Thinking About Installation and a Solo Show.
Over the course of this final unit I have been thinking more carefully about how I might want to present and install my work, and how it could interact with different audiences. The act of returning the paintings to Kingussie in April, and the experience of photographing them in place, started to open up questions I had not been fully sitting with before: what happens when work leaves the studio, and what kind of conversation does it invite?
One of the aims I want to set myself between the end of the MA and a potential PhD start in 2027 is to do my own solo show. Not only would this help to keep the momentum of the practice going during what could otherwise be a quiet period, but I think it would also ask something different of the work. Presenting a body of work to an audience in a physical space requires a different kind of thinking than making it, and I am curious about what that process might reveal.
One idea I keep returning to is the question of how language shapes the way we receive work. I want to try splitting the audience in two: one half experiencing the work with no labels, no descriptions, and no text-based narrative, and the other half encountering the work in the more traditional way, with wall text and context provided. Bringing both groups together afterwards to talk about what they noticed and how they moved through the space feels like it could be really revealing. It connects directly to the research I have been doing around alexithymia, pain, and non-verbal communication, and the broader question of whether art can do something that language cannot, or whether we reach for language so automatically that we close that possibility before we have the chance to find out.
I also want to think about how a show might bring the landscapes that sit at the centre of the work into the room with it. The footage I captured during the Kingussie trip in April, the photographs of the paintings in place, these already feel like the beginning of something. But I want to go further and think about whether there is a way to create a space within an exhibition that functions almost as a cocoon, somewhere a viewer could step into and be surrounded by the sounds and images of those places. Sound in particular feels like an important and underexplored element. As I reflected on in the Photographing in Place post, the landscape around Gynack and Creag Bheag produces its own kind of language, and no image fully captures it. Pairing the footage with field recordings from the same locations, and displaying prints of the paintings photographed in place alongside the finished works, feels like a way of making that dialogue visible and audible rather than keeping it contained within my own experience of the work.
A lot of these ideas trace back to experiencing Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years at the Royal Scottish Academy last October. I wrote about it at the time, but the exhibition has continued to sit with me in ways I am still processing. The Gravestones room in particular, where the stones gathered from 108 graveyards across Dumfries and Galloway were displayed in a space with the lights almost entirely dimmed, has stayed with me more than almost anything else I saw during the course. There was a quality to that room that I found difficult to articulate at the time, and still do. It felt still and quiet, but carried an underlying sense of movement or vibration that you could not quite place or see. Something separate from the rest of the exhibition, as though you had stepped into a different kind of time or space, present in the room but not entirely of it. That is the quality I want to think about when imagining what an immersive element of a solo show might feel like. Not spectacle, not explanation, but somewhere a viewer can simply be, held by something they are not required to name.
These are still early thoughts, and the shape of a show will depend on the practicalities of space, time, and resources that I cannot fully anticipate at this point. But having a direction to move towards feels important. The practice does not stop at the end of the course, and I want to make sure that the period between the MA and whatever comes next is one where the work continues to develop rather than waiting for a formal structure to hold it.
