Arts Thread

'A Landscape I don't Remember Anymore' is a series of collages, pulp paintings and paper sculpture forms. It's part of my project 'Connected'. I destroyed my prints and drawings from previous years of study to deconstruct and reconstruct imaginary landscapes and compositions. Initially, working on my degree project, I wanted to capture the stories about Scottish land and culture. What distinguishes the Scottish landscape from others is its humidity, rustling wind, romantic and foggy mountain peaks, always green forests, grey sky, shores of cold seas, and mirror surfaces of magnificent lakes. The beauty of nature is imaginative and delightful, and the Scottish landscape appears more mysterious, fantastic, and wild than other lands. In the first stage of the study, creating the prints, I usually worked within the confinements of surfaces with defined borders and edges. But the uniqueness of the Scottish landscape, with its rapidly and unpredictably changing weather, made me decide to depict it using the monotype technique, which let me expand free-flowing, intuitive and borderless compositions and mark-making. I continued this approach to composition in the process of papermaking. In my works, I wanted to capture my sensual fleeting moments of contact with nature. I was focused on the mood, surface shape, texture, and blurred contours between individual elements. I wanted to create a piece where the materiality of paper is in constant dialogue with the materiality of water, the wind, and the sunshine. I had let my pulp dry on the mesh loosely left on the grass in my garden till it dried, or I hung the mesh with pulp pressed to it on the wall to get the serpentine shapes. Making paper, I became more interested in forms and experiences that could exist outside of the realm of my hand and decision-making. I enjoyed the possibility of constructing something that would come into being in one moment and then completely dissolve, which is constantly happening in the physical world. What I liked about making the paper and creating pulp paintings was that despite the repetition of the process stages, there was a place for an element of chaos and surprise. The material qualities of paper and all stages of making: pouring, layering, and moving pulp on the mould reflect the quality of a moment, like an imprint of the particular day with all its shades and moods.