The Caledonian Pine or Scots Pine tree seems to symbolise all that is tough and hardy about Scotland. Through it I feel the tug and pull of my DNA, my ancestors voices in the wind, calling. I wrote a poem which became a drawing and then a video. I love the way the artistic process unfolds as you work.
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The outer cloth and silk lining ready to sew a sachet - I dyed these cloths while at Dartington this year.
Weathering the Weather
Much of art research is collecting information or data, then conceptualising how this can be creatively expressed. Collecting data about the weather has become a rich source of inspiration in the Western Highlands for over a hundred years. I’m carrying it forward…
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View of the lower part of Ben Nevis through the rain spattered window
Climbing, not Bagging
Why do people climb mountains? Is it because “they’re there?” In Scotland there is a tradition of ‘bagging a Munro’, climbing one of the mountains over 3,000 feet. My idea of climbing and bagging is a bit different….
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Pilgrim, Stranger - Coigrich Taistealach artist book April 2022
"Have you Gaelic?"
Being gifted Gaelic titles for some of my artworks while in Scotland has given me the key to a map of landscape. My accordion fold artist book Pilgrim Stranger with its Gaelic name Coigrich Taistealach has unlocked this landscape as a place of mystery which I have entered as a pilgrim.
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Landscape, Interrupted. Mixed media, 2022.
First Marks
You can never un-know what you know. In the midst of extraordinary beauty at my artist residency at Cove Park, I discover that just over the peninsular is the UK’s largest nuclear submarine facility. It is almost as if, in the midst of beauty, we need to scar the landscape in the most spectacularly catastrophic way. How to make art to reflect this?
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Trusting the Process
Every time I get nervous or feel under pressure to perform, I remember to let the work develop itself, to find its own story that needs to be told. This is what happened when my photograph of two chimneys became a metaphor for dispossession in a series of artworks devised at my artist residency.
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Argyrotype print In the washing out tray - Callanish Stones, 2022.
Stones of Destiny
Stone Circles, houses of stone and hills of ancient rock form a narrative of time, place and human interaction with this animate landscape in the Outer Hebrides. They are the beginning of my Stone Stories project.
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Glenfinnan viaduct taken from the Jacobite Express carriage window
The idea of it
in Storytelling
Sometimes it is the idea of something which propels us into action. If we are lucky, the reality meets or exceeds expectations.
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Callanish III (Cnoc Fillibhir Bheag) stone circle, Island of Lewis
Small offerings
We are bereft of rituals. The ancient peoples who were of the land, knew the need for ceremony, for thanks and gratitude to the earth,
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