Gouache on hot press 300 gm paper, 15 x 11 inches, 2022
The early and ground-breaking geologists Peach and Home stayed at Inchnadamph in the early 1900’s. In the glens behind the hotel the limestone rock is porous, rivers disappear and reappear, there are caves, and limestone pavements high up just like the Burren in Ireland and Malham Cove in Yorkshire, with specially adapted plants.
Gouache on hot press 300 gm paper, 15 x 11 inches, 2022
All about that place. In Assynt, the mystery of these high places is impossible and imposing.
Acrylic, water soluble graphite and charcoal on panel, diptych, 2022, 76 x 152 cm.
My title is from a piece of landscape in Assynt, below the big corrie in the main wall of the hill called Quinag, or in Gaelic, Cuineag, meaning the milking pail. BÀTHAICH is a byre, and this piece of land was a shieling, or a summer pasture, from the days when the people of Assynt would take their cattle up to clean fresh pasture high up for the summer, and there they would make or repair bothies to sleep in, and live quite a different, free and light-hearted kind of life, making butter and cheese from the milk. This is before the Highland clearances of course.