GATHERING LIGHT (2024)
Gathering Light was made during six weeks spent living off-grid in the uplands of Southern Scotland as artist in residence with Connecting Threads and Borders Forest Trust. It is a response to a landscape undergoing a programme of ecological restoration which has seen over 2 million native trees planted across 31km² by Borders Forest Trust, a charity established to restore native habitats in an area with the lowest percentage of native woodland in mainland Scotland.
The Wild Heart Residency was commissioned in 2024 by Connecting Threads, a Southern Uplands Partnership project, and produced in partnership with Borders Forest Trust, as part of Destination Tweed. Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
---
This work is a meditation on a specific landscape and on the changes slowly unfolding there at differing physical and temporal scales, linked to the seasons, cycles and processes of nature. In a place where water is always falling – as rain or dew, soaking through peat, flowing downhill in the burns – the trees defy gravity, transporting water upwards from root to stem, swelling their leaves to gather the sun.
In an abundance of northern light, soaked up and accumulated by the growing trees, I began to see photography and photosynthesis as analogous to one another. Day by day I watched the sun's path rise to its midsummer zenith. At night I bathed in the light of ancient summers, released from the embers of a fallen Ash tree.
I lived amongst birds. My concerns were threads - growth, time, the texture of water, the nature of light and the gentle hum of an ecosystem in the making.