The Trace series comprises three paintings I made between 2021 and 2023. Each begins from a place marked by an earlier culture, though in every case I’ve painted the water rather than the monument. At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, the site of a Saxon ship burial, I painted the River Deben and the wake of a passing boat rather than the burial mounds themselves. At Loch Venachar in the Central Highlands, the submerged stones of an iron-age crannog off Portnellan Island, half-visible beneath the surface at dawn. The third work, Blackwater, records foliage reflected in the near-black, mirror-still water of the river that feeds the loch. I’m drawn to the faint marks that past cultures leave in a landscape, and to my reflections in imagination, as a means of painting them.
The three works were exhibited in Borrowed Land at the Kilmorack Gallery in 2023.
P U B L I C A T I O N
“Kilmorack Gallery has timed this exhibition – Borrowed Land – to run when Scotland’s landscape is at its greatest threat since the clearances. Giant multi-national companies threaten to build electrical substations the size of university campuses, along with 60m high pylon lines hundreds of miles long, and soon after will come the transformation of hills into power stations with a new generation of mega-turbines” (Tony Davidson 2023)
B L O G L I N K S
Painting ripples left by, for example, a falling twig, reminded me of pre-historic concentric rings carved into rocks … Traces of the past
The idea behind the phrase ‘Borrowed Land’ reframes a question; ‘What will you leave to posterity, to future generations?’ I’m fascinated by the traces left behind by past cultures, traces that are often barely discernible today. Some cultures left subtle marks. Borrowed Land
What you see above is a view of the gravel quarry and SSEN (Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks) electricity substation near Beauly, Inverness-shire. Beauly means ‘a beautiful place’ and despite these developments by SSEN, much of it still is. A Beautiful Place
E X H I B I T I O N
Rose Strang Artworks 