The view from up here
For a geographical feature usually thought of as merely picturesque, it’s surprising that there are so many with such violent names. Hill of the Thunderbolt, The Executioner, Peak of the Brawling Corrie – Scottish mountains with those unpronounceable Gaelic names masking the Sassenach from a history of conflict, threat and brutality. Mountains are a convenient defining edge for national borders, serving well as both defence and enclosure; keeping people in or out as you require. And yet they still retain an air of contemplation, quiet, peace and solitude, a place of retirement from the world, a vantage point to look down on your fellow man, hidden and safe. Rendered as works of art, the painting making up the cycle Ciste Dubh (or ‘Black Coffin’) permit access to both of these extremes with their Arcadian imagery and cruel names, the small scale physically inviting you in but contemplation stimulating vertiginous dread, wondering how many needed to die on this treacherous peak for it to finally deserve the name. An ideal lens, then, through which to view this whole body of work; a play of safety, meditation, playfulness, surface, versus threat, activity and the dangers of the machinery of war. A gamut of human-centred actions superimposed, each containing the impress of layers above and below, tangled between bloodshed and the bucolic. In whatever layer of the works you choose to inhabit, you will find war and peace inseparable, mutually, materially inscribed.
A mountain is a geographical classificatory symbol of an elevated area of land above a certain height – to be precise, somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 feet , probably. Each one is unique, but there are over 140 in the USA alone named ‘Bear Mountain’ – taxonomy is clearly unable to deal with such multitude. My mountain has a variety of lines of ascent; over there is what looks at first glance like fairly solid rock, but the steps cut by the boots of past hikers have created an unsteady scree I’ll have no choice but to scramble up. A little difficulty along the way is just the thing to provide that elated feeling when I conquer this mountain, when I stand on the summit and gaze down triumphant.