Personal Topographies
(The Self-Isolation Residency)
Dunoon Burgh Hall Gallery,
Dunoon Scotland 2021.
This reflection led to the recognition that decades of travel had accumulated into what might be described as an internal geography: a reservoir of images, spatial memories, atmospheres, and cultural impressions sedimented through lived experience. During lockdown, when external exploration was curtailed, this internal archive became newly operative. The resulting body of work, Personal Topographies, emerges from this condition. The paintings are suggestive of landscape without being descriptively tied to any specific site. They operate within the idiom of landscape while resisting topographical fixity, presenting instead a mediated terrain filtered through memory, critical reflection, and painterly process.
(The Self-Isolation Residency)
Dunoon Burgh Hall Gallery,
Dunoon Scotland 2021.
This reflection led to the recognition that decades of travel had accumulated into what might be described as an internal geography: a reservoir of images, spatial memories, atmospheres, and cultural impressions sedimented through lived experience. During lockdown, when external exploration was curtailed, this internal archive became newly operative. The resulting body of work, Personal Topographies, emerges from this condition. The paintings are suggestive of landscape without being descriptively tied to any specific site. They operate within the idiom of landscape while resisting topographical fixity, presenting instead a mediated terrain filtered through memory, critical reflection, and painterly process.
These works may be understood as articulations of an internalised landscape, a psychological and experiential cartography. While deeply personal in origin, they invite broader identification. The sense of remoteness, introspection, and suspended mobility that informed their production resonates with a collective experience of isolation. The familiarity viewers may perceive is therefore not geographic but affective, grounded in shared conditions of distance and introspection.
Materially, the paintings foreground paint itself as subject and agent. Although they evoke spatial depth and atmospheric suggestion, there is no attempt to disguise their painterliness. Gesture, surface, and facture remain visible and integral. In this respect, the series extends concerns explored in Carved from this Land and earlier process-based works. This investigation was further developed in a group of paintings executed on plywood blocks, where the objecthood of the support becomes inseparable from the painted surface, reinforcing the work’s material presence.
The subsequent solo exhibition at Dunoon Burgh Hall Gallery provided an opportunity to encounter the works collectively. Installed together, they assumed a cumulative and quasi-narrative dimension, charting a trajectory of introspection and reorientation. In retrospect, Personal Topographies may be understood as both a response to enforced immobility and an affirmation of the imagination’s capacity to traverse internal terrains. The series reconfigures travel from a physical act into a reflective and painterly one, proposing that movement can occur not only across geography, but within memory, material, and the evolving space of the
