The artificial wilderness of the Scottish Highlands—bleak moorland alternating with stretches of conifer forest—is a familiar image of ‘the North’. This vision of North Britain has been adjusted through landscape interventions to serve various groups over time, from that of the Forestry Commission founded in 1919 in response to wartime timber shortage, through to the more recent ‘native species’ campaigns to restore the lost Caledonian forest. This presentation, however, will examine earlier piecemeal and hybrid efforts of 19th-century landowners, plant hunters, and imperial forest science to introduce individual species and plants to the Scottish environment. The science and profession of forestry developed in British dominions overseas in the efforts of imperial civil servants such as John Croumbie Brown, the pastor and former Government Botanist at the Cape of Good Hope and Professor of Botany in the South African College, Capetown, and author of Forests and moisture (1877) or Finland: its forests and management (1883). At home, trees such as sitka spruce, sequoia, noble fir, and Douglas fir were planted over two hundred years ago by landowners and municipal authorities for amenity and profit; many survive and are now achieving towering stature in parks, arboretums and forests.

Trees live for a long time and stay in one place, adjusting their gathering bulk to the exact footing and weathers of the spot where they are planted, and marking the shifts of environment around them. That long enduring experience is inscribed in the twists and scars of their trunks and branches. They stand as witnesses and sometime allies of former schemes and values. As an artist I have been working for the past decade on long-duration observational drawings of tree bodies—specifically, detailed close-up views of the stocky load-bearing trunk section. My aim is to develop both an immersive contemplative practice of being in the environment, while acknowledging the structural and intellectual knowledge fostered in Western traditions of drawing such as in the life room. I aim to be faithful both to the surface of the exterior skin of these living bodies, while also showing the enduring interior structures and tensions involved in staying upright, in catching light and water, and in getting along with one’s peers.

For the exhibition accompanying this symposium I have prepared a new work, a charcoal drawing of a foreign introduction brought here by Victorian imperial plant hunters, the monkey-puzzling araucaria, indeed a particular specimen standing over the ancient Egyptian-style tomb of one of Glasgow’s more successful merchants. The living subject is located in one of Glasgow’s gloomier Victorian graveyards—a sublime and unintended evergreen arboretum of laurel, cypress, and other rare conifers. My landscape researches have also been carried out in words—in textual, written, academic investigations of the interactions between landscape representation, notions of national and regional identity and the cultural politics of design and landscape shaping in Scotland. I have also been closely involved in the GSA public seminar series (2015-2018) Through a Northern Lens, that has examined the pitfalls and contradictions within familiar and romantic images of ‘the North’. This presentation is intended to mark a new direction in my practice, where I will aim to carry out interdisciplinary investigations in parallel, through writing, research and drawing.