In March 2025, The SSA held the the exhibition The Land at The Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. The aim of the exhibition was to explore how land was responded to and used in the work of different artists. For my contribution to the show, I wanted to make a drawing that had lived and breathed the landscape before being brought indoors.
During a week at Sweeney’s Bothy I made a start on the work. I had wanted to find some strange and dizzying perspective – a place where I felt the land was ready to tip over and where I could feel the tension of weight and time acting upon a place.
Around the south side of An Sgurr was a place where the pitchstone columns appeared to be driving in many different directions, creating cracks and weak points and a real sense of the force of gravity dragging at a colossal overhang. Taking in this sight of tumbling stone, my mind was full of images of what happens next (in a few thousand years or so) when the cracks are further exploited and these great masses succumb to the inevitable.
With my canvas stretched over the side of Sweeney’s Bothy, I tried to lay out the confounding geometry of the scene – looking downwards from a high point created a bizarre perspective which was tricky to communicate. I’d imagined the drawing to be made in a frenzy of elemental activity; huge sweeps of charcoal and salt water and rain and mud and wind. Had I remembered that my desire for fine cracks and crispy chips and layers of stone was truly overwhelming, then I wouldn’t have been surprised when I found myself finishing out the drawing with the tiniest of paintbrushes and delicate marks.
