Photographing in Place.
Something I had been thinking about before the Kingussie trip was what it might mean to bring the paintings back to the places that made them. Not to display them there in any formal sense, but to see what happened when the work was returned to its source. Whether something would shift, whether the dialogue between painting and place would change when they were no longer separated.
I wasn't sure how it would feel in practice. There was an awkwardness to it at first, a worry about imposing, about placing something man-made into a landscape that already has its own complete and self-sufficient language. But once I was there with Gynack and Creag Bheag propped against the hillside and the trees, that feeling dissolved quite quickly. The landscape seemed to offer up its own answers for how to do it, a clear branch of heather here, a well-positioned tree trunk there, a rock that seemed to be waiting. I stopped trying to direct it and let the place take over.
What I hadn't anticipated was how much the paintings would change simply by being there. In the studio they feel large. Out in that landscape they seemed to merge, to become part of something much bigger than themselves. With Gynack in particular, the light filtering through the trees added a dimension to the painting that I couldn't have planned for. The marks on the surface started to echo what was happening around them in a way that felt entirely natural, as though the painting had always been heading back toward this moment. Creag Bheag was harder to work with logistically, the sun positioning and the steep drop making it difficult to find the right angle, but there was something in that resistance that felt true to the painting itself and to the place it came from.
This idea of returning work to its source is something that other artists have explored, though often in different ways. I wrote about Andy Goldsworthy earlier in the course, and his practice feels relevant here, particularly the way his work is made from and returned to the landscape rather than taken from it and placed elsewhere. Richard Long and Hamish Fulton work similarly, using walking and documentation as a way of holding the relationship between body, land, and mark. What I am doing feels distinct from these practices in one important way: I am not making work in the landscape, I am bringing work back to it. The paintings are a response, a translation, and the act of returning them feels like closing a loop or maybe opening a new one.
There is something in this that connects to the broader themes I have been working through over the course of the MA. Place as a form of language. The body as a site of knowledge. The idea that some experiences resist being expressed in words and need another kind of translation. Bringing Gynack back to the burn it was painted from, or Creag Bheag back to the hillside, felt like an act of that same kind of translation. The painting is not illustrating the place. It is in conversation with it.
I am now thinking about what it might mean to take this further as part of how the finished work is presented. The photographs I took during the trip already feel like a body of work in themselves, and I am drawn to the idea of printing some of them and displaying them alongside the paintings, so that the viewer can see both the work and the landscape it comes from, held together in the same space. This would add another layer to the themes of place and embodiment that run through everything I have been making, and it would make visible a relationship that currently only exists in my own experience of the work.
There is also the question of sound, which I am still sitting with. The landscape around Gynack and Creag Bheag produces its own kind of language, one that no image fully captures. My recent 1-2-1 with Jonathan opened up some thinking around this and the idea of finding ways to let the sounds of a place speak for themselves, without words or image as a mediator, feels like a live thread I want to return to once the course has finished.
