Sunday 1 July 2018

Mull Reflections from Rhona

Sometimes, the big is just too big and the small necessarily becomes a more focused line of enquiry.  The landscape of the west highlands seems too beautiful to directly provide material  for my work.  It is akin to visiting an exhibition of ones favourite painter and having to cover your face with your hands and look through gaps in your fingers to narrow the gaze to bearable proportions.  This was going through my mind when I returned to Iona where with some relief discovered a rubbish dump on the south cost and I had a good rummage around for rusty steel fragments.  A sense of the intrinsically messiness of life makes me feel more part of the human race.   I have been sifting through the metal back in my studio and wondering why on earth I lugged them back...I think it is the act of collecting rather than the objects themselves that is the more absorbing.


This sense of looking through cracks is a tool for understanding.  A view described by boundaries or a passing view occluded by foreground features.  This continues to inform my current work together with the idea of linking together collections of thoughts, ideas and objects.  Here is a little collection of tenuous smudgy rubbings from the quarry rocks.

Mull Reflections from Rhona

Sometimes, the big is just too big and the small necessarily becomes a more focused line of enquiry.   The landscape of the west highlands ...