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| Culloden Targe |
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| Shield |
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| Dava Targe |
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Sometimes the wind sweeps
from the West across the Laich of Moray. It lifts the light, sandy soil in great clouds and deposits it in drifts across the
roads; snowploughs become sandploughs.
In this open landscape trees are significant. On the coastal plain farmers grow shelterbelts along their
field edges, obstacles to the gritty blast. Earlier this century at Culbin, trees were planted to anchor the shifting sands.
The unstable dunes became a pale and silent forest floor and lichens turned the trees silver.
Inland at Dava, high moorland is punctuated by regenerating
conifers: the ground appears both pierced and pinned down by their spiked forms, while at Culloden, forestry plantations stand
like a crowd around the arena of the Moor.
Trees deflect the wind and hold onto the soil; they are an important crop, providing income and employment.
But they are also more than this: as you pass through the landscape they are hooks to hang your thoughts on and silent watchers
of your passage. |
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| Fossil Record |
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| Regeneration |
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| Indication of Past Times |
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Our perceptions of landscape are coloured by knowledge of its
physical, political and social history, while at the same time one’s own emotional state can bathe every detail in intense
feeling. Disentangling her feelings for her father’s home at Macduff, Angela Carter wrote, “The Japanese have
a phrase, ‘the landscapes of the heart, to describe the romantic correlation between inside and outside that converts
physical geography into part of the apparatus of the sensibility”1. It is this subjective reading of
landscape and the personal significance that elements within it can carry that have generated this body of work.
Using the language of the patterns of tree growth south of the Moray Firth, these sculptures
express both issues of personal urgency and a broader sense of connection with the cyclical processes of continuity and change
within the landscape: growth and harvesting, peace and war, presence and absence.
1Angela Carter “My Father’s House” New Society 1976 |
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MARBLE/marble
Symposium,
Colorado, USA 1996 |
This Island Earth
An
Tuireann, Isle of Skye 1998 |
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| From the Heart |
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| Some Place |
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| Touching Holding (detail) |
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| Touching the Land |
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Media coverage for "Touching/Holding"
and "Touching the Land" in the exhibition "Changing Perceptions" at the City Art Centre, Edinburgh in
1997:
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“That’s lovely. That really is nice.
I could just stand and hold that all night.”
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In Touch, BBC Radio 4, 1997
“Bourne
appeals to the very core of our sensuality. For no matter how they might please us visually, the look of these objects cannot
compete with the sensations to be had from touching them.”
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Iain Gale, Scotland on Sunday, 1997
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