Looking for Mrs Cumming was exhibited in Research + Practice: RSA Residencies and Awards in Focus at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in September 2022. The work was produced as part Provenance, an RSA Residency for Scotland undertaken in the RSA Collections in Granton, Edinburgh. The work was developed with the support of: Sandy Wood and Robin Rodger [RSA Collections], Caroline Gerard [Genealogist], Malcolm Cruickshank, Paul Charlton, Paul Diamond and Catriona Gilbert [Workshops of Edinburgh College of Art], Dr. Rachel Walcott, Principal Curator of Earth Systems [National Museum of Scotland].

Looking for Mrs Cumming

Looking for Mrs Cumming is a search for origins, for a name and a life and the history of a particular place: the City of Edinburgh in the first decades of the 19th century. A moment when new knowledge and old faith exercised a feverish hold over the nation. “Mrs. Cumming” was the only attribution given to three paintings, Hawthornden, Dunkeld and St. Bernard’s Well, which were bequeathed to the RSA in 1886 by Mary Ann Cumming, the daughter of the artist. The silence that accompanied her place in the record was all too familiar. She had no name beyond marriage, no dates and no history. Her work, held in the Collections for almost 150 years, was the object of frustrated enquiry by the Curator Sandy Wood and Documentation Officer Robin Rodger. In the autumn of 2019 the genealogist Caroline Gerard responded to an enquiry: “who is she and where is she buried?” An extraordinary search ensued from Montrose to Riga, Edinburgh to Cheltenham. Trained by Alexander Nasmyth in his Edinburgh Studio, Elizabeth Maria Ouchterlony [1776-1854] led an adventurous life. Hawthornden is a confident painting of a geological landscape anchored in place by a forested river gorge. In 2019 the inventory was changed and Elizabeth Maria Ouchterlony was written into the record.

Provenance, a residency in the RSA Collections, was concerned with origins: with the beginnings of art, art education, the idea of the Scottish landscape and the land itself, its geomorphology. Looking for Mrs Cumming was one line of enquiry. It is in the nature of a teaching collection to distract one from a singular idea and to make new connections. With the Curator and Documentation Officer, Victoria Clare Bernie got lost and in the process moved through landscapes, ideas, theories and ways of making that were new to her. The early 19th century, with James Hutton behind you and Charles Darwin ahead, was an exceptional moment of intellectual flux in Scotland: deep time, outer space and free will all making their presence felt in the new town.

Looking for Mrs Cumming is a quarry film that traverses the landscape of a country house in search of an artist and her work. A Portrait of the Artist in a Meteor Shower embodies the artist, allowing her to take up the space beside her work. Lunarity is an orrery, a model of the planets as they were known in the lifetime of Elizabeth Maria Ouchterlony.

External link:

Provenance

An online talk by Victoria Clare Bernie

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.

Iron & Wood forms part of an ongoing enquiry into the nature of landscape and the uses of history in the Scottish landscape. It was made with the help of a landscape ranger, a museum curator, a geologist, a path mender and wood and metal workshop technicians. It was created with funding from a Creative Scotland, City of Edinburgh Council Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award and a Hope Scott Trust Award.

Iron & Wood was exhibited at Gairloch Museum in the village of Gairloch in Wester Ross in the North West Highlands of Scotland in the summer of 2019.

Iron & Wood

“… Letterewe, where said George Hay kept a colony and manufactory of Englishmen making iron and casting great guns, until the woods of it were spent and the leases of it expired.”  

The Letterfearn Manuscript c.1675  

Iron & Wood is an installation, a room of drawings and films preoccupied with the nature, industry and strange stories that people the local landscape. Imagined as a gentleman’s cabinet, a fictional study of sorts, for Sir George Hay the ironmaster and adventurer who lived and worked at Letterewe on the eastern shores of Loch Maree in the early years of the 17th century.  

Hay, a gentleman of Perthshire and an opportunist of the first order, originally set out to colonise Lewis under a royal grant of 1568. Together with his unscrupulous collaborators, the Fife Adventurers, he travelled north and made his way along the shore of Loch Maree towards the harbour at Poolewe and the boat for Lewis. Along his journey he would have noted two things above all in the landscapes that surrounded him: the distinctive iron-coloured burns that punctuate the eastern shore of the loch as evidence of bog iron in the sedimentary rock and an abundance of ancient oak woods, fuel with which to process said iron for profit. The Lewis adventure failed and in its stead Hay set about creating a suite of furnaces along the Loch Maree shore and the River Ewe, combining raw materials, processes and landscape in a remarkable and profitable adventure in mass production unique to early 17th century Highland Scotland.

Today the eastern shore of Loch Maree, the vast freshwater loch that stretches from Kinlochewe to Poolewe is quiet, peopled instead by oak woods and birches, rowan, ash and alder, each in varying states of vulnerability or resilience. Walking from east to west, map in hand, it is still possible to make out the vestiges of this once busy, industrious landscape: townships, dwellings and enclosures, furnaces and landing bays, piles of stones and the remains of groundworks all bear witness to production, cultivation and dwelling over time.

The Valentine Project: Lisa Mackenzie, landscape architect, Victoria Clare Bernie, artist, John Darbyshire, ecologist and Fraser MacDonald, historical geographer.

The Valentine Project was commissioned as part of Imagining Natural Scotland, a project devised and supported by Creative Scotland, Scottish Natural Heritage and the University of St. Andrews. Essays and images from the project were published in 'Imagining Natural Scotland' 2014 [David Griffiths, ed.] which was produced as part of The Year of Natural Scotland.

The Valentine Project

The Valentine Project is an exercise in graphic archaeology. A project to draw a singular line in an iconic landscape, to investigate and represent Glen Tilt in Highland Perthshire from the policies of the Atholl Estate at Blair, to the Falls of Tarf and the path north to the Lairig Ghru. Glen Tilt, a former drove road and a major artery through one of the most significant highland estates in Scotland, is also an extraordinary geological condition, the site of James Hutton’s Unconformity and the home to rare and endangered species of flora and fauna. It is a landscape that operates between the formal manicure of land management for tree cultivation, hunting, shooting and fishing and the informal but equally contrived design of the ‘almost wild,’ the carefully choreographed Victorian landscapes of paths and bridges, small-scale vignettes and destination wonders, waterfalls and forests, open hill and precipitous ravine.

The Valentine collection in the library of the University of St. Andrews includes some 50,000 topographic views, postcards and photographs of Scotland produced by Valentine & Sons of Dundee between the 1870s and 1960s. Amongst the collection, a suite of six images depict the journey up Glen Tilt from the south to the north, from the Witches’ Rock in the River Tilt at Blair to the Falls of Tarf in the Cairngorm National Park. For the Valentine Project these postcards operated as a script, a sequence of staged views along the Glen that offered a point of departure, a lens and a limit with which to frame the drawing out of the landscape beyond.

Working between the disciplines of visual art, landscape architecture, ecology and historical geography, between fieldwork, filmmaking and drawing, The Valentine Project set out to draw the Glen in deep time and in doing so to acknowledge the myriad overlapping systems at work in the landscape: history and geography, geology, ecology and climate. The hierarchies at play in the received history of the Glen and the stories lost to popular memory and the weave of human occupancy, dwelling and farming, a pastoral and military past.

The work of The Valentine Project comprises drawings, photographs and fieldnote films culminating in a folio of maps and observational drawings by Victoria Clare Bernie that ascend the Glen in line with the postcard views, a geophysical and anecdotal survey of the Glen from bedrock to rainfall, flight paths to temperature mapping and, a suite of investigative and propositional drawings by Lisa Mackenzie centring on the Falls of Tarf and the extraordinary collision of geological forces at its core. 

on wilderness was made with the generous help and support of a group of people who live and work in Shieldaig and the landscapes that border Loch Torridon and the Applecross peninsula. The project was funded with the support of a Creative Scotland Visual Arts Artist's Bursary Award. on wilderness Premiered in Shieldaig Village Hall in 2012 and was subsequently installed in the Small Gallery of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, Inverness in 2013.

on wilderness

on wilderness is a video artefact, the record of a landscape as seen through the particular understanding of four inhabitants of a Highland Community. It is a large-scale projected moving image work structured according to the interplay of landscape ‘events’ in and around the Village of Shieldaig in the Parish of Applecross in North West Scotland. The video, together with the drawings and photographic works that accompanied its creation, all attest to a concern for the politics of representation, for a place and its image. In Highland Scotland the politics of land is paramount. With a prevailing visual iconography of emptiness, melancholia and a seemingly untouched nature - all attached to a vital tourist industry - it has become a complex thing to navigate a modern life in a symbolic landscape.

In the politics of land in Scotland the word ‘wilderness’ is highly contentious and the term ‘wild land’ has become its somewhat awkward representative. Wilderness in this context carries with it the loss or erasure of history, the implication that this land has never been touched, inhabited, worked or cared for and with that, the implication of wastefulness. There is no Gaelic word for wilderness, the closest term, fàsach, refers to an empty place, unoccupied or uncultivated. The uncritical application of ‘wilderness’ to the Highland landscape denies a history and constrains a present and a possible future.

The popular imagery of the Highland landscape as a scene of almost hypnotic beauty and frequent emptiness is a primary economic resource at a local and a national level and yet, it is also a fiction. The evolution of this visual fiction, its formal devices of composition and scale and the audience that it creates and serves are the focus of this work. The urban visitor to the Highlands, constrained by time and an overwhelming desire to distance himself/herself from utility – the world of home and work and the seemingly unconstrained activity of the city – is disciplined to see a scene of untouched, found nature. The practicalities of that view, the work of cultivation and stewardship over time, the very particular geographies of living and working in a landscape that is perceived to be remote, are blurred.

What would it be to see and to act differently, to acknowledge the remarkable beauty of a place and in doing so to recognise the contribution of people? The landscape that we see is neither a found wilderness nor a devastated artefact rather it is the site of a very particular form of modern life.

on wilderness takes as its object four men and the paths that they occupy and work: a prawn fisherman working in a sustainable fishery, a mountain path mender restoring the trammelled routes of hill walkers across the surface of high mountains, a forest planter, responsible for the planned and natural regeneration of an Oceanic Woodland and a freshwater fisheries biologist tracking the behaviour of trout in a Highland River. Each man knows a particular landscape intimately: the sites of carnivorous wildflowers, the bend in a river inhabited by juvenile trout, the minute growth patterns of individual pine trees and the prawn population density of a coastal mud bank. And each understands this distinct landscape as part of a seasonal and annual cycle. In this place change is seen at the micro and the macro scale and the impact of human intervention is calculated over many years.

on wilderness is both a video work and the document of a year spent trying to see differently.

Slow Water was a Leverhulme Trust funded Residency project with a particular remit to engage across the disciplinary boundaries of visual art practice and marine science. The Slow Water project was supported by the Leverhulme Trust, SAMS, the Scottish Association for Marine Science, a Hope Scott Trust Award and a Film and Video Umbrella Project Development Grant.

Slow Water was a solo exhibition at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow 2011. Individual films from the project have been shown in the Millenium Gallery in Sheffield in 'Can Art Save Us?' and the Alchemy Moving Image Festival, Hawick in the Scottish Borders.

Slow Water

Slow Water is a project to map the present condition of water in Scotland through the device of a visual arts residency at SAMS, the Scottish Association for Marine Science’s research laboratory at Dunstaffnage, near Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Designed to operate between the disciplines of visual art and research science, the residency was an address to the representation of knowledge of place in art and in science. It was an attempt to learn from the intellectual, material, physical and conceptual logics of the other; to deploy the resources of digital video sound and image installation, photography, drawing, interview, ‘found’ sound and image collection, collation and representation in the realisation of an inhabitable map. A necessarily flawed document operating between the extremes of fiction and documentary, made and found, scaled and scale-less: an acknowledgement of the authority and power of the mapped image and, its inherent flaw as a singular record of the truth of a place, a landscape or a time. Slow Water is a project to represent the aqueous landscapes of Scotland as a shifting reality, as a changing sequence of possible truths operating between tides and seasons, a site of industry and occupation and a significant indicator of environmental change at the microscopic and macroscopic scale.

Slow Water centres on a cross-disciplinary engagement with the research practices of two marine scientists, Dr. Henrik Stahl and Dr. John Howe, in relation to Loch Etive sea loch in northern Argyll on the west coast of Scotland. As the deepest fjord in the British mainland, Etive is viewed by research scientists as a form of inland sea, a microsite for the study of sub-aquatic topography and its implications for the environments of shelf and coastal seas and estuaries in the context of a changing climate. SAMS is one of seven partners delivering the Natural Environment Research Council’s Oceans 2025 programme investigating the challenges of a changing marine environment. Dr. Stahl and Dr. Howe are contributors to Oceans 2025 Theme 1 ‘Arctic Ocean and climate change’ and Theme 3 ‘Shelf and Coastal Processes’.

Dr. Henrik Stahl is a marine biogeochemist working with planar optode technologies to study the transport of oxygen across the sea floor at the point where sediment and water meet. His work produces microscopic sectional images mapping oxygen concentrations in relation to animal activity in marine sediments.

Dr. John Howe is a marine geologist who uses sonar mapping and computer imaging at a macro scale to study the complexities of the sub-aquatic landscapes of the west coast of Scotland, the post-glacial topography and its impact upon the transport of sediment across the continental shelf.

External Links:

Slow Water, Everything Flows 2021

Street Level Photoworks [offsite] Harbour Arts, Irvine

Slow Water 2011

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow

Metis: Mark Dorrian + Adrian Hawker with Victoria Clare Bernie

The Northroom was exhibited in: The Lighthouse, Glasgow 2006-7, Il Palagio di Parte Guelfa, Florence 2007, The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh 2007 and the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – invited submission – 2008

Northroom

The tomb of the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume is a stone chamber on Calton Hill above the city of Edinburgh. A singular masonry vessel it stands gated, intermittently locked, and open to the sky. Calton Hill is an optical landscape, the home of the city’s first Observatory, Rock House the studio of pioneering photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson and the venue for Maria Short’s short-lived entertainment, a popular observatory in a wooden hut. In the ruins of Calton Hill it is possible to make out the curve of Robert Adam’s Bridewell Jail, a panopticon structure in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham’s project of surveillance.

On a clear day in the 1790s the Irish painter Robert Barker climbed Calton Hill and from here he was able to view the city of Edinburgh in the round from Arthur’s Seat to the Firth of Forth. A vision that led him to the design and construct the painted panorama, a visual entertainment for the masses that proceeded to tour Europe throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries in a precursor to the Lumière brothers’ travelling cinematograph and the ultimate draw of cinema.

Architecture Studio Metis, in collaboration with Victoria Clare Bernie proposed a latter day panoramic entertainment, a vessel at once monumental and articulate, a family of vertical armatures, wood and metal structures configured in a ghosting of the Hume Monument. A room open to the sky and holding on its surface a suite of some 32 films as detailed studies of the distant micro landscapes of Scotland and the immediate, somewhat weather beaten, skin of the monument itself: bog cotton and foxgloves from the Affric forests, spider’s webs and snail trails from the surfaces of Tomb.

The Northroom, designed in the spirit of a touring panorama, travelled from the Lighthouse Gallery in Glasgow to Il Palagio di Parte Guelfa in Florence to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and ultimately, the Royal Academy in London. In each instance the vertical components recalibrated to the Renaissance Hall, the vaulted landform or the 18th century Salon.

Approaching the Northroom a mane of black cables, wires and flexes encircles the floor, a single vertical structure pulled back from the vessel allowing access to the room and the flickering images and low level soundscapes within, an aural overlay of insects and water, flight paths and tannoys recalling both the immediate city and the country beyond.

Image 1: Northroom Installed, The Lighthouse, Glasgow, photographer Peter Dibdin 2006

Suddenly, I find a new path to the waterfall was installed in St Philip's Church, Catterline, Aberdeenshire as part of the Catterline Arts Festival 2005

Suddenly, I find a new path to the waterfall

Suddenly, I find a new path to the waterfall is a video sound and image installation commissioned for the nave and vestry of St. Philip’s Church in Catterline, Aberdeenshire. On entering the church and approaching the altar, a soundtrack of insects, slow moving water in small streams and bird song gradually increases in volume. A turn to left and the ‘waterfall’ is visible, framed by the door to the vestry, a small darkened room flooded with the Prussian Blue, Ultramarine and Yellow Ochre of minute twigs immersed in water, lichens and nascent ferns in the half light of a dense forest.

There is a waterfall in the village of Catterline. It is very hard to reach.

"Suddenly, I find a new path to the waterfall", Looking for Work [2] Raymond Carver 1989

Memoirs of a Beekeeper was commissioned as part of Oak Trees and Fountains a project at Drum Castle in Aberdeenshire curated by Iain Irving and Lorraine Grant. The work was made with the support of Aberdeenshire Council.

Memoirs of a Beekeeper

Memoirs of a Beekeeper is a digital video sound and image installation in the Gardener’s Store of Drum Castle in Aberdeenshire. A single suspended semi-transparent screen and video projector arranged in the manner of a private screening, of home movies and small histories.

In the video, a camera traverses the surface of plants and flowers in intimate detail, navigating the topography of each plant, following the tracks of insect movement on peonies wilting in the mid-morning heat and the gradual evaporation of frost from the surface of reptilian cabbage leaves.

As a cinematic still life the work takes its reference from the paintings of Henri Fantin-Latour, familiar for their depiction of fruits and flowers caught at the moment of spoil, of imminent death, the ripe fig or the full bloom. 

Idleness and the Dreamer was exhibited in a solo exhibition at Bonhoga Gallery, Shetland 2004. Idleness and the Dreamer was made with the support of  an award from the Hope Scott Trust and the Shetland Arts Trust.

Idleness and the Dreamer

Idleness and the Dreamer is a latter-day camera obscura, the evocation of an enclosed garden on the darkened walls of grain loft in a former barley mill in Weisdale, Shetland. A painted panorama of atmospheric phenomena, of light on water, and a digital video projection recalling the structural elements of a garden for the practice of courtly love: a fountain, a bench, a tree and a walk.

The 13th century poem “The Romance of the Rose” is the recollection of a poet undertaking a dream walk to a walled garden. Here he meets with the virtues and vices of the medieval tradition and the ultimate object of his wandering, the Rose. At the entrance to the garden the poet, the Dreamer, is met by the allegorical figure of Idleness, a woman whose sole purpose is that of pleasure and beauty. On entering the garden a stage is set for the formal practises of romantic love.

A Cinematic Garden was installed at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute in 2003. In 2004-5 it was included in DRIFT, New Media Scotland Touring Moving Image Programme and shown as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh; British Council, Belgrade, Serbia; The Museum of Voivodina, 8th Videomedja Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia; An Tuirrean Art Centre, Portree, Skye touring exhibition

A Cinematic Garden was commissioned as part of the Mount Stuart Contemporary Visual Arts Programme. The work was created through the support of a Scottish Arts Council Assistance Grant for Visual Artists.

A Cinematic Garden

A Cinematic Garden is a video landscape for the policies of the Mount Stuart Estate on the Isle of Bute in Argyll. Commissioned as part of the Mount Stuart Visual Arts Programme the work is a collection of video findings from the greater landscapes of northern and western Scotland: designed landscapes, botanical gardens, kitchen gardens, woodlands, plantations and the meta landscape of Scotland’s hydroelectric infrastructure, dams, intakes, surge tanks and turbine halls. Recalibrated as a singular, kaleidoscopic sequence, the work moves between exotic and native flora, grassland and folly in an evocation of William Gilpin’s tour of the Highlands. Gilpin favoured the Claude Glass, a convex darkened mirror held out towards the landscape to frame the view. Travelling at speed in his carriage he advocated its use as a means of capturing the fleeting passage of time and space.

“In a chaise particularly the exhibitions of the convex mirror are amusing. We are rapidly carried from one object to another. A succession of high-coloured pictures is continually gliding before the eye. They are like the visions of the imagination or the brilliant landscapes of a dream.”

William Gilpin “Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views, (relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty)” 1781

Mount Stuart is an autobiographical designed landscape composed of a sequence of discrete projects, gardens and avenues, follies and vistas created by a succession of Earls and Marquises from the 18th century to the present day.  In the 18th century John Stuart the youthful 3rd Earl of Bute began the process of laying out his policies in the new manner, informed by the flurry of publications, garden treatise and accounts that marked the discipline of garden and landscape design throughout that century. In the 19th century the Calvary Walk attests to the conversion of the then Marquis to the Catholic Church and the reimagining of the route to Calvary, the Via Dolorosa, beside a small burn in an Atlantic woodland. A Cinematic Garden is a digital evocation of a 21st century designed landscape, a challenge to the authority of scale, the demands of structural logic and linear time, a paean to “…the brilliant landscapes of a dream.”

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.

The Invention of Geography was a site-specific installation exhibited in a solo exhibition at art.tm in Inverness. The work was created through the support of a Scottish Arts Council Assistance Grant for Visual Artists

The Invention of Geography

The Invention of Geography is an installed landscape painting, a panorama depicting the optical phenomena of diurnal and seasonal in the Highland landscape: cloud formations, heat haze, morning mist, moonlight, twilight and dawn, spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Drink me was installed in the Institut Français d’Ecosse, Edinburgh as part of the group exhibtion Houseworks in 1997. in 1998 it was exhibited at Pitshanger Manor, Ealing, London

Drink Me

Installed in the anteroom to the office of the French Consul in Edinburgh, a Georgian terraced house above the steep gorge of the Water of Leith at Dean Village, Drink Me is an oil painting in parts. A work comprising some fifteen individual panels disposed across the walls of the room in an evocation of the earliest forms of painted panorama. It is a forest, a darkly blurred world of shifting hues of green and blue. Designed specifically for the scale, orientation and fixed ephemera of the anteroom site, the work plays against a full height gilded mirror, expanding the locus of the panorama, distorting space and reinforcing the hallucinogenic recalibration of the room.

Inappropriate Behaviour was exhibited in a solo exhibition at Galerie La Centrale Powerhouse, Montréal, Québec, Canada. The project was supported by a British Council Canada Visual Arts Professional Exchange Grant. The work was produced as part of a Leverhulme Trust Study Abroad Studentship based in the Department of Architecture at McGill University in Montréal, Canada

Inappropriate Behaviour

Inappropriate Behaviour is an architectural fiction, a room installed in a building formerly devoted to the storage and distribution of animal skins, fur coats, hats and gloves in the Downtown area of Montréal. Here, found and made furniture, linens and photographs, piles of pepper and lavender and an ornate, curiously calibrated sequence of wall mirrors depict a familiar narrative, a moment of fracture in the apparently benign surroundings of polite society. Borrowing from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) and closely allied to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865), the work centres on the architectural evocation of reason, order, good government and the established hierarchies. It depicts the moment when this breaks down.

Inappropriate Behaviour owes a particular debt to Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’ “The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations” (1780)