1. Cataclysm
Industrial Upheavals Continue Ancient Processes
Fabricated Land is an ongoing body of work composed of photoweaves of abstract aerial imagery. Each weave tells hidden stories of the past’s influence on the present. This month I am sharing and discussing my ideas around images from the series.
Fife is more exotic than you think, the site of a 300-million-year-old seabed of sandstone originating from warm, equatorial waters. Today, this ancient rock hidden under Scotland’s thin, boggy skin, is pulverised by crawler dozers at a quarry in mere minutes. The fine grains, once mountains, once beaches, are now prized for whisky-bottle glass or raked into championship bunkers.
At the highest point of the quarry lies a tailings pond, where silt settles and water separates. On its opaque mirror surface, reflected clouds dance, shift and reform, like a timelapse vision of the geological process that formed the layers below. The image is broken by birds stirring up sediment as they paddle through. Nature seems to be recolonising this manmade habitat. On closer inspection we see that this species, the Canada goose, is exotic too, an ornament of Empire first brought to Britain in the 17th century, as people launched out to the New World. Today, as with other industrial sites in this part of the world, forest, mainly laid out in parallel rows for timber, hides the quarry from the road.
Quarry Lagoon, Fife, 2023
Photographic print on paper
50 x 37.5 inches
Edition of 3
The Central Belt of Scotland has been an industrial landscape for centuries. Coal mines fuelled the Industrial Revolution and shale oil was refined for petrochemicals. From drone height, the Firth of Forth and its salt flats are topped by the Grangemouth complex, where prehistoric oil and gas are processed to this day, though maybe not for much longer.
On satellite maps we see scores of quarries and industrial holdings, like this, hidden from passing cars. Humans are responsible for recent upheaval of the landscape, while monumental change over millennia is down to geology.
The horizon shifts; the landscape has always been in flux.
These study weaves for Fabricated Land consider the stories of shifting landscapes through deep and recent time, from sea to quarry to sand.
Dumbarton, Fife Sands (Tweed), 2023
Photographic print on paper, hand-cut and woven
8.5 x 6.5 inches
The turquoise pool of a quarry lagoon in Dumbarton is woven into the bright iron-rich waters of a quarry in Fife. Both pools are coloured by natural materials in the rock strata.
Dumbarton, Iona Study (Flow), 2023
Photographic print on paper, hand-cut and woven
8.5 x 6.5 inches
Heavy machinery at the base of a deep quarry near Dumbarton combined with the gentle waters in Port Bán, Iona.
Iona Study (Flow), 2023
Photographic print on paper, hand-cut and woven
8.5 x 6.5 inches
The pristine white sands weave through the turquoise waters of Iona in the Hebrides on the Atlantic Ocean.
I do like the image of the Canada geese - it's like they need more practice with their formation flying. I know they are on water, but, from a distance, they look to be in the sky. But then, perhaps, the whole thing is an illusion - not quite what it seems at first glance.