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Landscapes of the Heart
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The Top and the Bottom of It |
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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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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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“Beautiful”
- Clare Henry, The Glasgow Herald, 1991
“Mary Bourne’s stone and slate carvings show a love of the Scottish countryside. Beautifully tactile, with textures and polished surfaces, her sandstone resembles a small perfectly formed
piece of the Earth’s surface… Her ink sketches are pure inspiration.”
- Beatrice Colin, The List, 1991
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