faux terrain was exhibited as part of a site specific group exhibition curated by Magnus Runesson, För mig är du vacker /To me, you are beautiful, in Trehörnahult, Småland, Sweden.

faux terrain

faux terrain is an optical installation, a video projection, wall cut and film sequence panel painting depicting the landscape of the Hermitage at Dunkeld, an 18th century designed walk in Highland Perthshire. Installed in a 19th century wooden barn, the work responded to the observation “För mig är du vacker”, to me you are beautiful. “För mig är du vacker” was a landscape project situated across the buildings, fields and forests of a family farm in southern Sweden. Predicated on the notion that the larger majority of Swedish citizens are but one generation from the farm, the project required the invited artists to engage with the notion of belonging, to land, place and territory.

The Hermitage was a gift from a son-in-law to a father-in-law, the Duke of Atholl, a woodland walk by the River Braan to a waterfall and salmon leap. A designed sequence of paths and follies arriving at Ossian’s Hall, a dining room above the waterfall, a mirrored chamber reflecting the optical frenzy of the water beneath. Ossian is the blind bard, the narrator of James Macpherson's somewhat controversial project, a cycle of epic poems retelling the myths of origin of Gaelic culture and society in Western Europe. The Hermitage is a truth retold as a fiction overlaid on a woodland grove and in this it carries within it some of the complexity of the Highland Landscape.