Pathways
BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES
front cover image Winter Journey mixed media 89cm x 152cm
Published by Kilmorack Gallery ltd, 2022 ISBN 978-1-8384862-9-7 Kilmorack Gallery, inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk
Pathways 25 March - 16 April 2022
BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES
Pathways mixed media | 81cm x 121cm
Introduction There are hidden places around Beth Robertson Fiddes’ home in the northwest of Scotland: small inlets that others rarely visit, a waterfall in a deep gorge, illuminated by sunlight for only a few weeks a year, or a place where you look down from a clifftop to the sea below, and another where you look out from the beach far out to the horizon. There are always pathways that take you to these places and Robertson Fiddes has walked many of these and is still discovering more. You can look at the land, or a painting, and see ways through it, imagining the journey you’ll take. Beth tells me that sometimes she’ll head to the coast expecting to paint the horizon, but instead turns around and becomes fascinated with a small puddle. The best pathway surprises you. It takes you deep into the land and lulls you with each step until you become sensitive to seasons, weather and time. The place you arrive at maybe somewhere better than expected.
Beth gestures towards the mountain in front of her studio. It resembles a reclining woman. She tells me it’s like a clock where the sun traces an arc from the left shoulder to pap one. It then goes over the head, crossing pap two, down the right shoulder before it moves out to the sea. On the other side of her studio are caves. Beth tells me of a procession of head torches coming down the hill at night after a day’s caving. They have spent a day (or is it a night) in the underworld. There are ways of understanding that need you to be there; slowly, without the noise and quickness of modernity. This is, of course, how the world has been understood for the longest. Cairn-builders, Norsemen and crofters would have known about the caves and would have also traced the sun as it moves over Beth’s reclining woman. This timeless feeling gives Robertson Fiddes’ work a primal quality, where you are discovering a new world, as a progenitor, and the players in this film 1
are the most ancient actors: the length of a day, four seasons, the sea and the land. It is epic and endless, her paintings say. Knowledge and love of landscape is one side of Beth Robertson Fiddes’ work. It sets the direction. Most of art is in the navigation, in finding the path that fires a very personal urge to work. Beth has found this, but she also has incredible craftsmanship. Her studio is busy with the chaos of twenty-years experimentation. Pots, tubes, brushes and strange applicators and scrubbers lie at arm’s reach. The first phase in working on one of her paintings is the maelstrom. This is a storm that gives energy and a near disorder of acrylics. It is like the volcanic birth of the rocks she paints, when black and red lavas of paint are laid down with gusto. After this, calm is restored by the controlled use of oil paints and inks. Here, a restful order is found, when complications end and an equilibrium is found. It is in this stillness that we the viewer can inhabit 2
the painting freely. This is a very deliberate way of working. In Robertson Fiddes’ paintings, just like in our lives, there is always a play of chaos and order. Beth Robertson Fiddes’ earliest years were spent in Tiree, where another world was a hop and a splash away in the rockpools around the island’s edge. Here, hairy-seaweed-monsters, anemones and crabs could be found, and the sounds and iodine smell of the sea felt. These memories never left her. After this Beth spent time in Kansas where her father worked. He was an art teacher and took her and other kids to every art exhibition available, into the private galleries where you had to buzz to enter, and then onto the big public exhibitions. She tells me of a gallery full of brightly coloured mobiles. ‘That must have been Alexander Calder’s work. They were fun, like toys.’ ‘Which one would
gained a lot of knowledge on this journey. There is a book of colours in Beth’s head and a gazetteer of places to go when there’s a frost, or when the morning light is low. It feels as if the ghost of her father is there too, giving a critical eye, a chaos to be calmed, but also a font of wisdom.
Beth Robertson Fiddes in St Kilda
you like?’ her father asked. In America, art was everywhere and at home artbooks covered every surface. It was the same when they moved to Kingussie in the early-1980s, but now Beth was older artistic conversations were more intense. Her father had strong opinions about the rights and wrongs of every painting. Eventually Beth went to Edinburgh College of Art and, after this, she returned north to the source of her work. Today she looks out to the reclining mountain woman. Robertson Fiddes has
It is always a great honour to host an exhibition like this. Big shows let us stop on a pathway and explore where we are. They are a three-week time to be savoured and remembered. There are twenty-two works in this catalogue and in each one we are taken to a special place by the best guide you could hope for.
Tony Davidson Director of Kilmorack Gallery
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Still Backwater mixed media 76cm x 106cm
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Sheltering, Clachtoll mixed media 80cm x 121cm
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Gentle Tides mixed media 81cm x 121cm
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Seafoam mixed media 89cm x 152cm
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Higher Ground mixed media | 76cm x 106cm
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Falls, River Briggle mixed media | 75cm x 106cm
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Hidden Depths mixed media | 61cm x 81cm
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Tides, Clashnessie mixed media | 78cm x 90cm
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Towards Cul Mor mixed media 89cm x 152cm
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Round Pool mixed media 75cm x 106cm
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The End of Complications mixed media 76cm x 106cm
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Wailing Widow Falls mixed media 98cm x 121cm
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September Tide mixed media 76cm x 106cm
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Golden Light, Clachtoll mixed media 60cm x 86cm
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Chaos mixed media 76cm x 107cm
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Warm Skies mixed media 80cm x 122cm
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Remote Shores mixed media 80cm x 122cm
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Round Pool mixed media | 75cm x 106cm
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Pebble Pool, Iona mixed media | 60cm x 79cm
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Night Glow mixed media | 47cm x 57cm
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‘My work has sometimes been described as having an otherworldly quality to it and, in a sense, this is partly my objective. I refer often to memories of my early childhood at Hynish on Tiree, playing and exploring the shoreline there, trying to attach meaning and a story to everything I found or saw.’ Beth Robertson Fiddes
Beth Robertson Fiddes was born on the Isle of Tiree in the Inner Hebrides and grew up in Kansas, USA and Kingussie, Scotland. She studied at Edinburgh College of Art, where she graduated in 1995 with a degree in sculpture. Since then, Beth has continued to draw and paint, travelling the West Highlands and Islands of Scotland, St Kilda and the south coast of Iceland. Her pursuit of painting, deep understanding of landscape and exploration of collective memory have enabled her to become one of the finest landscape artists in the UK today.
Pathways: a route that takes you somewhere. Often you don’t end up where you expect. This catalogue celebrates the third solo exhibition by Beth Robertson Fiddes at Kilmorack Gallery and her understanding of ways into and through the Scottish landscape.
£8.00