Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame was exhibited in the galleries of Summerhall in Edinburgh in early 2020. The exhibition, designed and curated by Wendy Law, comprised the work of four artists concerned with official and unofficial histories, nature and cultural memory. The exhibition, which takes its title from a video work by Victoria Clare Bernie, comprised a suite of interconnecting gallery installations together with a singular time-based performance. The project was supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame

Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame is a curated installation of drawings, videos, three dimensional constructs and sketchbooks all relating to the woodland history of northern Scotland.

The video work, Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame describes a designed ‘wildernesse’, a 17th century garden intended to offer just enough of the wild to delight. Over time the garden has lost much of its structure, weathered by hurricane and disease and altered by the inconstant demands of fashion. Winding paths and relict trees persist whilst in the undergrowth entropy, the beneficial chaos of growth and decay, recycles.

Daedalus, a study in black and white, is a video document of the construction of a 1:72 model of a Messerschmitt Bf110, the plane used by Rudolf Hess in his flight from Augsburg-Haunstetten in Bavaria to Eaglesham in the west of Scotland on the evening of May 10th 1941. Daedalus is a study in craftsmanship, obsession, fine detail and the dangers of unbridled fascination. As Hitler’s Deputy, Hess’s mission was never fully explained as either narcissistic fantasy or officially sanctioned gambit. It remains the object of an uncomfortable fascination for conventional military history and its more unsavoury outriders. This, together with his legendary flight and unproven progress through the landscape, great houses, hunting lodges and castles of Scotland as a prisoner of the Allied Forces, underlies a considerable industry, a published exchange of conspiracy, specification and myth which endures well beyond his death in Spandau Prison in 1987.

Chronograph Drawing: 50 years 0.05 seconds is a three-dimensional drawing that follows the trajectory of a single pinecone as it falls from a stunted, mud-bound tree found at the extreme edge of a planted forest. The cone lands on the seat of an adjacent, suspended wooden chair. The forest in question, an experiment in tree planting in high moorland, offers to the casual eye a dense blue-green woodland of Sitka Spruce and Noble Fir. Examined in detail, it reveals its more decadent origins as the site of a private tree collection amassed in the early decades of the 20th century from forests is eastern Russia, China, the islands of Japan, Chile, the Appalachian Mountains of North America and the Pacific North West.