Laurie Clark: LEAF DRAWINGS
Watching a birch tree every day from the kitchen window and seeing it change through time with the seasons, from the fresh green of the young leaves to the rich gold of autumn, led to a series of drawings of individual leaves, selected from the same tree, throughout the year. The drawings are made with pencil crayon and the activity of drawing gives the opportunity to look more carefully.
While botanical illustration tries to capture the essence of a species, it is the particular and not the general that is interesting. Within a series of drawings, of birch or ginkgo or aspen leaves, the simple shapes of individual plants begin to conduct a complex conversation. That one species can generate infinite variations, is a constant source of focus and amazement.
Laurie Clark is an artist, illustrator and publisher based in Pittenweem in Fife, Scotland where during the summer months, Tom & Laurie Clark run Cairn Gallery. When it began in 1986, the Cairn Gallery was one of the earliest of ‘artist-run spaces’, specialising in Land Art, Minimalism and a lyrical or poetic Conceptualism. Since 1973, Tom and Laurie Clark have published their work under their own imprint of Moschatel Press. Named after a small green flower, whose botanical name Adoxa means “without glory”, the hundreds of Moschatel publications include cards, books and objects which explore some possibilities for presentation as an aspect of form.
Here at postROOM, Clark’s commitment to honesty, formal simplicity, and purity is exquisitely demonstrated in this series of straightforward and unostentatious drawings.
Lesley Punton: THE HIDE
This film records the passing of time in a wildlife hide on the west coast of Scotland. The hide allows the viewer to look upon the landscape through a long, panoramic viewing aperture. It looks out onto the land and water in a location where time is governed by the inexorable regularity of the tide. It’s mid-summer. The wind riffles through leaves, insects hover, and the camera examines the space viewed from the hide, but also of the hide itself. It’s a place that is almost a pause in the landscape, a place to view a pause in the landscape. Nothing happens. We just watch and wait.
Lesley Punton has worked at the Glasgow School of Art since September 2000. Since 2013, she has been Head of the Department of Fine Art Photography. She is also an active member of and contributor to the research group, Reading Landscape at GSA.
Her work is centred around how we experience (and translate our experience of) landscape, and much of her work emerges through the act of walking and spending extended periods within remote places. Recent works have focussed on aspects of time and duration in relation to place - the intimacy of lived time in contrast with deep time or geological time. Her practice necessitates spending much time "in the field", particularly mountain climbing in Scotland (where she has almost completed a round of the Munro's) and in Europe.
