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Time Passing: People, Landscapes and Stone
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My work is an exploration
of how we interact in multifarious ways with our environment. Using natural stone
immediately creates an implicit link between my transient mark-making and the enduring, if ever-changing substance of the
land which gives rise to us.
“Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought
and were learned, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was
forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurted you. And she had ever
thought to leave it at all!”
Lewis
Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song 1932
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Stone is the very
stuff of our land. Whether it is dour, hard Aberdeen granite or mellow, sunny
Moray sandstone, it is far from characterless and inert; shaping stone is always a conversation between maker and material. Sometimes it is a battle of wills, but never is it boring.
To mark stone is to add
one more layer of meaning to a substance already charged with its own history, history held in the very particles and crystals
that form it. Sometimes other histories are caught in the stone too: fossilised
creatures from long ago, traces of ice, heat or water passing over or through the rock, or marks made by men in days when
to set something in stone was to entrust it to posterity.
I work in stone because it is demanding; it slows me right down and makes me consider and reconsider every small decision
along the way to arrive eventually at a form which seems inevitable, a form in perfect balance between my intention and the
stone’s own immutable character.
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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:
“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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