WOSP

Many crofters on South Uist have second jobs to help make ends meet. Some work at the hospital, others at the local missile firing range. Beatrix Wood’s second job is filmmaker.  San Fhuil/ It’s in the Blood  is her three part documentary series showing the annual cycle of crofting and its twenty first century challenges. The films are centred on the township of Drimsdale where Wood and her family have lived and crofted for the last eight years.  Every aspect of the crofting year is covered (brace yourself): collecting and spreading seaweed to fertilise the fields before ploughing, sowing and harrowing, cutting and drying peat for fuel, driving the sheep out onto the hills where they winter and gathering them back in again after lambing for castrating, shearing and dipping, dosing and pedicuring cattle, calving, muirburning, roof thatching, taking lambs and calves to market in Lochboisdale, harvesting the oats and barley and preparing silage for winter feed, ...

History is not what happened it is what we remember happened. There are significant gaps in our understanding of Scotland’s history. To borrow the opening quotation from  New Shoots Old Roots : “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Chinua Achebe This simple publication contains photographs and interview transcripts. It brings to life the stories of eight African and Caribbean women who came to Scotland between 1958 and 1996. It places value on their experience as migrants to this country where they were welcomed for their skilled labour but often left feeling socially isolated because of racism. The book is dedicated to Edith Meheux. There is a Polaroid photograph of her as a young woman on the front cover of the book. She is a vision in pastel shades: a light green coat over a pink dress and yellow leggings. But she also wears thick gloves and dark boots and scarf because the earth is covered in blue whi...

Photograph by Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert  @JshPhotog  for  @Greenpeace Another Royal Wedding, another Strictly Come Dancing ‘curse’ moment and, oh yes, that ‘final warning’ report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Temperatures are rising, the ice caps are melting and Hurricane Michael just ripped large chunks of Florida apart like they were made of paper. If we don’t take urgent and drastic action in four key areas, energy, land use, cities and industry says the report then frankly, we are all  fucked ! That last word is mine, but you get the idea. Photo by Suthep Kritsanavarin  @suthepkritsanavarin   The  @EverydayClimateChange  exhibition currently showing at Trongate 103 is prescient. This week’s major IPCC report has made little impression on news headlines. How could it when in competition with the sartorial elegance of royal wedding guests and the minor infidelities of d-list celebrities? Cara Delevingne’s top hat an...

Black Flag  is the right thing in the right place at the right time. Santiago Sierra has firmly planted the international symbol of anarchism in the city of Dundee just as the V&A opens with much fanfare across the road. The first thing that hits you when you walk into the gallery space at the DCA is the pair of giant black and white photographs on the wall at the far end. Both are landscape in orientation. Placed one immediately above the other they form a square. At the top is a black flag, small in scale, in the middle of the ice cap at the North Pole. Below is the inverted image of another black flag flying on the snowy land mass at the South Pole. Together these two photographs form a very succinct picture of planet Earth from top to bottom. The whole world is seen compressed, devoid of hierarchy. On the wall to the right is a grid of twenty photographs arranged in two rows, again one immediately above the other. To accompany the journey along the photographs i...

Vitreous  China , the enamel that coats bathroom ceramic, is the initial connection between the work of Paul Walton, an evangelist for bio-diversity, and Andreas Athanasopoulos, a man mildly obsessed with urinals. Another factor is that they are both black and white photographers who frequent the darkroom at Street Level Photoworks. In their exhibition  China  they show thirty-five large glossy silver gelatin prints. The work is mixed together, but you can tell who made which prints because as Athanasopoulos says, “all of mine have urinals in, the rest are Paul’s”. Almost all of Walton’s prints feature baths discarded in fields, now encroached upon by nature. Walton’s picture making is rooted in his attention to the age of the Anthropocene, in which human activity has become the defining characteristic of our geological epoch. His geologist father instilled in him from an early age a sense of the infinite in nature. This has been eroded gradually throug...

Logically speaking there is no such thing as photographic language. Language requires syntax and punctuation marks, photographs float free. Melanie Letore defies logic by using her photographs to construct a sentence on a shelf in a gallery. The contrariness begins with the first photograph,  an exterior view of quixotic Rosslyn Chapel showing a stone wall entrance, a portal to nowhere. In all, t wenty two photographs are arranged in eight phrases separated by small spaces like pauses for breath in an utterance. A brief text is sandwiched between two plates of glass and finally there is a beautifully photographic full stop, a hand filled with light. The written text consists of seven sentences, each one using the word ‘story’. So many stories are to be wrung from Letore’s concise photographic sentence. The series title,  No You Without , comes from Rebecca Solnit’s   A Field Guide to Getting Lost  where she describes the Californian Wintu tribe who unders...

Gemma Dagger has visions that cannot be expressed in words. In her photographic practice she stages scenes that approach those visions and attempt to give them tangible form. A Thin Place  is the title of her latest project but that arrived only after she had two images already inside her head: great stones in the landscape and a figure carrying a saw-horse for some undefined ritual purpose. Thin Places are a Celtic concept of special places where the distance between heaven and earth collapses. Upon discovering this during research for her project, the title was set and fragments of thinking began to fuse together in Dagger’s mind. What we see in the photographs are an austere looking group of a dozen men and women. All wear white shirts under dark jackets and coats. The women wear white headscarves. Their dress and demeanour suggest a rural community on their way to worship in their Sunday best, but there is no conventional church in sight. The group are in an exp...