‘A CONTESTED Land’ examines the complex relationship between Scotland’s people, history and landscape through the work of four photographers.
The contrasting series of works by the collective known as Document Scotland will be exhibited from Tuesday 23rd April 2019 at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, its first Scottish showing.
The exhibition was premiered at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol early this year and will subsequently move on to Dunoon Burgh Hall followed by photography festivals in Inverness (FLOW Photofest) and Harrogate (PhotoNorth). The exhibition features new and previously unpublished work by each of the collective’s four members.
Document Scotland was founded in 2012 by four photographers – Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren.
Tired of the tropes and clichés which are often used to represent Scotland, their aim is to provide an accurate view of their nation today and disseminate their work beyond the borders. Although their work is contemporary, it acknowledges the past and its resonance with the present.
Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s work captures the raw and powerful political theatre of Scotland’s parades and marches. Played out in public spaces from Glasgow to Faslane, depicting pro-Scottish Independence marches to demonstrations against Trident missiles – the photographs collectively show vibrant and lively displays of stand-bearing, placards, slogans and passion.
Strip away the banners and confiscate the flags, the adversaries cannot be told apart – they are all Scots.
Sutton-Hibbert’s photographs offer a beguiling view of the possibility of an undivided future aside from political discourse and disagreements.
The gentle and undulating landscapes of Scotland’s peat bogs are the subject of Sophie Gerrard’s work.
Eschewing sentimentality, the photographs look at how this precious environmental resource has been desecrated and denuded over generations and how these almost magical places are being revived and reinvigorated through careful and considered conservation. Once seen as ‘fair game’ for industrial-scale exploitation, this series questions the viewer’s relationship with local and national areas of outstanding beauty, and how such places fit into Scotland’s topography and consciousness, linking people to the land and the land to the people.
Stephen McLaren’s series examines the hidden link between Edinburgh’s wealth and the slave trade with Jamaica.
Depicting everyday sites across the city once connected to the slave trade, McLaren’s work ignites a conversation about acknowledging a historical wrong and re-evaluating the relationships with people and communities within and beyond its own borders.
History is also the starting point for Colin McPherson’s visual exploration of life on Easdale, the smallest permanently-inhabited Hebridean Island. Once the epicentre of Scotland’s slate quarrying industry, the island has become a by-word for repopulation and reinvention as its current community continues to battle traditional adversaries: economics and environment.
At its height in the 19th century, Easdale housed four hundred people – the slates they produced roofed the world. When an epic storm decimated the island in the 1880s it went into decline, only for a new band of pioneers to resettle and revive Easdale nearly a century later. McPherson’s personal connections with the island date back 30 years, and through this series, he offers a contemporary commentary on the parallels with the past and how many of the 65 current residents live.
Paul Adair, collections officer at Culture Perth & Kinross, said: “I am delighted that Perth will be the first Scottish showing of Contested Land. Perth Museum & Art Gallery has a very significant photographic collection with a strong documentary theme going back to the nineteenth century Perth photographer, Magnus Jackson. Document Scotland are continuing a fine tradition of Scottish documentary photography and the museum and art gallery is proud to be hosting their work.”
‘A Contested Land’ will be at Perth Museum and Art Gallery (23rd April – 23rd June), Dunoon Burgh Hall (20th July – 18th August), Inverness FLOW PhotoFest (September) and PhotoNorth Festival (30th November – 2nd December).