The Glasgow School of Art

I have a particular interest in the experiential nature of landscape with reference to the physical processes of walking, climbing and mountaineering. Working primarily with drawing, text, painting and photography in experimental and experiential forms that seek to create parallels between my experiences of landscape and those of recording and representation, my practice is informed by a longstanding interest in the history of mountain and polar exploration and through the artifacts, images and literature of exploration, memoir and scientific document.

Often through intensive and laborious drawing processes I aim to question the ways that these experiences of landscape (rather than landscape itself) both resist and enable the translation into physical form. My work is therefore intended to physically embody an experience as opposed to simply record one.

Recent works have developed through a growing interest in the landscapes specific to Scotland and an understanding of its geography through personal and physical involvement. Geography, for me, provides a means to engage with a more ontological position, and one that is released through the deep time of geology and within the temporal and transitory sensations of weather and climate.

This aspect of time, slowness and the ephemeral, has long been central to the production and conceptual understanding of my work, although this has somehow been made clearer to me by extending this engagement with landscape whereby physical awareness and risk is real and actively experienced. Time spent in remote places is, through necessity, extended, and this non-passive participation through climbing/walking allows me a shift away from romantic and idealised notions of "sublime landscape" to one that recognises and acknowledges the prosaic but, significantly, is also deeper and more full.