· Group Exhibition featuring work by 16 artists working across a wide range of media
· Press View: 24 January 2020
· Associated symposium exploring People and Place, Histories, Wild Spaces and Contentious Landscapes
Images: Marianne Greated – Sunset Song; postcard of Westwood House at the heart of Nicky Bird’s Heritage Site; Alan Currall – Wanlock Dod Pool
The Glasgow School of Art’s spring 2020 exhibition, which runs from 25 January – 22 March, brings together 16 artists who are part of the GSA’s Reading Landscape research group. Staged in the main gallery at The Lighthouse, the show will feature work in a variety of media including painting, photography and video. As well as Scottish landscapes including Skye, Moray, the Rosneath Peninsula and Loch Ossian, the artists have also made artwork inspired by Cyprus, India, Norway and Mexico.
Artists featured in the exhibition include Nicky Bird, Susan Brind, Justin Carter, Alan Currall, Marianne Greated, Michail Mersinis, Christine McBride, Shauna McMullan, Lesley Punton, Frances Robertson, Ross Sinclair, Michael Stumpf, Amanda Thomson, Gina Wall and Hugh Watt.
Nicky Bird uncovers alternative voices in landscapes in her collaborative works Raging Dyke Network (2012) and Heritage Site. Heritage Site(2014-2016) works with the Five Sisters shale bings in West Calder and the story of a buried house. At its heart is an Edwardian photographic postcard of the house and the memories of Isabella Mason Kirk, whose voice plays in the gallery. The artwork presents a 1:12 model of the missing Westwood House, with a digital projection of Westwood House within the Five Sisters, based on LiDAR data, looped and projected onto the side of the house.
Sue Brind and Jim Harold explore the politics of landscape, making work relating to their visits to the UN Buffer Zone in Cyprus, a country which has been divided since 1974 and contains the only politically divided city in Europe.
Blood from Stone is a body of work produced by Justin Carter during the summer of 2018 which is inspired by the regional relationship between Oak and Ore. During his research, Justin identified this as an area of ancient industry, iron smelters having been fuelled by the abundance of wood fuel from Rockingham Forest. Transforming this historic relationship to the visual, Justin combined oak galls and bark from the landscape with rust removed from local ironstone quarries’ dragline buckets to make iron gall ink. The hundreds of images on display capture the unpredictable character of the iron gall ink in klecksographic prints (also known as inkblots). They are suggestive of various lifeforms, from zoological specimens to human portraits, the ink having emerged from the surrounding rocks and trees.
Alan Currall has produced new work, Exits and Entrances, which comprises a spoken word video, utilising stills from a series of photographs of small hill pools in the Southern Uplands. The work has been made in collaboration with Colin Cruise, Emeritus Professor of Art History, Aberystwyth University – Cruise has responded to Currall’s work with a collection of poems written from the perspective of these pools. Currall’s existing research around ideas of knowledge, belief and perception found a provocative foil in Cruise’s interest in the Romantic, and the imaginative potential of invented mythology. In the following period of dialogue, Currall and Cruise worked on several ideas for future development of this project. This particular outcome uses video to set readings from some of these poems, to an edited selection from the photographs.
Marianne Greated shows new paintings that explore human interventions into the environment and how sustainability manifests within the landscape. Greated’s current research includes field visits, a site visit to Southern India and ongoing explorations of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland among them. Informed by these visits Greated’s paintings focus on renewable power structures in the landscape.
Through a range of materials and alternative printing processes such as kallitypes and argyroprints that use the elements from the landscape ( iron, silver, salt, sunlight), Christina McBride’s work focuses on a number of trees which hold great cultural and spiritual significance within the Mexican landscape. The prints are made onto untreated recycled paper, reinforcing the cyclical connection between paper, pulp, wood and tree.
Shauna McMullan considers time and landscape. SITTING – Glasgow is the third in an ongoing series of Sitting performances created for and in response to specific locations on the edges of Europe; places with complicated historical, geographic and political landscape identities. The first Sitting took place in Agios Sozomenos, Cyprus, next to the UN controlled Green Line separating the south and north of the island. The second was in Telavag, on the edge of the west coast of Norway; a village deleted from maps during World War II by German occupation forces. Sitting Glasgow will take place in the gallery, in front of two photographs documenting the previous sittings.
Michael Mersinis will be presenting a series of photographs, made during earthquake season. Each photograph was determined (optically and technically) by the duration of an earthquake.
Lesley Punton also explores walking, in her work, looking at the experience of ‘being’ within remote landscape, in relation to deep time. The work is made over an extended time, collecting rocks and minerals on her travels primarily in Scotland, but also meditates on rocks that have originated in Sweden, Iceland, Algeria, The Netherlands, China and England.
Like McBride, Frances Robertson also focuses on the image of a tree, in her drawing entitled ‘Imposter’ (2020).The exhibition at The Lighthouse offers the opportunity for Robertson to explore through a long-durational observational drawing of a tree body, a different kind of power, whilst acknowledging the structural and intellectual knowledge fostered in Western traditions of drawing such as in the life room. For this exhibition, Robertson intends to depict a foreign introduction brought here by Victorian imperial plant hunters, the monkey-puzzling araucaria, indeed a particular specimen standing over the ancient Egyptian-style tomb of one of Glasgow’s more successful merchants.
Ross Sinclair has repeatedly walked a 10km route along the spine of the Rosneath Peninsula, on the Firth of Clyde – Gare Loch/Loch Long. His resulting work will consider how this landscape, whilst wild, is also in close proximity to the Nuclear Submarine Bases at Coulport and Faslane.
Michael Stumpf makes a new sculptural work Waterdrop on hot stone for the exhibition, which considers the Western Industrial world’s relationship to the idea of landscape. With natural materials including stone, clay and lichen, he combines them with man-made materials such as denim, Gore-Tex and glass.
Amanda Thomson, author of ‘A Scots Dictionary of Nature’(2019) explores the notion of ‘slow looking’, with her video ‘Aar’, which is a meditative study of a tree over time. Since April 2018 Thomson has been filming an alder outside her window, documenting the slow and shifting changes of season, light, time. Alongside this ongoing gathering she has also been recording ‘sightings’ – often the ‘firsts’ of a year – wood-sorrel, creeping-ladies-tresses, swallows, geese.
Gina Wall works in place, and through the memories of place, to explore the relation between land, photography and text.
Hugh Watt’s new video work is the result of exploring the relationship between nature, culture and spirituality within the Scottish landscape. Through an ongoing conversation with archaeologist Martin Wildgoose (AOC Archaeologist Group), Watt has been undertaking field trips to two locations on Skye: High Pasture Cave and Cave of the Seed. He is interested in how these sites, from mid bronze age, through to the Iron age, were occupied and used prior to its closure in 80 BC. In particular, Watt’s research has drawn on the use of these underground spaces as ceremonial spaces. In addition, he will also show a new piece which works with a 3D scan of, the cave’s area known as ‘Bone Passage’. Watt has experimented with having a scaled down 3D print made in clay about the size of a human spine.
An associated symposium – Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation – on 19 and 20 March will explore four key themes: People and Place (including alternative voices and experiences of landscape including embodiment and auto-ethnographic practices); Histories (including land ownership, commons, cultural perspectives, border territories, heritage and preservation); Wild spaces (including peripheral territories, deserts, forests or ideas of remoteness) and – Contentious Landscapes (including sustainability, interventions, conservation and ecology).
Ends
For further information, images and interviews contact: Lesley Booth, 07799414474 / lesley@newcenturypr.com
Listing
25 January – 22 March 2020
Gallery 1, The Lighthouse, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow,
Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation
A group exhibition featuring work by 16 artists all of whom are part of The Glasgow School of Art’s Reading Landscape research group. The exhibition features work in a wide range of media including painting, photography and video.
Entry free
Note for Editors
Initiated in June 2014 by Susan Brind (Reader in Contemporary Art: Practice & Events, Department of Sculpture & Environmental Art) and Nicky Bird (School of Fine Art, the Reading Landscape research group provides a context for Fine Art practice and research interests.