I N T R O

The Ardnamurchan series is a group of seven paintings made in May 2022 for Coast, a two-person exhibition with the landscape painter Jim Wright at Resipole Studios. I first came to Ardnamurchan in 1992, and painted this series in response to the peninsula’s wild environment and part-inspired the work of ecologist Suzanne Simard, who discovered how trees communicate and share nutrients through underground fungal networks. Her research reveals forests as a living, interconnected system. Most of the paintings follow the Silver Walk, a late-nineteenth-century estate path that runs along the shore of Loch Moidart to Castle Tioram. Others are of Sanna Bay, further west on the open coast.

Alongside the paintings I recorded a Gaelic song, Nach Falbh thu air an Turas Leam?  (Will you go on a Journey with Me?), composed in 1975 by Donald McColl, a gamekeeper and bard from Acharacle. I found it in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh, and recorded it with the kind permission of his family for a short film that accompanies the series.

P A I N T I N G S

B L O G  L I N K S

I was entranced by the ancient forest of birch and oak growing all the way down to the sea, and of course Castle Tioram, which featured in my Planet Narnia paintings inspired by the book Planet Narnia, and the cosmos as understood in the Medieval imagination … Ardnamurchan 1

P L A C E