IN WILD PLACES is a cerebral journey across big spaces. It is a response to the significance of elemental features and forces. It looks at landscape and place in a new way. The five collaborations are with artists I have worked with before in Europe and Scotland - mostly in remote places. The work considers my relocation to Aberdeen from the remote North East and other remote places where I have worked/briefly lived: Lapland, Russia, Poland, East Anglia and Brixton which develops the theme that all places can seem ‘wild’ for a moment, or under certain circumstances, nuances of relived memories can invade any space.
Collaborations:
Mateuz Fahrenholz – Warsaw, formerly St. Andrews
Mat hates the very idea of wild places. His work responds to profoundly inhibited behaviour, social mores, timetables, clocks, travel tickets, dislocation, restraint which suggests that underneath there is a vast and volatile wild place just waiting to break through our veneer of order. We have been investigating the virtual space between us in our respective countries.
Mary Bourne – Dufftown
Mary’s work is honed from the stuff of the earth. Her stone work is not just contemporary it is imbued with the tradition, knowledge, understanding and craftsmanship specific to this natural, sometimes unpredictable material. Her work has rich earthly strength and spirituality. We are working with stone and fishing line which brings together light and dark, lightness and weight.
Karen Laing – Aberdeen
Karen is my partner. We look to the sea. We (as human life) come from the sea. Its restlessness, force, dogged repetition, vibrant nature brings us (brought us) together. We are on the shoreline. We create temporary movements of water rivulets of light, sand, stones. We record a fragment of an ocean that is so small but that signifies so much of how we feel together – of the wild space between and around us. Our work for this exhibition took us to the island of Tanera Mor.
Duncan Hart – Aberdeen
In our work together, relationships of materials, people, landscape, ownership and humour, seem to dominate. So a relationship with a space or person is an experiment in humours and nature. The outcome has an inevitably delightful uncertainty. We have been working with a stretch of the River Dee. Kaija Kiuru – Lapland (Finland) Kaija lives and works internationally not just in a wild place. She responds to and involves the vulnerable forces of a constantly changing nature and environment. Her work is about how to live with that nature – how to belong to it; the psychological preparation for that journey through it.
