using charcoal and frottage, then added water ripples for effect. But as I did this, the ripples became acoustic sound waves, the lines became power poles cutting across the Hebridean Islands and suddenly I had made my first marks and sutures with Landscape, Interrupted.
It is almost as if, in the midst of extraordinary beauty, we need to cut and scar the landscape in the most spectacularly catastrophic way.
When I visited the Island of Lewis, they were erecting huge power lines across the moors. In the mainland of Shetland, they had begun construction of a huge wind farm with not just a few windmills, but hundreds of them as well as the access roads and site buildings needed to maintain them. On Unst, the northern most Shetland island, they are erecting a satellite rocket launch pad. The skylines of the moors will be forever altered.
Then I find that in the midst of this extraordinarily beautiful landscape of Cove Park overlooking Loch Long, there is the most controversial of nuclear submarine facilities just over the next peninsular. The subs have names like Repulse, Renown, and Revenge and more recently Vengeance, Victorious and Vigilant.
I cannot express the beauty of this landscape without referencing the potential for complete human annihilation as
“ Each missile carries warheads more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima during World War Two.” [1]
There is a peace protest camp that was set up in the 1980s which is still operating. I might take the farm car out for another little drive and have a cup of tea with the protesters. Who knows what art this may inspire.
View from the balcony, Cove Park, Scotland
