Comming soon | BORROWED LAND exhibition

We have an exciting new exhibition and publication coming soon, Borrowed Land : Reinventing Scottish landscape. This celebrates land, sea and sky, and the artists who love and are absorbed by it.

 

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Landscape artists are vital. By studying and painting sky, sea and land, they remind us of its importance. Painting the land, or making pots from it, is timeless. It is an art that is ancient, modern and future-facing: a navigational light to steer us to a better world. Landscape, the physical world with its rich ecosystems, will hopefully be there long after you and I are gone.

Kilmorack Gallery has timed this exhibition - Borrowed Land - to run when Scotland's landscape is at its greatest threat since the clearances. Giant multi-national companies threaten to build electrical substations the size of university campuses, along with 60m high pylon lines hundreds of miles long, and soon after will come the transformation of hills into power stations with a new generation of mega-turbines.

Kilmorack is in a unique position because we are in regular contact with artists across the whole of Scotland, including the often underrepresented northern artists, and those from the islands and other rural areas. They know the land better than anyone and, because of this love, they have much to offer.

Curation includes the ecstatic artists, and some who see it as a metaphor, a few who live the tides and moons, some who incorporate its body into their work. There are tree worshipers, physicists and intuitive poets of abstraction. Landscape and how we belong to it is maybe the oldest and only story ever written. We hope our exhibition 'Borrowed Land' which runs throughout the winter of 2023-24 will reflect this.

 

Tony Davidson, Director of Kilmorack Gallery

October 13, 2023