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- Artist:
- Type: Photograph
- Medium: Analogue photograph
- Production Date: 2024
- Description: In the academic year 2023-24 the artist Audrey Grant was Artist in Residence at the University of Stirling.
Audrey's work interrogated the landscape, uncovering undiscovered aspects of a parkland whose primary function is now as a university institution, but which contains the echoes of the lives of those who have lived and worked within its boundaries. Audrey considered the visible and invisible traces left behind and responded to this experience to create works in a variety of media: photography, film, paint and sculpture. Her work narrates the past of this ancient estate, archiving the history of the landscape alongside the disappearance of the markings of the estate to make way for the modern university. The layered landscapes in works such as this one takes two contrasting landscapes and intertwines them to create a mythical scene. The artworks echo the layers of memories held and journeys made.
Audrey writes:
'Throughout my residency, analogue photography has played a central role in my research process. I have almost five hundred black and white photographic images of the estate. There are double-landscapes where two freely associated images are combined as one. There are layered photographic works that insert one image on top of another, creating something more mysterious than the original. Memory isn‘t linear but often evoked by association, or by being in a particular place. Not every landscape is known to us, or part of our remembered past, but we can all connect to similar or shared experiences within our collective understanding: the forest, the ruin, a flower, the soil, a dwelling are all things we have some experience of.
There is something melancholic about a ruin, or a thing abandoned to nature, something that has been allowed to fade, or common places such as an overgrown greenhouse, a mound of soil, a spade, an old copper back boiler, all easily overlooked. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space would see all of these as ‘praiseworthy spaces‘ and my hope is that my unearthing of the many aspects of this beautiful and complex landscape allow some of it to flower in a different way.' - Digital Copy:A digital copy exists.
- Location: Digital copy
- Accession Number: 2025.3
- Contact: University of Stirling Art Collection
