A collaborative exhibition uniting the works of two artists taking different paths through Scotland’s natural landscape, but who were alike drawn by the elemental forces that course through every aspect of our living land.
Trinity Coombs, photographer, was guided by the course of the River Nith in the south-west of Scotland, and through her photography captures the individuals working in close connection with the land, each one with distinct paths yet intertwined by the river, and the candid beauty found therein. For the Nith is no passive presence: it is a living seam, connecting people to place and practice to meaning.
Journeying North to the Scottish Highlands, the artist Octavia Charlesworth was inspired by the same subtle forces, and the gift of a book of poems by the legendary Scottish poet Nan Shepherd. No words were more profound nor fitting than Shepherd’s, and they became intertwined with each moment captured in this series of pastel paintings.
In these places the artist encountered a ‘leap of the spirit’, as Shepherd described it: a sensation of the soul soaring up into the skies, carried by invisible forces, which had the power to both free the soul and simultaneously bound it to the very earth beneath one’s feet. Another wonderful expression from Shepherd’s book ‘The living mountain’ was the concept of becoming ‘fey’ again: the return to a primordial state of being both unworldly and grounded in the natural world.
Shepherd said: ‘it’s a grand thing to get leave to live’, and we hope that our artwork can grant the viewer that leave to live through the stories presented in our journeys across this living land. For, ‘through living in it, the landscape becomes part of us just as we are part of it.’
Trinity Coombs: ‘A Rich Seam’ https://wwwtrinitycoombs.myportfolio.com/a-rich-seam
My Heart is in the Highlands
‘Leap of the Spirit’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 30cm x 24cm
View of Loch An Eilein in the Scottish Highlands. On the island at its heart lies the 13th c. castle ruin, the stronghold of the Wolf of Badenoch.
‘Tell name yer depth and nanne shall I.
Bricht though yer deepmaist pit may be,
Ye’ll haunt me till the day I dee.’
Bricht, an’ bricht, an’ bricht as air,
Ye’ll haunt me noo fo evermair.’
From ‘Loch Avon’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘An Ecstasy Remembered’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 30cm x 24cm
Loch Mallachie in the Scottish Highlands, its icy surface sang that day.
‘As though from one pure crystal all were wrought:
So crystal-hard, fine cut in crystal thought,
Our moment of amazed beatitude.’
From ‘An Ecstasy Remembered’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘Astonishment is in the Skies’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 41cm x 31cm
In the Highlands looking East to the Cairngorms at morning twilight.
‘Astonishment is in the skies;
The gliding waters murmur o’er
Songs that are their own surprise;
The trees ne’er looked like this before.
Thine is the ravishment they wear.
I turn from thee in such content
That where I go thou still art there,
And all the world with thee is blent.’
From ‘Astonishment is in the skies’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘Lux Perpetua’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 41cm x 31cm
View of Loch Mallachie in the Scottish Highlands, frozen by winter’s touch.
‘O clarity, colour, the height of a winter noon,
The flocking of winds together, the flight the croon
…
And a hush behind them that lay on the wood like a spell,
A hush that was quick with the underthrob of sound.
After, to South-South-west through asphodel
The sun slid round.’
From ‘Lux Perpetua’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘Wide Lands of Dream’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 41cm x 31cm
The distant Cairngorms call, dusted in snow and ignited by heavenly fires.
‘And O but the unsubstantial blue
That the earth was at daw!
And how the sober flats grew
Elfin, uncertain, half like dew
And half like light withdrawn.
And all of a sudden the world was strange
With the strangeness of things that seem
More familiar the more they change,
Like the queer, familiar forms that range
Through the wide lands of dream.’
From ‘Flood’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘Mirror Pool’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 30cm x 24cm
Loch An Eilein in the Scottish Highlands, its frozen surface a mirror of the expanding sky.
‘And tis’ but air that hurries by,
Disturbing thy serenity.
Does the heavenly mystery prove
So urgent thou canst not but move
In emulation of its flight
As it speeds onward to the light?
Or hast thou purpose of thine own
To us, as to the wind, unknown?’
From ‘Pool Beside the Birches’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘Winteresque’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 30cm x 24cm
Looking towards Boat of Garten in the Scottish Highlands at sunrise on a midwinter’s morn.
‘And if upon the angry height
There comes a golden hour
Of magical and lovely light
And terrible in power,
Illuminating the width of land
And all the hills that are -
Peak after peak how clear they stand,
Farther and yet more far
Then ah! If I am walking there,
And breathe that blue serene,
And see through that enchanted air
The form of the unseen,
It may be I at last shall know
A god’s experience,
Perceive the world without the show
That opens to the sense.’
From ‘Fires’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.
‘O, licht amo’ the hills’
Soft pastel on pastelmat paper. 30cm x 24cm
The infinite horizon from up on Cairn Gorm in the Scottish Highlands.
‘O, licht amo’ the hills,
S’uld ye gang oot,
To whatna dark the warld ’ll faa.
Nae mair the thochts o men
’ll traivel yont the warld
Frae aff some shinin Ben.
Nae mair the glint o snaw
Oot ower the warld’s wa’
’ll mak men doot
Gin they’v their een or na.
O, licht amo’ the hills.’
From ‘O, licht amo’ the hills’, In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd.