IN TIME AND SILENTLY and A WIND FROM THE NORTH
- Submitting institution
-
University of Dundee
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32977070
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- University of Dundee
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The underpinning enquiry for this series of paintings,
primarily presented in two solo exhibitions (2016,
2018), was an investigation of the capacity of painting
as a performative act to shape new meaning fused
in the materiality of final artworks. Close analysis of
source photographs taken in-situ in the landscape and
art historical references underpins this enquiry and
is distilled through painting to both transform these
subjects, exceeding their photographic and
historical references, and to bring new insights and
understanding to their subject matter exploring
themes of life and death. The lasting influence of
the Northern Romantic tradition in painting is
re-contextualised within a contemporary framework
to create secular artworks that nonetheless
incorporate traces of spirituality through the motifs in
subjects such as ‘Ophelia’, and otherworldly qualities
of light as in ‘Spectral Vision on High Ground’. The
‘Tidal Swell, Firth of Forth’ continues this thematic
enquiry through the depiction of an area of coastline
where cadavers are occasionally washed up by tidal
currents. The title of the exhibition of work from this
series at The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh (2018) was
taken from the last line of Seamus Heaney’s final
poem (published 2014) that reflects on the brevity of
human existence. These paintings specifically use
landscape as a metaphor to consider the human
condition in relation to the passage of time.
This eschatological theme informs this overall body
of work and the cyclical turning of the seasons across
the series makes clear that these are temporally
reflective images. Each evokes an experience that is
sufficiently associative to provoke recollection of
similar experiences in the mind of the viewer, thus
offering ontological significance for those open to
it, and proving new insights and understanding.
The research is further disseminated through group
exhibitions, collections, reviews, publications,
journals, conference papers, invited talks.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -