Looking for Traces | Jean Gillespie
“The landscape is marked by processes, materials and energies we often do not recognise. What is largely ignored or overlooked then becomes fertile ground for the imagination and for thinking about our impact upon nature. Collecting materials and ephemera from sites and trying new ways to process them has led me to different ways of engaging with a project...”
I
Passage
Scottish artist and poet Jean Gillespie’s practice is a celebration of overlooked and undervalued elements of our Earth; she is a champion of the often unacknowledged actors playing vital roles in the fight against climate change. Here, we’ll take a journey through the artist’s practice, introducing three recent projects: Passage, Marking Time & Journeys.
These artworks were produced for a solo exhibition in Kyoto, Japan, which took place last year. Also named Passage, the exhibition’s title suggests a movement which might guide the viewer to an end destination but which is not in itself important; it might also suggest a liminal space, a zone between two places. What excites Jean is looking through the cracks into these spaces, searching for unique shapes and textures, documenting in some way what is ignored or missed and in so doing, trying to capture the feeling of that initial discovery.
In her drawings, the artist has tried to impart a meditative quality, locating an other-worldliness in the patterns and marks which hint at our own fragile world.
“In my peat drawing, ‘Compression’, I wanted to impart the sense of deep time and dreaming I feel in such places. Blanket bogs have an intrinsic worth which is so much more than any extraction value. There is an aura, a calm, haunting presence at these sites which seems to fill the silence. They are places of slow, fragile growing where our own troubles seem unimportant.”
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Marking Time
Jean is interested in how macro and micro worlds coincide and this is perhaps most evident in her Marking Time series. Lichen patterns are one expression of this. Their colours are reflected in the mountains or shorelines they grow in and, like the peat the artist also works with, they are formed by millennia of slow growth.
Delicate and fragile, they remind one of maps or islands, changing over time, affected by climate, water and air conditions and needing undisturbed space to develop.
“Lichens, mosses and peatlands have been used by people for centuries to heal and impart a kind of austere beauty to the world, but – like much of the boggy Scottish landscape – they have been overlooked in their importance; their territory seen as wasteland or a between space, ignored and undervalued as indicators of the health of the planet.”
Jean has captured this fragile beauty through printing, tracing and recording the sights and sounds of these spaces.
III
Journeys
The artist lives and works near the sea, a fact that’s evident in almost all of her artwork, regardless of subject. “I love listening to the sea breathe”, the artist writes. A liquid-like quality spills into all aspects of her practice.
Though abstract, the prints in her Journeys series are reminiscent of light upon the sea’s surface. In Blue Horizon & Flow (below) Jean’s choice of substrate further emphasises the depth of feeling she has for her local environment – the sea and sea-shore – but also possess a sense of trepidation. By using a delicate semi-transparent paper the intense luminous beauty of the water’s surface is heightened, yet at the same time the fragility of the paper speaks of its peril. The works are thus both homage and plea.
“The sky strikes a tone, a chord,
of perfect blue; a harmonic
vibration so pure that the sea
reverberates like a bell, its echo
shimmering, like a forgiveness.”
All images & text above © Jean Gillespie | Cover image: 'Storm Dance' | Produced by A La Luz, 2023 | Please do not re-publish any of the above without prior written consent
