Window to the West: The Rediscovery of Highland Art @ City Art Centre

Installing a contemporary art exhibition that self-professedly aims to “rediscover highland art” is certainly a risky strategy. After all, when so much of the Scottish cultural legacy has been concerned with composing eulogising elegies to the ragged terrain of the North, we can ask: is it really possible for a contemporary artist to delve into the Romantically-laden tradition and re-interpret all the overblown, pseudo-sublime sentiment without lapsing into saccharine cliché?

To its full credit, the City Art Centre, through its tactical curatorial strategy, succeeds in doing just that. Chris Drury’s seemingly simple landscape drawings, for instance, embrace the austerity of conceptualism to navigate the Romantic legacy away from histrionics. Created by superimposing digital scans of his fingerprints onto Ordnance Survey maps, his meshed networks of lines quite literally invest a personal touch into the experience of the landscape.

Another useful strategy to by-pass the hackneyed is, of course, satire. Edward Summerton’s Shitsocks of the Highlands is an amusingly ironic tribute to the hiking trails of the north. His photographic series is not concerned with documenting the sea, the skies or mountains, but rather, the abandoned underwear strewn along the grassy paths. By merging abject humour with artistic representation, he navigates a refreshingly comical pathway through the high-principled heritage of landscape art.

Similarly, Norman Shaw’s skilfully simplistic animation, Highland River, is projected against a wall like an array of digitised, stylised water ripples and accompanied by a selection of sound bites ranging form Gaelic Psalms to Pictish instruments. By harnessing the power of digital technology, Shaw blends pre-historicism with modernity, and in doing so creates a redolent tribute to timeless landscapes.

Succeeding in engaging with the historic legacy without once slipping into banal sentiment, Window to the West, serves to confirm that, if we’re honest, we’re all still Romantics at heart. Aren’t we?