'But trees warp time, or rather create a variety of times: here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous - never plodding, mechanical, inescapably monotonous. I can still feel this as soon as I enter one of the countless secret little woods in the Devon-Dorset border country where I now live; it is almost like leaving land to go into water, another medium, another dimension. When I was younger, this sensation was acute. Slinking into trees was always slinking into heaven.' John Fowles, The Tree, Little Toller, p 17
I grew up in a small village called Aberchirder in north east Scotland. Near the village is a community woodland, called the Cleanhill Wood, known locally as simply the Hill. I spent much of my childhood exploring and playing in these woods, climbing trees, and discovering (without realising it) an enduring and deep love for woodland.
On the top of the Hill, obscured by trees, stands a disused concrete WW2 Observation Post. When I was younger, it served as a den and playground. It is now an obsolete and decaying structure, still standing, hidden among the trees like a folly or a temple from a Claude Lorrain painting. I realised after leaving art school that this Observation Post was the catalyst for my interest in utilitarian and modernist architecture. It informed my growing fascination with the overlaps between human-made structures (abstracted suggestions of buildings, snow poles, shelters, huts, street lighting, walls) and trees, investigating the ambiguities and complexities around how we see the landscape, and our place as part of it.
This fascination, kindled in the woods around Aberchirder, finds its focus now in my on-going exploration of the land around my home in the Scottish Borders. In fact, all my work starts with an experience of a place encountered, often during a walk. Walking is a key part of generating ideas, and I will explore and record through notes, small drawings and photography. Sometimes, though, I get excited about a place because it reminds me of something I've seen in art history or film, or it causes me to make associations with something I'm reading or thinking about already, perhaps thoughts about how the land is being used.
From these initial responses I develop the work in the studio. Through layering of surface and detailed drawing with paint, with a process of constantly adding and removing paint, I create a sense of simultaneously looking back and forward in time, in the same moment. I try to show human and non-human worlds as entangled, overlapping and inextricably linked. I'm not presenting an opposition, but rather a personal vision of a sympathetic relationship, a symbiotic co-existence or a formal tension.
Sensitive reforestation, through rewilding, is a recurring theme in my work. Loss of biodiverse native woodland is now one of the most pressing issues facing us and other species. We need to enable sensitive reforestation now on a vast scale. An example of this is Carrifran Wildwood in the Scottish Borders, planted and managed by the Borders Forest Trust.
I've been looking at relationships between human culture, trees and rivers in a public art project recently, part of the new Flood Protection Scheme in Hawick in the Scottish Borders, collaborating with artists Alec Finlay and Gill Russell. As part of this project, I planted 13 native trees on the tributaries of the Teviot Watershed, linking trees with water and the branching forms of the tributaries, and the need for planting upstream.
I am influenced by a lot of art from the past, such as Albrecht Altdorfer, a 16th century German artist who is credited by some as making the first European independent landscapes, including the idea of the wild German forest. I'm interested in how Scottish artists such as John Knox and Horatio McCulloch, via Walter Scott, helping create what we think of, to this day, as the 'archetypal' sublime Scottish landscape. I both acknowledge and critique these constructs in my own work. I'm fascinated too by Modernism and the legacy of it, admiring artists like Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian and Ben Nicolson - lines, edges, transparency, multiple viewpoints, surface and painting as object. In terms of contemporary art, I like Martin Boyce, Carol Rhodes (sadly recently died), Hurvin Anderson and Peter Doig, among many others. Agnes Martin is an absolute favourite, and recently I've been enjoying Anni Albers.