“…an emerald after it has just been split, placed in that dell would see its brightness fade against the colours of the grass and flowers.”
Dante, Purgatorio, Canto VII
Traces. Forest of Luffness 2. Oil on 30 x 30 inch canvas. Rose Strang 2025
Traces comprises two series of paintings by artist Rose Strang, a film by Manuel Pennuto and a collaboration between a group of artists and friends, including Richard Demarco CBE, artist Terry Ann Newman, animator and composer Adam Brewster and author Robert de May.
Introduction
What does the 800-year-old effigy of a crusader in an East Lothian forest have to say to our modern world?
Edinburgh-born artist Rose Strang first encountered the site of a ruined Carmelite Friary in East Lothian in 2021. Beneath its broken arch lies the time-worn stone effigy of a 13th-century crusader. Discovering that the crusader died of disease at Carthage after being cared for by Carmelite friars, an order born in response to war which embraced peace, silence and spiritual healing, she began to draw parallels between the legacy of the Crusades and the impact of conflict today.
The first series of paintings is a trilogy of works; Abyss, Veil and Effigy, an exploration of the war-traumatised psyche of a 13th century crusader.
The second series: Traces. Forest of Luffness originated on a June morning in 2024, when a group of artists, family and friends, including Richard Demarco CBE, artist Terry Ann Newman, animator and musician Adam Brewster, filmmaker Manuel Pennuto and author Robert De May, joined Rose Strang at the site of the medieval Carmelite friary.
Traces. Forest of Luffness is the work that emerged from that day in June: a 25-minute documentary film by award-winning filmmaker Manuel Pennuto and a series of paintings by Rose Strang. Together, they respond to a pilgrimage in the forest and what survives across time; in landscape, in stone, and in the human capacity for both destruction and reconciliation.
Traces | Film Trailer
Traces. Exhibitions and Screenings
Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh Festival programme this year took as its theme The Artist as Pilgrim and brought together the work of two artists: Patrick Reyntiens, whose stained glass for Coventry Cathedral stands as a defining act of post-war renewal, and Traces, a project led by artist Rose Strang.
Together, these works explore how art and pilgrimage enable us to contemplate contentious histories of war and seek paths toward reconciliation.
Traces Exhibition: 23rd August to 15th September. Board walk Beach Club, Edinburgh, Scotland
Traces Screenings: 21st, 22nd, 23rd August 2026. 12th September 2026. Screenings were followed by Q&A with Richard Demarco and Traces participants on the theme of The Artist as Pilgrim.
Images from Traces at Boardwalk, August/September 2026
New Developments
Rose Strang has donated the Traces series of paintings to the Demarco Archive. In December 2025, Richard Demarco donated his entire archive and collection, over 1,300 artworks and 865 boxes of documentation built over sixty years, and valued by the museum at hundreds of millions of złoty, to Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, one of the oldest museums of modern art in the world. Richard Demarco, who has maintained a relationship with the museum since 1968, is currently in discussion with its curators about presenting Traces as part of this living archive.
The Muzeum Sztuki’s response to Richard Demarco’s life’s work has been exemplary: the Polish Minister of Culture attended the handover in person, the archive is being properly catalogued and digitised, and the museum’s director Daniel Muzyczuk has described it as the greatest gift in the institution’s history. For a thoughtful account of what the archive’s departure means for Scotland, and for a vivid portrait of Richard Demarco at 95, we recommend Charlie Ellis’s piece in Bella Caledonia, A Cultural Evacuation: The Demarco Archive Leaves Scotland.
Richard Demarco CBE and the creators of Traces warmly invite those interested in supporting future showings to stay in touch: rose.strang@gmail.com
Creative Roles | Traces
Rose Strang – Project lead, artist, producer, scriptwriter, narrator, music (voice)
Manuel Pennuto – co-producer, director of the Traces documentary, cinematographer, editor
Adam Brewster – camera, animation, Traces music arrangements (incl’ recorder and arrangement of Bryd one Brere)
Robert De Mey – writer
Jacob Olah – music (guitar)
With
Richard Demarco CBE – artist, writer, teacher; Director of the Demarco Gallery, Director and founder of the Demarco Archive Trust (Wikipedia | Demarco Archive)
Terry Ann Newman – artist, Director of the Demarco Archive Trust
Further Reading
Rose Strang: The Forest of Luffness – interview by Robert De Mey, Art-Scot
The Medieval Way of Seeing – essay by Rose Strang
Contact: rose.strang@gmail.com
Detail: Forest of Luffness 1. Oil on 30×30″ canvas. Rose Strang 2025
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose. Robert Oppenheimer (1947 lecture “Physics in the Contemporary World”.)
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