We’ve lived and loved and laboured in this place

There was a footprint, held in the baked earth of the garden this spring. Blackbird? Thrush? I’m not sure. It wasn’t far from where our son, some years ago now, unearthed a tiny lead toy horse buried beneath some old concrete we’d been removing. And I think about the many traces of the many lives held in the dark red soil of this place. Iron rich soil originating in the desert-like conditions of the Permian and Triassic periods. Soil that has sustained and shaped its inhabitants for millennia; whose inhabitants, through their lives and deaths, have in turn sustained and shaped it, in a continual and dynamic process of reciprocal exchange…

Making your own pigments is physical and intimate, and never more so than when they come from the earth you know best. The leaf rich earth from beneath this tree; the bones from the crow who died here, on that day; the fallen twigs from the ash you spent years hoping might beat the odds and didn’t. In their specificity, in their peculiarity to time and place and individual life, in the labour of their making, the pigments become infinitely precious, a finite resource that can never be exactly replicated. The earth is dried and sifted to a fine dust. Mixed with linseed oil it’s ground on the slab, and its sound changes as arms ache and grit becomes paint. With it I draw the tiny bodies of just a few of the many others with whom I have lived and loved in this place. The soil renders us equal, enables the physical combining of the marks and memories of our existence, holds our tangled lifelines, remembers the traces we didn’t know we’d left…

‘Evolve’ @tighnabruaichgallery runs from 1-23 July 2023