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Artworks
Patricia Macdonald
Burnt moorland, grouse-shooting, Central Highlands, Scotland, 1998-2001, from the ongoing series The play grounds: Deadly games (24 part work)photographic colour giclée prints on Hahnemuhle paper219 x 226 cm totalEdition of 3Copyright the ArtistIn collaboration with Angus Macdonald. This is a grouse-moor – a deadly board game – seen from the air after a light fall of snow. The dark patches are tall,...In collaboration with Angus Macdonald.
This is a grouse-moor – a deadly board game – seen from the air after a light fall of snow. The dark patches are tall, growing heather, and the lighter areas those that have been more recently burned as part of the intensive management procedures of ‘driven’ grouse-shooting, which have changed this ‘wild’ place into one of the landscapes of industrial agribusiness.
In this piece, the moor is seen simultaneously in various spatial ways and from various points of view, including that of the hunted grouse. It considers ideas of freedom and constraint, of hunting and being hunted, and different systems of perception. It contrasts two superimposed versions (actual and conceptual) of the linear grid of mechanist modernism with the nonlinear, circling feedback loops of the ‘strange attractor’, one of the mathematical ‘signatures’ of the holistic, ‘organicist’ world-view.
