Working together with the other three prizewinners of 'Black & White : Shetland Open 2016', we all made responses to the theme 'Traces'. Our shared interests and connections included paths and patterns in nature, decay and preservation, traditional skills, and lines as potentially expressive of impermanence and the layered-ness of time. I'd first started exploring imagined landscapes in the 'Ruins of Skaw' drawings in 2015 (below), and wished to continue for ‘Traces’. I wished to explore landscape-painting tradition further, and also to research how how depiction of space and use of perspective in images can potentially be expressive of different world-views or ideologies.

In making work for 'Traces', I also took inspiration from a Leonardo da Vinci quote where he suggests looking at patina of decay as way for artists to invent landscapes for their work. He describes a way we can creatively see new worlds and forms in the chaos of the world around us. More than simply a useful device for artists, it seems that da Vinci is almost describing a world view, that chaos and decay are actually desirable - and perhaps even necessary.

To explore this further, I gathered together photographs of decaying walls I'd taken at RAF Garth's Ness, a former NATO LORAN A radio navigation station located in South Shetland. Active from 1961 to 1978, this site gave crucial aid to ships and aircraft crossing the Atlantic - and allegedly may also have been involved in Cold War listening activities [1]. In tracing shapes and lines in sections of decay-patterns found on the walls at RAF Garth's Ness, I was able to generate imaginary landscapes, translating the small into the large as I drew formations of islands, hills and shorelines. These landscapes were as though viewed from an aerial or 'floating' viewpoint. This oblique perspective put the viewer in a position of floating in time and space also, of being 'everywhere at once', and so outside of time's linear progression - in some kind of ruin-landscape.

In Shetland, war ruins like RAF Garth's Ness can be found scattered all across the island's otherwise untouched and wild-seeming landscape. Encountering them makes us realise that 'nature' and an idea of its pure sublime beauty is an increasingly fragile notion in a post 20th-century-war world. In the 'Tracing Patina' drawings, I hoped to evoke an ethereal, wild kind of ruin-landscape (one before/after human habitation). In this deceptively 'natural' drawn landscape in-fact being generated from patina found in war-ruins, it contains hidden darknesses.

1. Archaeology Shetland.org. 2016.