Inspired by the violent coastline of Cornwall combined with its beautiful and mysterious inland creeks. A video poem exploring how a sense of time and place can be can shift our perceptions between centuries. The past always has echoes in the present. A touch of the Daphne du Maurier.
Hunkered Down
In Taynish Woods of Argyll - the winter seems to batter relentlessly in endless waves of wind and rain. Despite this there is incredible beauty in the colours of this season with the rust of bracken, emerald of moss, sage green of lichen carpeting the trees with an alternative foliage and the deep plum of old leaf litter. Even the wind is a source of enjoyment watching and listening to Ravens do their amazing tricks surfing the breeze and flying flipside over.
I am Humpback
Inspired by Simon Armitage's 'The Christening' about a Sperm Whale. The glacial striated rocks leading into Linne Mhuirich at the tip of Taynish National Nature Reserve have always reminded me of a knobbly Humpback. I chose to throw in a few Scots and Glaswegianisms as I think this Humpback would talk that way.
Just a bit of fun
Seasonal surf
Watching weather moods and changing musicality of the seasons of Scotland's coastline throughout the seasons.
A lockdown of mist
Mid December, west coast Scotland enters in own version of lockdown. Everything is a hazy shadow of its real self - half in this world and half in the next. A rare moment of brightness to realise its an inversion with the sun pressing down on the heavy blanket of mist. The gone.
Storm Barra
Storm Barra picking up its wrath at Kirkinner, Dumfriesshire in the Forest. The trees are about 70 years old and whippy enough to be able to dance to the tune of the wind. It’s a beautiful spectacle looking at this avenue, with a spilt gold path of beech leaves below. Its howling with alarming sounds of tree knuckles crashing and splintering all around. Nearby crazy nodding synchronised reeds as the storm water slaps the shore angrily.
Big Skies Islay
Recently returned from a winter trip to Islay. Saligo Bay –horses on the dunes, sheep in the turnips, beautiful waves lined up regimentally and driving onto the shore over rocky finger fragments pointing to sea. Machir Bay – light shafts from dark boiling clouds signalling a change in the weather. The slack water creating dazzling reflections of bubbling clouds and remnant blue skies , wide beach with delicate sinuous patterns from the wave reach.
The late afternoon sun is revealed through purple clouds in great shafts of light across the estuary. On the way back the big skies of Islay are opened to us across the low lands around Loch Gorm.
The measure of it
The autumn version of 'Awakening' my Beech woodland spring video. This is a homage to the other season of transition which is equally spectacular in its colour and impact on our own psyche - a preparation for winter and hunkering down until light returns next spring.
Hebridean
A recent visit to Harris in the Outer Hebrides had me considering the age of the Lewisian Gneiss rocks that dominate this landscape. There is a palpable sense of time and a real feeling that sounds from past lives are trapped within the rock that slowly releases as it erodes back to its constituent components only to be released into the ocean and return again in an unrelenting cycling of change. There is a deep musicality to this cycle of time.
Childhood Summers
My childhood memories of the great migration north each summer to visit my mothers family. To me it was an epic journey without much joy except the final escape to the North York Moors
Another Life
Inspired by open water swimmers who seem to be able to plunge themselves into below body temperatures. I have tried twice to swim at the height of summer in Scotnish, Argyll encased in protective wetsuit with snorkel and goggles and lasted about 1 minute both times.
An Sgùrr, Eigg
Inspired by the geology of the Small Isles of Scotland and the rocky volcanic glass fin on the Isle of Eigg. Here the geologist Hugh Miller discovered ancient fossils of Plesiosaur also known as sea dragons. The North of the island is famous for its singing sands of round eroded quartz grains.
Old Man of Hoy
Finally finished a rather challenging seascape of a distant view of the Old Man of Hoy from Mainland Orkney. It was a tangerine sky under deeply bruised skies and the Old Man was perfectly silhouetted, set apart from the cliffs of Hoy. My vantage point was from the aptly named Cauldrus across agitated seas. This was view that inspired my Orkney Stories 5 video poem.
Good news also is my poem form the same Orkney series - Stenness Stones - was awarded commended in the Scottish Federation of Writers Vernal Equinox Competition
Safe Haven
Trying to capture the anxiety that sailors must feel when needing to find safety when weather conditions turn - especially when the closest is already a crowded space jostling with other boats. Anxiety can continue if its only an anchor hold and through the night they are the mercy of that slim thread.
Orkney Stories 8 - The Earl's Palace, Kirkwall
The final in this Orkney Series after my visit the autumn of 2020. In the heart of Viking medieval Kirkwall is the Earl's Palace with a dark and grim history. The remains are set within a serene woodland square but still permeates a sense of this brooding story.
Postcard Conversations
Inspired by the a work in the private collection of artist Beverley Ann Hicks. It charts the conversations between two old friends by postcards, poems and artworks. As time goes on they drift apart but one chooses to frame her memories and their history as part of her own gallery so that connection is not lost.
Orkney Stories 7 - The Pier Art Centre
The combination of artworks from Orkney to St Ives in this extraordinary collection at the Pier Art Centre, Stromness inspired my 7th Orkney poem in this video series. All housed in this dramatic location at a crossing point of seas and a starting point for arctic explorations.
Awakening
This year the arrival of spring seemed interminable and I recorded the slow progress of the beech woodland leaves opening and lifting. It was long awaited and felt like an awakening.
Orkney Stories 6 Stones of Stenness
This is the sixth of my series on Orkney visited last year for the first time in over 10 years. The sense of time and our relationship with the world is deeply felt at these Neolithic standing stones. Even the presence of absence of those stones that are missing.
Light Glitches - Between Here and There
Inspired the work of Lesley Hicks from her Icelandic series where she painstakingly recreates the grainy interrupted static of digital traffic camera images across an unforgiving landscape. I work by abstracting information from my painting series of the River Add Estuary in Argyll to give the sense of transience that this landscape offers.