Next Show
4 - 31 March 2010
Kelli AbdoneyLandscapes
“My great love affair with the natural wonderland of Scotland may well have begun as a small, wide-eyed girl, growing up in the heartlands of Ayrshire: a home I was brought to at the age of three from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
However, it was at the age of 21, travelling back and forth from Caithness and Sutherland, seeking inspiration for my Glasgow Art School degree show, that I realised I had truly and irrevocably fallen in love with my own country. This series of landscapes looks back to my days and nights spent in that northernmost part of Scotland and I hope that the images reflect a cherished way of life in those far reaches of our land – an often harsh yet ultimately rewarding existence lived amid the simultaneously unforgiving yet beautiful Highland topography.
My landscapes offer a representation of man’s interaction with his natural environment. I believe landscape representation is not simply a matter of recording the physical aspects of the country, such as its geological structure and the space in which it exists; of equal import are those less tangible, often elusive factors, such as personal memory and shared history and, of course, the slow circles of time. In fact, time is the one true and constant dimension in which the meaning of a landscape unfolds, and it is registered within my work in the constantly changing pattern of the terrain itself and man’s ambivalent, sometimes strained relationship with his surroundings.
More than ever, the natural environment is a controversial issue, and it is apparent that, set against our evident needs as human beings, there is an equally ever-increasing demand for preservation and protection of threatened, fast diminishing ecosystems. It is equally obvious that a reconsideration of the processes whereby we inhabit and utilise land must be carried through into a an all-encompassing social, political and industrial reform. It is with this in mind that over the past 10 years I have sought to document ‘wildernesses’ to ascertain how these isolated lands are reacting to this transitional period in an environmental, social, political and industrial context.”
