A GROUP of visionary Scottish artists who were ahead of their time in responding to the threat of climate change are the focus of a new ground-breaking exhibition.
The six artists’ backgrounds and experiences, which are largely rooted in Scotland, led them to engage with the consequences of brutal social disruption and spiritual exile long before the effects of climate change had impacted on the communities of the Arctic Circle and in other precarious environments around the globe.
The six include the late James Morrison who worked alongside a community of Inuit peoples in the Canadian High Arctic forcibly re-settled from their traditional territories by the Canadian government. For Morrison, their fortitude in the face of injustice heightened the emotional intensity of his Arctic paintings, which, devoid of people, depicted a colossal landscape sublimely indifferent to mankind.
Following his expeditions to the High Arctic, Morrison was left in no doubt as to what the future held.
“We are hell-bent on destroying the planet,” he said in 1997. “I simply do not see homo sapiens making the decisions, the self-sacrificing decisions, to save the planet. I think the planet will run on to oblivion.”
Elizabeth Ogilvie’s family had to leave the remote island of St Kilda in 1930, along with the rest of the population, triggering her lifelong interest in lives lived on the edge of existence and a related preoccupation with the sea from early drawings of “wave-scapes” to her recent film of kelp forests, projected onto the COP26 venue in Glasgow.
Frances Walker, always drawn to the wild and desolate spaces, feels a similar kinship with St Kilda. A further shared sense of loss is that of the Gaelic language.
Trained at Edinburgh College of Art, Walker went on to become the sole art teacher for all the schools in the Outer Hebridean islands of Harris and North Uist, which reinforced her love of wild and desolate spaces and her desire to depict isolated panoramas and landscapes.
From 1971 she lived part of the year on the island of Tiree. Her 1987 landscape, After The Storm Of The Inner Hebridean Island Of Tiree, was painted at a time when she was voicing concerns about “the sea level rising … and engulfing most of low-lying Tiree like another Atlantis”.
Will Maclean’s forebears were victims of the Highland Clearances when his great-grandfather was forced off the land to join the herring fleet. Two generations later, this occupation also collapsed due to modernisation.
Much of Maclean’s work mourns the loss of age-old working communities and memorialises their links to archaic pasts.
Thomas Joshua Cooper, who is of Cherokee descent, established the Fine Art Photography programme at Glasgow School of Art. He grew up on a Native American reservation which led to his understanding of the trauma of his ancestors and by association “cleared” Highlanders.
Describing himself as an expeditionary artist, he works on long-term projects which take him to the world’s extremities, working only with an 1895 American field camera, requiring single frames, long exposures and hand processing. He almost died at the North Pole falling through the ice. Having hauled himself out, he realised: “I’m at the actual top of the world. I can do this. The weather was perfect with the freezing fog that rose.”
Glen Onwin’s 1975 Saltmarsh project was one of the earliest examples of land art in the UK.
The exhibition is being staged by the Fleming Collection of Scottish Art in Stirling University’s Pathfoot Building until August 18 next year.
Fleming Collection director James Knox said: “This landmark show installed in the modernist masterpiece of the Pathfoot Building, which incidentally was designed by a Scot, will open the eyes of the public to the sensibility of Scottish artists to the threats and consequences of climate change as expressed through works of great beauty and force.”
Sarah Bromage, University of Stirling Collection head said: “We are delighted to be working with the Fleming Collection to bring this important work to the University of Stirling.
“It is hugely exciting to be showcasing these six artists in a way that hasn’t been done before, and to highlight the pressing issue of climate change, and it is fitting that this landmark exhibition is shown in the landmark building of Pathfoot.”
