Long Shadows Cast is a work made with a series of glass watch faces painted with glacial flour ( sediment left by retreating glaciers ). Each drawing depicts (post) glacial site in Switzerland visited by the artist in summer 2023 through her residency at Muse d’art du Valais. The work is part of the wider project about what emerges as a result of glacial retreat. Placed on an OHP, shadows are cast on the wall. The viewer sees not the drawing but its trace, via the means of this nearly obsolete technology. The yellow glow from the electric bulb of lends the work a sepia glow, recalling early photographic images of high mountain areas before the impact of that industrialisation of that period was to be seen.

 

Wake : (Foolish sands) is a development of Long Shadows Cast. It  continues reflection on  what emerges as a result of glacial retreat.  It is a series of glass watch faces painted with rock flour gathered from post-glacial locations in Dumfries and Galloway. It was first exhibited at Tidespace, Kirkcudbright for the exhibition STILL/ WATERS/RUN/DEEP in 2024.  Instead of depicting the remains of contemporary glaciers, Wake: Foolish Sands reflects on Dumfries and Galloway as a post-glacial environment. It is a landscape drawn by ice that once covered this land. 11000 years later, its traces remain visible in our U-shaped valleys, erratics, lochs nestled in hollows carved by ice, debris of moraine and alluvial sediment that washes out into the Solway. These traces belie the sense of landscape as timeless as a human conceit, all is changing, and our presence here will pass in the sands of time. 

 

Long Shadows Cast  was first exhibited at the John Muir Trust in 2024 and  is part of the wider Emergency project.

 

 

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