Drowned, Drained, Swamped & Bogged Down:
Initiating A Creative Exploration Of Mythterious Scottish Marshes & Wetlands
CREATIVE: CATHKIN MARSH & CATHKIN BRAES, GLASGOW
Reflecting on this landscape visit, the sooty head of the reed bunting sprang to mind above pale neckerchief - and the shiny beetle-like bodies of fighty coots with beaks white and sharp.
The dry reeds and rushes popping and crackling, with weight of last year’s seed heads.
There seemed to be a fragility to this landscape - hanging in the balance at the edge of the city - a vulnerability. Something shiny and precious encroached on by fly tippers and burned out cars. The dazzling positivity of the skylark chorus vs. the solitary cuckoo’s omen.
Fresh spring growth from shadowy pools.
Those glistening leeches dancing across the pond to feed on something unseen.
The blackness of peat.
Then the braes - once high above Glasgow’s smog and chimneys. Coal taken from those very hills to burn. The industrial revolution. This rallying place.
This place of nature and refuge and leisure today.
A delicate sense of hope?
Mary Queen of Scots watching her forces defeated. The image of a tarred head on a spike - a warning? That cuckoo again.
Loss.
The crispness of dry beech leaves hanging - clinging - despite the breeze.
The Scottishness of spikey gorse with cheery flowers. Willow buds popping open with fragile newness.
The cairns. Burials. Stones carefully stacked, then lost and scattered. A sense of custom and ritual.
The cremations and burial urns, with their quartz pebbles - For healing? For hope? For memory?
Monuments built to endure - but replaced, or ruined, or irrelevant.
The sweeping wind turbine blades endlessly turning in the salty air blowing up from the estuary.
A city built on the whiteness of sugar and deep darkness.
Following my earlier mask attempt, I set out to make a 3D head, using paper mache. Layer upon layer upon layer. Once set hard I cut it off rather unceremoniously with a bread knife leaving a large scar down the side. The plan had been to repair it afterwards but it asked me to leave it.
It felt appropriate to paint the head a shiney bituminous black. But I couldn’t stop there - it had to be thick like tar. Like coal. Like something burned crisp.
Split open, the head felt like a cracked egg. Releasing something. I decided to paint and leaf the inside - a royal gold - then I suspended the head using a delicately balanced bunch of rushes. Growth or clinging? Something ready to burn or burning?
Using different coloured clay I mapped out one of the pools from my visit within a wooden frame, pressing it in with my fingers to create a textured surface - soot, white, brown - like the bunting.
I scattered the surface of the clay with charcoal powder then set a ritualistic ring of Scottish quartz pebbles, sugar, salt, heather flowers, violets. Flakes of gold leaf felt from the head.
Then I played with lighting and projection.
