The artist: I am 78, and for over 30 years was a Social Worker & Mental Health Officer, but, for most of my life, have painted, made collages and printed from woodcuts. In my 60’s, following a desire to make sculptures and art installations, I studied Sculpture & Environment Art at Glasgow School of Art, gaining a BA (Hons) and then an MLitt (Fine Art Practice).
It was when studying that I allowed my lifelong love of fabrics to play a significant role in my artwork – and have since continued to make fabric sculptures and art installations.
I had long allowed the colours, shapes and patterns seen in fabrics ,to inform my other artwork, as it was evident to me, that the majority of these were drawn from the world around us. Many people, when considering what landscape is, tend only to regard the natural world, and all too often don’t truly notice the impact man makes on it, whether it be the infrastructure we develop to the way we dispose of waste on the land. Dropping a sweet paper is ‘making an impact on the landscape’.
My sculpture, ‘Landscape (Clues & Contradictions)’, encapsulates much of what I consider when trying to interpret what a landscape is. The individual pieces made to comprise the whole are deliberately made pod shapes, leading one to consider what they might contain, as one might note with seedpods. The colours, patterns and repetition are clues to what might also be noticed in ‘my’ landscape - be it flowers, waves, etc. The contradictions are those such as a flamingo, seen on some of the fabrics, a reminder to me of an abandoned pink plastic flamingo seen on the side of a road on the Isle of Skye.