The Heartwood project, an annual project now in its third year, brings together both Scottish and international visual artists for a site-specific, contemporary exhibition set in a rural woodland at Monkquell in Blairgowrie, Perthshire.

The exhibition engages with a wide public audience and is open from 11 – 19 September to coincide with the Perthshire Open Studios.

The artworks respond to the rural locality and natural environment of the Monkquell woodlands to address contemporary issues of identity and place, and human interventions on nature. They explore the fragility of the connections between site and imagination, flora and fauna, time and memory, artist and visitor, as well as inviting visitors to consider their own role within this landscape.

A total of 15 pieces of work are to be discovered by walking through the woodland paths. Artworks include a very diversified range of media from audience participation, sound and video, sculpture to installation.

The exhibition is organized and curated by the Heartwood Artists, consisting of seven Scottish based artists, who are committed to bringing artists together and creating work in the rural landscape. Invited artists for this year’s event are Allison and Bray, Margaret Bathgate, Mary Bourne, Doug Cocker, Caroline Dear, Kirsty Duncan, Rob Mulholland and SVOP/T group from Norway. Participating Heartwood Artists include six of the seven Heartwood Artists: Fanny Lam Christie, Kyra Clegg, Su Grierson, Shona Leitch, Frances Law, Martine Foltier Pugh.

This event is made possible by the concerted effort of Heartwood Artists and the voluntary contribution of all participating artists. The Heartwood 2010 project has received support, with thanks, from the Hope Scott Trust towards the printing of a catalogue. Patricia Bray has also received the Fife Visual Arts Award for her collaborative work in this project.

The exhibition is open from 10 am – 5 pm daily from Saturday 11th to Sunday 19th September, 2010 at Monkquell, Brucefield Road, Blairgowrie PH10 6LA.
Admission is free.

Visitors are advised to bring suitable outdoor shoes. A location map and further information can be found on the website www.heartwoodartists.com

Heartwood 2010 Artworks

Audience Participation

Svop/t is a collective formed of two Norwegian artists and an Italian architect. Their conceptual work The Appearance of a Path takes the logical ‘precision’ of mapping and planning, and invites the visitor to challenge their preconceptions of a direct path by leaving decisions to a dice throw. Natural obstacles – trees, rocks etc – determine the course of the path and insist on the spontaneous creation of new pathways and new discoveries.

Martine Foltier Pugh’s DIY Interpretation turns round the practice of interpretive panel writing by replacing it with visitors’ comments. These words are processed into a generative software that transforms them into a constantly evolving word cloud where their size and appearance are determined by their frequency. The changes to the cloud can be checked on site and online throughout the event.

Unseen-Uncovered by Su Grierson places small objects that act as evidence of unseen woodland activities into a very dark enclosure. The visitor must enter the dark space with a torch in order to re-discover the objects which are through the exploration of the viewer transformed into mysterious, unique objects that challenge perceptions of our everyday environments.

Video and Sound

Nesting is a collaborative work by Allison and Bray using three short films, shown inside bird’s nest boxes, to explore three unique creative spaces.

Cistercian Links by Margaret Bathgate directly references Monkquell’s past associations with the Cistercian monks of Coupar Angus Abbey. Rooted in historical research, the installation is made from thousands of dried teasel heads, which hang swaying with the breeze. The work is accompanied by sound.

Sculpture

Doug Cocker’s sculptural assemblage, Tools and Moons, alludes to time and work: there are elements taken from tools – the handle, shaft and blade – combined with crescent curves that are suggestive of the illusionary image of the moon. The work reminds us of the co-existence of man and nature, and of the dysfunctions that are associated with this relationship.

The ambiguous sculptural forms in Mary Bourne’s Gathering Dishes are at once scientific and domestic. Quietly placed under the rowan trees, the stone dishes wait as if to collect something. The emptiness of the dishes creates a sense of anticipation, allowing the visitor to interpret whether they are part of a scientific experiment, collecting biological specimens, or simply gathering the fruits of the rowans.

Installation

Fanny Lam Christie’s Still Winter draws on direct observation of the woods over winter. The installation in a rowan grove reveals delicate porcelain butterflies hugging the limbs of rowan trees, in juxtaposition with the imposing skeleton of a metal butterfly.

The Looking Room by Kyra Clegg is constructed around the motif of a search for our bearings in a wood. Furniture, mirrored books and framed pictures – all objects of domesticity and the interior – are placed outside in the wood. The work highlights the many ways we look at our natural environment and our place within.

Caroline Dear’s Enclosed explores ways we perceive the environment around us. With a minimal veil of structure formed using willow, our spatial awareness is transformed. Using natural materials such as willow, moss and heather, the work plays with ideas of boundaries, perception, sanctuary and seclusion.

Kirsty Duncan works with fragments of popular childhood fairy tales. In Once Upon a Lifetime, she references stories that have been retold by Clarrisa Pinkole Estes in her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, in which stories are reclaimed from a dominantly male tradition, and focus on the idea of a wild woman.

The female figure at the centre of Frances Law’s Shrine is a symbol of how sites can evoke a spiritual focus whether natural or human-formed. The intention of the installation encourages a moment of quiet contemplation of the internal or external human experience, bringing to mind a sacredness and timelessness of place, past, present and future.

In Bending moment Shona Leitch explores our place within the natural cycles of growth and decline and the way in which our balance is challenged by forces – external and internal alike. She believes that reality is a balance swayed by our perceptions and it is the way we think about events, rather than the events themselves, that ultimately dictates our path.

In Rob Mulholland’s Trace Project 2010, boxes of small collected possessions are dispersed between mirrored figures suggestive of their original owners. Placed within the larger environment, these collections might seem small and irrelevant, but are key to identity and memory.