The Bothy where I stayed while on residency at Merz is situated in lovely grove of trees. In the first week of my residency when it was too cold to work outside I made a series of time-lapse videos of the trees from the studio window.

Later I used the drawings and video as inspiration to create Ashes to Ashes a painting on The Bothy Green House windows.

One of the locations where I worked was a terrace of disused farm cottages outside Sanquhar. Wanting to respond to the colour, light and atmosphere of this unique place I created time-lapse video and used a combination of observational and automatic techniques such as stencilling to make paintings and collage. I hope these videos capture the beauty of this place as well as the melancholy of time passing. I also managed to capture the rise of the April 2021 Supermoon (see the second to last video in the gallery below. The moon appears in the left of video).

On my walks to the River Nith I often went through the ruins of Sanquhar Castle – a structure that is almost 1000 years old (William Wallace stayed here!). The contrast of ruins and landscape was fascinating. The Crow House is a farm ruin along the way to the river where a large flock of crows lives.

The Pamphy Linns, is a ‘Faerie Glen’ hidden within an old tree plantation near Sanquhar. A series of small waterfalls and caves, it is a hidden landscape covered in hanging moss that glows green in the sunlight, darkening into shadow when the sun shifts behind the clouds. It is a place full of mystery even on a bright spring day.

I experimented with time-lapse video here to record the uncanny light and the way form seemed to shift and change with the movement of the clouds and sun.