BORROWED LAND | Scottish Landscape Reinvented

Borrowed Land REINVENTING SCOTTISH LANDSCAPE

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This publication was printed to mark an exhibition of work in Kilmorack Gallery running through the winter of 2023/24.

front cover image undercurrents, Eskadale oil on canvas 122cm x 183cm

Published by Kilmorack Gallery ltd, 2023 ISBN 978-1-8384862-8-0

Kilmorack Gallery, inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk

www.kilmorackgallery.co.uk

Borrowed Land REINVENTING SCOTTISH LANDSCAPE

Nature’s Sigh ROBERT MCAULAY oil on canvas | 71cm x 71cm

Borrowed Land It is the preciousness of land, sea and sky that has prompted the exhibition ‘Borrowed Land.’Artists play a vital role in reminding us that there is nothing more important than the living and invisible worlds that surround us. Our own health as individuals, a species and a planet depends on how well we look after land, sea and sky. Artists help navigate us towards a better world.

They let us see the precious thing that is too often walked past or forgotten.

A landscape artist, by spending time in one location, will have witnessed many wonders: morning light escaping the crack of darkness, the smell of rock ignited by a ground-shaking clash of cliffs and wave, cloud-play on hills, an elm tree gnarled with time, and they see the land’s inhabitants whales, rabbits, birds and deer. The landscape artist can even make pots or paint from the body of the land. Sometimes they sit in the shelter of tall grass and tell us what it is like to feel safe. They can be ecstatic or methodical, but if successful they will always bring back a souvenir of what they have seen. Early hunters and explorers were like this too, focused and quiet in the land, but now, it is the landscape artist who has this privilege. They know that we are never alone. Especially when no one is around.

It is not easy to capture such an intangible and ancient wonder, and to distil it into a form that can be held or hung on a wall but, when successful, magic exists in the physical artist-made object. It is invested with reverence, time and love. Since founding Kilmorack Gallery over twenty-five years ago, I have looked constantly for the spark in a work of art that makes it endure and connects it to an eternal thread. The land, and how we see and walk through it, is the Mother Thread. It is the one story told by every writer, painter and sculptor, and works included in ‘Borrowed Land’ are my personal choices drawn from the gallery’s stable of artists and guests. They are not beautiful scenes but love letters to the wonder around us. I hope that together they make a rich chapter in this story.

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The most obvious artists to include in a landscape exhibition are the painters of wild awe-inspiring dramas, the ecstatic painters. I think of Beth Robertson Fiddes, Allan MacDonald and Janette Kerr as some of these.

They share a physical closeness to their subject. Beth Robertson Fiddes predicts when the sun will catch a wave, or when winter will diamond-frost the land and plans her calendar around this. Talk in the studio is normally of her next adventure out of it and into the landscape. Every year Allan MacDonald becomes restless if he is unable to paint the northwest when the weather is right. There is little point when the weather is fine, he tells me. If snow doesn’t come in Scotland, he begins to mention Greenland. It is the essence of his art, to feel the sublime. Janette Kerr always looks north, to big seas and cold boreal powers. The south is weighed down by a veneer of industry and the north is unleashed and free. I asked Shetland artist Gail Harvey why she lives next to the sea.

‘Clean. It seems pure and clean, and the waves are independent but the sea moves as a whole.’

Peter Davis tells me that it is the sea’s constant motion that fascinates him. The land is very still compared to the sea, he reminds me.

There is much we can learn from the ecstatic landscape artists: about time and our place on the Earth. Their work necessitates a lifetime of artistic study - half-science, half-religion – into something they can’t look away from.

Some of the artists in this exhibition capture the invisible energy of landscape. An instinctively subatomic approach to the land, sea and sky.

Gail Harvey is one of these, and Lizzie Rose, Shona Barr, Patricia Paolozzi Cain and Christopher Wood too. They remove the skin of conventional landscape painting - trees, mountains and waves – and consider it at its most naked. It is a more abstract approach and again it requires devotion. Decades have been spent in these artists’ studios, trying to catch something invisible to the eye. Intuition is needed if the abstraction is to make sense. Shona

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Rising Tide BETH ROBERTSON FIDDES mixed media | 98cm x 122cm

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Barr begins with a conventional painting, and distils this into a watercolour, before making a small oil paint study and finally, if she likes it, it is worked up into a large painting. Look closely and you will see the underlying colour, maybe a blue, yellow or pink ground that sets the frequency of each Barr painting. Patrica Paolozzi Cain revels in what can be discovered with a trained eye. Of all the artists in ‘Borrowed Land,’ she is the most quantum.

How small and infinite can you go, she asks. A tree, by Paolozzi Cain, also traces the flow of particles and the results take us into the infinite if you look for long enough. Tansy Lee Moir’s trees conjure a flow. They become rivers, bodies and limbs caught with a beauty like an old Dutch master’s self-portrait.

Any artist who studies land, sea and sky is aware of how geological time dwarfs the days and hours which rule our lives. Some become aware of the sound of silence. These two properties – the silence of mountains and the unhuman age of the Scottish landscape – are central to Jane MacNeill’s current work. At first, her mountain and seas seem like simple fields of colour and form. Look closer, though, and you feel the fiord depth of water, become aware of copses of trees and hear the air whisper as it moves between mountains. ‘I like to feel that my ancestors felt the same awe as me, in the same place,’ she tells me.

There are also times when painting the landscape is simply about the joy of paint. Ann Oram, who is possibly Scotland’s clearest inheritor of the Colourist tradition, follows the solid foundation of capturing what is before you with honesty and skill, presenting us with what is artistically correct.

It is her great ability, with many years practice, that produces great results.

Liz Knox is also from the school of well-honed painters. Decades of work and an eye for colour and composition create paintings with an unrivalled balance and sophistication. Liz Knox, like Ann Oram, paints many subjects and delights in the medium of paint, but there is an evident energy and freedom from painting outside the studio. It feels close to the thread.

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Landscape artists have the option of being able to literally incorporate their muse, the land, into their work. Using watercolour, Peter Davis mirrors the deposition of sediment by the sea in pigment, water and paper.

He sees this every day from his studio in Shetland. It is known on Shetland for sand to be completely removed from a beach one night, to be returned sometime in the future.The beauty of watercolour is its permanence.Water, pigment and paper don’t sit in layers. They become one.

Ceramic artists have more understanding of fire and earth, which formed the landscape and our culture, than other artists. It is the oldest of the arts and sciences, and pots have always been both sacred and practical.

Lotte Glob, who is known to have climbed hills and left artworks in hidden places, has a near legendary closeness to the land. Almost seventy years of experimentation has given her an alchemical knowledge of which pickedup mineral can be fired in her kiln and which ones can’t. If they can’t, she’ll

May Nights - Dayset PETER DAVIS watercolour, bodycolour and chalk on paper

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still try again anyway. Every full moon, at high tide, she has a swim followed by a sauna. Also Danish-born is illona Morrice and, like Lotte Glob, her life revolves around landscape. ‘I am nothing without the landscape,’ she told me last week and the diversity of her work shows the richness of the natural world.Anything can come from her kiln: birds, shells, archaeologicalinspired objects and even the moon. From Skye, Patrica Shone’s work takes inspiration from the stratification, erosion and the contours of land around her studio. She rejigs clay into objects which appear naturally-formed hybrids of humankind and nature. Allison Weightman, who lived for many years on the roadless Scouraig peninsular, creates vases with glazes which echo the landscape. Look closely and you may see the northern lights or snow on a ridge. Ceramics unflattens the two-dimensional world of painters. It brings third and fourth dimension to the art world.

There are other layers in the landscape. Wendy Sutherland captures a drift of pollen and the smell of mulberry in paintings that have a flavour of the east. One layer, like in Japanese kimono fabric, relates to its neighbouring thread. Lizzie Rose also takes the analogy of weaving with threads of light, sea and land, creating the world from an invisible divine loom.

Most of all, the landscape is not empty. It is not a view. It is not static. It is a dynamic ecology where we and other creatures live. Paul Bloomer is an important artist in telling stories of birds and beasts. He is another Shetland artist but was blown north from his native Black Country twenty-six years ago, and after the move, his work changed from industrially-inspired scenes to translating messages from the birds, fish and creatures of Shetland. It cries out for us to listen to older knowledge and live in greater harmony with land, sea and sky and that is where this exhibition’s title ‘Borrowed

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Softness and Warm Light GAIL HARVEY oil on canvas | 71cm x 71cm

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Land’ comes from: ‘the land is not inherited from our parents but borrowed from our children.’ It is an old wisdom but more needed than ever in the twenty-first century. Moving away from concrete, steel and the squandering of resources begins with seeing what the landscape artist sees.

Thank you to the artists who have contributed not only their work to this publication, but also their words.

Tony Davidson Director of Kilmoarck Gallery and author of Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer

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Northern Lights ALLISON WEIGHTMAN ceramic | 55cm (h)

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Jane MacNeill

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Green and Blue, Loch Pityoulish oil on board | 89cm x 112cm

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Jane MacNeill

My feeling for the hills is what makes me paint. All of the turns I have taken so far on my life’s journey, all of the places I have visited and all the mountains I have seen lead me back to the Cairngorms, those blue hills of my childhood.

I can make comparisons between them and other mountain landscapes I have visited in Scotland, England, Europe and Scandinavia. I can talk about the history of the place where I grew up, the changes of use the land has undergone and the way decisions made by our forebears many years ago affect our relationship with the landscape today. I can discuss forestry, tourism, population, and my concerns for the ecology of the area. I can mention how my childhood in the lee of the mountains inspired my interest in botany, fungi, fauna and folklore, and how the Gaelic names for the places I love validate my interest in colour and shape, and in the simplification of things. All this feeds into my experience of the landscape.

But when I paint I simplify. To me the mountains represent endurance through time. The act of looking at them slows my mind. It allows me to accept mystery. It makes me experience time in terms of geology. It is like swimming in a cold loch, when all you know is the water. Looking at the mountain empties my mind of everything but the mountain.

Jane MacNeill, September 2023

Tree Line, Snow Line oil on board | 94cm x 116cm

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Janette Kerr

Painting for me is a collaborative act – a dialogue between artist and place. I seek a physical immersion in the landscape and, as I paint, this spills out onto the canvas and reflects movements through time. They describe what is sensed, rather than simple topographical depictions and are ‘polyvocal:’ fusions of memory, narrative and imagination, and ultimately grow my understanding of nature.

Janette Kerr, Shetland & Somerset, October 2023

State of the Sea, Eswick oil on canvas | 65cm x 85cm

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Allan MacDonald bank of gold, Eskadale oil on canvas | 25cm x 35.5cm

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Conjurors ALLAN MACDONALD

Artists are manipulators, maybe even conjurors. Something out of nothing, usually the domain of God. It’s not out of nothing though: it’s a melding of the artist themselves (Emile Zola defined an artwork as a ‘corner of creation seen through a temperament,’) the natural world and the sheer mystery of their existence.The big surprise would be if we weren’t profoundly affected by the landscape and universe around us. It should overwhelm us on a daily basis.

How did it come to this though? Especially when we remember that in the past hierarchy of genres, landscape painting was one off the bottom, just above the lowly still life.

It might be tempting to give the credit for this transformation to Impressionism or Post Impressionism, but there were other strains at work too.

From the emergence of Dutch landscape painting (Van Ruisdael) through German Romanticism (Runge, Friedrich), Symbolism (Boecklin, Munch) and on to Rothko right up to a present-day artist like Peter Doig, we can trace the altered perception and manipulation of the natural world. Far from being a backdrop, or a mere sensory experience, it became the raw material for artists to project their own imagination, their own thoughts, a ‘recomposing of reality.’

The question has to be asked, ‘why does the natural world have such a profound effect on us?’ Is it because it’s a constant in the perpetual flux around us? Is it neutral ground, a blank canvas, a no man’s land between me and everyone else? Are we in some way separate from it, above it?

Can we see ourselves in it? Is it an echo, a hint (even a megaphone) of something greater, deeper? Is it intentionally beautiful? Or preordained?

Otherworldly? Is it remorselessly hostile and meaningless? Is my perception of it radically different from someone else’s? Is it ours? Has it got restorative, healing qualities? If so, why?

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Questions questions. Within the answers to these questions lies our understanding of not just the natural world but who we are ourselves.

In the group of paintings for this show, I’ve used the same raw materials (blazing Autumn sun, golden beech trees, a slow-moving river and a figure on a paddleboard) and reshaped them. A single moment has been expanded into something lasting. Arnold Boecklins painting ‘Isles of the dead’ was once described as a ‘solid embodiment of the beyond’ and I’ve tried in these paintings to revisit this subject, within the particularity of an actual experience.

Emile Nolde, the German Expressionist painter, said ‘reproducing nature faithfully, accurately, does not create a work of art. Transmuting nature by adding one’s own emotional and spiritual values turns the painting into a work of art.’ There is really no such thing as landscape painting. There is only painting.

Allan MacDonald, Inverness-shire, September 2023

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Allan MacDonald

new river, old earth oil on canvas | 76cm x 101cm

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Beth Robertson Fiddes Even in the most remote places I often wonder how many walked that ground before me and what the future holds for that landscape, who will follow the paths I have walked and with what purpose. It’s easy to feel a place is your own when you’ve walked alone for hours, but only my experience belongs to me. I’m an insignificant visitor to a landscape seemingly unchanging in my short time here, its own journey, shifting and changing over an unimaginable timescale, a journey which does not concern itself with my fleeting presence, recording my version of a blip in time. I like this idea and it’s something I try to convey in my paintings, a sense of something larger, awesome, maybe beautiful, perhaps dangerous but certainly demanding consideration and respect. I hope that viewers of my work get a small sense of my appreciation of my wild surroundings and my efforts to share this experience and that future generations of wandering observers have the freedom to enjoy it as I do.

Beth Robertson Fiddes, Elphin, October 2023 Glimmer mixed media | 81cm x 152cm

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Patricia Paolozzi Cain For a while, my work has been concerned with the pursuit of spirituality in nature and this has been closely aligned with meaning in life and self-transcendence.

Taking this route has meant making a commitment to being the student always, staying open and letting things work through me. In my art practice, I’m trying to develop further to cultivate the small life, to see things through the eyes of a learner, and follow an active principle.

The notion of Borrowed Land reminds me how we look and respond to the world about us: that we don’t see a fixed world out there, but one which we create for ourselves. I’m aware that how I look at things can often be motivated by external values, so I remind myself (both in art and life) that I’m engaging a process of transcending a false sense of self, to achieve something that I hope will be more authentic and have greater depth.

Patricia Paolozzi Cain, Edinburgh, October 2023

When You’re Falling, Dive acrylic and coloured pencil | 158cm x 254cm

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Ade Adesina

Peace linocut | 56cm x 76cm

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Shona Barr

I find an inexpressible fulfilment sitting out in the midst of nature painting; savouring the fresh air, the changes in light as clouds move across, the rustling of leaves, occasional glimpses of shy animals going about their lives. It is about looking, recording, absorbing and being present. Developing final paintings based on these sketches takes on a very different flavour.

In the studio I am selecting, paring down, focusing colours, and finding something from within myself to express my interpretation. I need the separation from the original subject to release the possibilities for the painting to take its own form.

These two sides are the yin and yang of my practice, balanced and interdependent. The idea of ‘Borrowed Land’ appeals to me because of my sense that my paintings are about sharing something of what I feel about landscape.

Shona Barr, Glasgow, October 2023

Azure Sea. 2022 oil on canvas | 122cm x 122cm

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Liz Knox

Each human has temporary use of the land.

Each human seems to be transient on the land.

The land seems to be a constant, but one that, with or without human intervention, transmutes over time.

However we affect the land, the land ultimately affects us. At the end of the day, the land is the more powerful.

The land affects us, the land has moods, or we perceive a mood according to our circumstances at a particular moment of our lives.

The land affects our psyche, a singular reaction that affects what we create.

Liz Knox, Glasgow, October 2023

Shifting Sands oil on canvas | 183cm x 138cm

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Lizzie Rose

I am bound to the land and the land to me.

My work responds to place and the healing power found around us, but also highlights the fragile balance and destructiveness of our relationship with the rest of nature. Our being is woven into the fabric of the land, and we need to weave new stories into our human consciousness to enable change. Our collective action has changed the landscape we inhabit.

I am bound to the land and the land to me.

Lizze Rose, Ardfern, October 2023

This Breath I Breath Tonight - HIdden Landscape mixed media | 80cm x 118cm

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Kirstie Cohen

White Cloud oil on canvas | 75cm x 90cm

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Ann Oram

White Beach Iona mixed media on paper | 70cm x 100cm

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Rose Strang Landscape is the most profound teacher. Through painting landscape over the years, my brushwork begins to reflect energy felt from the elements observed. Mark-making is instinctive to humans but we still barely understand why we make the marks we do. The prehistoric drawings in the caves of Lascaux might express wonderment, or reverence towards nature as much as the desire to kill and eat animals. The idea behind the phrase ‘Borrowed Land’ reframes a question; ‘What will you leave to posterity, to future generations?’ I’m fascinated by the traces left behind by past cultures, traces that are often barely discernible today. Some cultures left subtle marks. Through landscape painting I can express my sense of reverence towards nature.

I find that the element of water expresses layers of mystery – what is revealed or concealed, what is reflected? How quickly the ripples created by a falling leaf disappear and how quickly lasting destruction can occur. The paintings in this series are of bodies of water near archaeological sites of past cultures who left little trace..

Rose Strang, Edinburgh, October 2023

Trace oil on canvas | 71cm x 71cm

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Peter Davis

Lumbari watercolour, bodycolour and chalk | 50cm x 70cm

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Painting the Edges PETER DAVIS

I was born close to the sea and for the last forty years or more I’ve lived and worked in the Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, where the sea is never far away. My current home and studio face the Atlantic on the westside of the Shetland mainland. I’ve always been inspired by the natural environment seeking to re-present it through my own eyes and usually in the medium of watercolour. In essence watercolour is a microcosm of a watery world, dripping, flowing, settling in pools and drying, leaving a desiccated stain. As it’s basically water coloured with pigment the action of watercolour is far closer to that of the subject it’s depicting than any other medium I know.

I’ve been using this medium for decades to recreate my own response to the natural world, though not in a totally representational way. I use a ‘natural’ colour palette and extract elements of the land or seascape I consider the more important to build up an image suggesting but not copying.

Watercolour also has its own in-built character which demands respect and which I defer to in the painting and drying process. The unpredictable elements of sea and sky and the effects of our changing climate are aconstant theme in my paintings using the equally unpredictable medium of watercolour.

I walk the nearby cliffs and coastline almost daily in every kind of weather. For me the sea is irresistible. I see constant change, of light, of colour and most importantly for me, the change in the edges of things.

Treeless Shetland provides clean landscape edges which undulate until they reach the sea and break up. There’s a constant flux at that point, edges that are never fixed. Inevitably with the sea it’s almost impossible to ignore that flat edge of the horizon. But get down low at the shore and that edge isn’t clean. The breaking waves create uneven layers of blue, green, grey and brown which then tear up into white surf.

Edges are, for me, the most important element. It’s the layering of watercolour washes that create multiple edges, suggestions of horizons, and other land and seascape features. The weather and changing seasons impact

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on the sea so much more than on land. The old Shetlanders knew of this and created so many words to describe the annual changes of light and dark in the weather to indicate when it was safe or just too dangerous to go out on the sea. Their respect for this environment is humbling. It’s a respect we seem to have lost.

Increasingly the weather patterns are changing due to human activity, and these will impact on this environment and how I respond to the landscape. Windier and wetter weather in the North is increasingly likely as the warmer south westerly winds clash with more northerly weather fronts created by a melting Arctic. Perhaps more extreme weather events will be the result. This is both a physical challenge and painting opportunity!

For me there is also the sense of the Sublime, often impossible to put down in paint; standing on the edge facing a stunning sunset or an impending gale. High up on the cliffs there’s a giddying feeling of peril looking into the abyss. And down at sea level there have been moments when I’ve felt the huge oncoming waves could cover me, and the land behind, which can be both frightening and exhilarating. Of course, eventually, it will do just that. But I’ll be long gone.

Peter Davis, Shetland, September 2023

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Christopher Wood

Between Tides acrylic and collage on panel | 76cm x 46cm

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Wendy Sutherland

The Land always simmers inside me, a layer of warmth I carry and get to cook with. I let it boil over and spill out onto the canvas, popping the bubbles that hold images inside. Creating something is to love the land you stand on.

Wendy Sutherland, Brora, September 2023

The Scent of Lilac oil on canvas | 214cm x 122cm

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Tansy Lee Moir

As an artist I notice things that go unnoticed and make art so that others might notice too. For the last 20 years I’ve been noticing the poignant beauty of long-lived trees, drawing the slow dance of their reaching limbs, the old scars and fresh wounds which hint at their stories.

By taking time to observe and creatively converse with trees in the landscape, I have gained a strong sense of their own aliveness. Beyond their value as a resource for human activity, I recognise how vital they are to the unseen millions of tiny lives which they support.

Our ancestors evolved with, depended on and exploited trees.We are lucky that a few ancients remain here.Who are we to take those arboreal elders from the generations who follow us?

Tansy Lee Moir, Edinburgh, October 2023

Rapids charcoal on paper | 65cm x 50cm

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Peter White

Landscape i acrylic and wax | 22cm x 22cm

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Lotte Glob The feeling has not changed. I am just a speck in the landscape.

I am part of it - walking or sitting on a rock absorbing the mood with all my senses, the landscape forever changing from serene to wild and raw. I absorb the vista, the forever changing light. The scent and sound fill me with energy and hope. It teaches me. It calms me. It makes me feel real. It is essential for my work. Without it I am like a dying flower without water.

I was seven years old and it was 3am in the morning when I first became aware of the landscape and its importance to me.

I inhaled its wonder, the vista, the early morning light, colours, sounds and mountains, inhaling summer smells of grass, cows and goats, their bells clinking and the sound of a waterfall and fast-flowing river crossing a small wooden bridge to a wooden hut. It was a family holiday in the Norwegian landscape, and I sat on the steps watching the gigantic mountains across the lush valley. From that day on I drew endless pictures of the landscape, with mountains, trees and rivers and I knew then that this is the place I would want to live. It is still so vivid in my spirit that I can close my eyes and be seven years old any time.

Lotte Glob, Laid, October 2023

Northern Lights and Night Rock Pool ceramic | 50cm diameter

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Patricia Shone

My work has developed alongside my awareness of the landscape around me. It took a long time to really feel a deeper personal connection with the place, other than with its stark beauty. It happened for me by walking old paths across the hill behind the house, barely more than sheep tracks but always there was a specific destination to that track - a spring or a peat bed or a route to the outer hill grazing. I had a strong sense of following the footsteps of past inhabitants but at the same time obliterating their footprints with my own. I find this very moving. It helps me make sense of my own path across the landscape of my life.

Patricia Shone, Skye, October 2023

Earth Strata Jar raku | 31cm (h) x 28cm diamater

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illona Morrice

Ammonite ceramic | 54cm x 50cm x 13cm

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Paul Bloomer

Yellow Hammer on Autumn Rowan oil on canvas | 99cm x 140ccm

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A Prayer for the Landscape PAUL BLOOMER

Landscape in its various manifestations is central to my artistic practice but it was not always so. As a child my playground and classrooms were in the border land between industry and green space and I developed a close connection to the land, trees and birds in this area.

As an undergraduate fine art student in the 1980s, landscape and nature did not lend themselves to the serious art I was trying to pursue, and I fell deeper and deeper into a pit of increasing meaninglessness.This dramatically changed one day when I was working on large charcoal dreamscape set amongst the canals of the Black Country. In one part of the drawing a man was desperately trying to touch a bird that was out of reach, and I realised that this was an echo of the yearnings of my soul to reconnect with nature and, through the act of drawing, this connection was restored.

A move to Shetland in 1997 gave me the sense that I had arrived in an unspoilt wilderness and for twenty-five years I immersed myself in the land, sea, and sky. However, in time I realised that all was not well. Centuries of overgrazing had stripped the land bare of trees, intensive salmon farming had played a part in loss of wild salmonoids, warming oceans had changed the availability of sand eels and led to near collapse of some sea bird colonies.

My own artistic response to the landscape is supported by four foundational pillars: weeping, praying, thinking and acting - in that order.Weeping for the world opens our hearts and helps shift the paralysis of eco-anxiety that many of us feel today. The ecological problems facing our world are so great, it is easier to ignore them and look away, but if we open our minds and heart to what we have done to other-than-human-life, then weeping is a powerful and apt response that can motivate us into action. When we think of what we have lost, what species we have made extinct, homeless, and hungry, what else can we do other than weep healing tears?

Prayer is a loaded word but reframed in the context of ecological awareness and conversations with the other-than-human it is easier to do.

Western culture has tried to convince us that we are above nature, that we

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have dominion and control of it, whereas in reality we are a part of it. In our increasing secular age, we have lost touch with the spiritual dimensions of nature. If we stop seeing water as sacred, then why should we not dump sewage into it? If air is not sacred, then why should we not pollute it? If animals, insects and birds have no spirit then why shouldn’t we abuse them?

If fish are not sentient beings, does it matter if we hoover them all up, or turn them into industrially farmed commodities? Prayer for me as an artist is vital because it opens doors and channels with the other-than-humanworld. It humbles me and helps restore the broken links between humanity and nature.

Thinking is the starting point of everything in our logic driven culture, but without the supporting pillars of weeping and praying it can lead to the dead end we are in. If weeping breaks us open, and prayer offers the means of heart expression and communication, then thinking helps us respond to the challenges facing the planet. When we understand, we can use our individual gifts to do something about them.

Weeping, praying and thinking are only part of the equation. We have to act and use the gifts we have been given in whatever ways are appropriate and we feel called to do, which in my case is art. I can think of no more urgent subject. Earth is the only home we have, and destroying it is destroying ourselves and everything that makes this beautiful, complex, and multidimensional planet our home.

We are guests on this earth and as such we should leave minimal footprints.

Paul Bloomer, Shetland

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Paul Bloomer

Whalesong ii woodcut, 30cm x 40cm

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A Man In Assynt (extract) Norman MacCaig Glaciers, grinding West, gouged out these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone, and left, on the hard rock below – the ruffled foreland – this frieze of mountains, filed on the blue air – Stac Polly, Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven, Canisp – a frieze and a litany.

Who owns this landscape?

Has owning anything to do with love?

For it and I have a love-affair, so nearly human we even have quarrels. – When I intrude too confidently it rebuffs me with a wind like a hand or puts in my way a quaking bog or loch where no loch should be. Or I turn stonily away, refusing to notice the rouged rocks, the mascara under a dripping ledge, even the tossed, the stony limbs waiting.

I can’t pretend it gets sick for me in my absence, though I get sick for it. Yet I love it with special gratitude,since it sends me no letters, is never jealous and, expecting nothing from me, gets nothing but cigarette packets and footprints.

Who owns this landscape? – The millionaire who bought it or the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning with a deer on his back?

Who possesses this landscape? – The man who bought it or I who am possessed by it?

False questions, for this landscape is masterless and intractable in any terms that are human.

It is docile only to the weather and its indefatigable lieutenants – wind, water and frost.

The wind whets the high ridges and stunts silver birches and alders.

Rain falling down meets springs gushing up – they gather and carry down to the Minch tons of sour soil, making bald the bony scalp of Cul Mor. And frost thrusts his hand in cracks and, clenching his fist, bursts open the sandstone plates, the armour of Suilven; he bleeds stories down chutes and screes, smelling of gun powder.

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hank you to the artists who have allowed Kilmorack Gallery to show their work since we opened many years ago, and those who have put

work into this exhibition which runs through the winter of 2023 - 24. And thank you to artists everwhere who record, tune-into and love the land, sea and sky.

There is another side to this exhibition which runs at a time when all rural areas of Scotland (and throughout the world) are threated by the concrete and steel of large energy-generating multinational companies. We hope that the wisdom of cherishing the beautifully diverse and folded natural world is followed by all, and that politicians, business, individuals and policy enactors once again follow the simple truth of ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘live local and act global.’

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Landscape artists are vital. By studying and painting sky, sea and land, they remind us of its importance. Painting the land, or making pots from it, is timeless. It is an art that is ancient, modern and future-facing: a navigational light to steer us to a better world. Landscape and how we belong to it is maybe the oldest and only story ever written. This publication marks both an exhibition (Kilmorack Gallery, winter 2023-24) and, more importantly, highlights the importance of Scotland’s threatened natural places, not just to those who love them the most, but to us all.

£15.00