Kingussie Trip.
April 2026.
The last weekend in April, my mum and I headed back to Kingussie to revisit a lot of the places that we had gone to the previous summer that I photographed and the places that have inspired a lot of the recent work in my sketchbooks and some of the recent paintings such as Gynack and Creag Bheag, and even the A1 painting that I am currently working on.
The primary purpose of the trip was to film POV footage of the walks and the places we visited throughout the trip to use for the 5-minute video that we need to produce for Unit 3. The plan was to try to transport the viewer to the places that influence my practice and the landscapes that I have such a strong connection with. Even though I can't physically bring the viewer to these places, this was a way to transport them there.
I also took two paintings with me on the trip that I wanted to film and photograph in place, specifically the places that they were inspired by, as another way of grounding the work in the sense of place and seeing how putting them in that landscape changed them and changed the dialogue of the pieces. I also took my sketchbook with me to do a similar thing.
The two paintings I brought with me were Gynack and Creag Bheag, both of which were painted in response to the previous summer's trip. With Gynack, the way the light filtered through the trees when I was filming really added another dimension to the painting. It was interesting to see how quickly the surrounding landscape seemed to envelop it, and how these paintings that had seemed so large to me in the studio suddenly appeared to merge into the landscape around them. Creag Bheag was harder to shoot due to the logistics of where the sun was positioned and the fact that the composition sat on the side of a rather steep drop.
It was initially awkward to have the paintings there and I didn't have too much of a plan. I was worried about imposing on the landscape in some way, but once I was there it just seemed to flow naturally. It was as if the landscape itself had the answers for how to shoot and place the paintings, offering up a clear branch of heather, a rock, or a well positioned tree trunk at just the right moment.
With the sketchbook, the main thing that stood out was how much the landscape had changed since the sketches I had done based on photos from the summer trip. At the end of April the landscape is only just beginning to wake up from winter. There were only very small signs of ferns beginning to grow, which are so dominant and all-encompassing in summer, there were no blaeberries yet on the bushes, and there was still some snow on the hills. It made me think about how much my sketchbook work is shaped not just by place but by season, and how the same landscape can feel like an entirely different one depending on when you are standing in it.
We got extremely lucky with the weather, and even though I only needed 5 minutes worth of footage, I left that weekend with well over two hours worth of footage that I can use, from hiking POV footage to filming my paintings and sketchbooks in place, and I know I want to use this footage in another project when I have the opportunity.
The one thing I didn't manage to capture as well was the sound of the landscapes. I noticed it throughout the trip and speaking with Jonathan in my 1-2-1 has given me some ideas about how I could try to capture this in the future, finding ways to let the sounds of a place speak for themselves without the mediation of words or image. I don't think I'll have time to go back before the end of June but I would like to revisit this idea when the course has finished as another avenue to connect people to the landscapes and the work, and to focus on the sounds produced by the landscapes rather than having to use words to describe them.
