Portfolio.

Notes on Practice.

Landscape, for me, is never fixed. It is a site of memory and return, a place that shifts between observation and recollection. This portfolio presents a body of ink works rooted in dùthchas, the Gaelic sense of inherited belonging to land, and in the related pull of cianalas, a longing for a home place that has no direct English equivalent.

Working in monochrome, I use fine line drawing and layered washes to build atmospheric environments rooted in specific places: forests, coastlines, and remote paths in Scotland. Each work begins with sustained looking: walking, photographing, dwelling. Forms emerge through tonal variation, accumulation, and erosion, with trees, thresholds, and shifting horizons marking spaces of transition.

Ink holds traces of duration, pressure, and movement, so the medium is inseparable from the enquiry. My relationship to it comes less from tradition than from necessity. I am alexithymic and live with chronic pain, and the slow, physical, often unpredictable process of working in ink has become a way of reaching feeling that resists more direct articulation. Mark-making is not illustration. It is method, a way of thinking through the body, at the pace the body allows.

This enquiry sits alongside writers and artists who have shaped how I think about place and feeling, among them Nan Shepherd, Amanda Thomson, and Anselm Kiefer. The work is an attempt to hold a place in feeling, across time and distance.