Aimee Labourne: Other Worlds, mid-project blog

This project, centred around drawing my way into Shetland’s landscape, began with visits to different locations. I’ve long been interested in how Shetland’s open space – with gentle hills, complex coastlines, and ever–changing views – can be explored through pictorial space. So I have also been researching bookbinding to make alternative format sketchbooks and concertinas to expand my approach to composition and viewpoint.

In parallel, my studio research has included gathering material such as newspaper cuttings, reports, and other discourse about the threat of industrialisation of the islands’ landscape. Using this material to make collages has allowed for more intuitive ways of working, revealing new meanings through chance collisions, and helping me develop compositions for imagined landscapes. 

In August, to develop further skills in book forms and expanding formats, I joined an e-maki mono (Japanese hand-scroll) making course with Northumberland-based artist Lucy May Schofield. It was so wonderful to learn from an artist who studies with master craftspeople, and gain insight into traditional Japanese skills, where time, care and interplay of paper and materials are integral to the making.

For my scroll, I used water-based monoprints/drawings, another approach I’d been experimenting with to generate imagined island ‘dreamscapes’. I am very excited to further explore form and concept coming together in drawn scrolls that don’t have a static viewer-object relationship, but are more interactive, tactile, and unfold in time, evoking how we interact with landscape. These thoughts are also informing my work for exhibition in the Upper Foyer at Mareel, from the start of November this year.

Through Lucy’s course I also met an amazing group of artists and had conversations about all kinds of aspects of being a creative and developing a sustainable practice. This trip also gave me the opportunity to visit ‘Sublime Landscapes’ at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, exploring changing ideas of nature since the industrial revolution, and Aberdeen Art Gallery’s ‘Works of Paper: Art and Energy’, both of which were was hugely relevant to my project.

Aspects of my project have evolved. I originally intended to draw at places of ‘wilderness’ around Shetland, where it appears very little has changed over millennia. Ancient sites such as Stanydale Temple and Ness of Burgi certainly transport you back in time – but modern habitation, transport and energy infrastructure are also always in sight. I started to visit more places with existing or proposed developments, such as Dales Voe, Braewick, and much of Shetland’s north mainland. Drawing here highlighted how your experience of open space is completely altered by aspects of large-scale industry. With more verticals and lines of human-made structures, there’s a feeling of sectioning-off and carving up the land, reflective of the global forces that are at work behind large scale developments. Places where there may be more developments to come already feel altered, your experience of them effected by hearing about surveying work or seeing developers’ site maps and other consultation documents.

My understanding of Shetland’s landscape has changed over time with further knowledge of how even the earliest human activity has shaped the islands. This project however has really fed my interest in Shetland’s fascinating plant ecology. All of this input – history, ecology, today’s issues – has given my work a layeredness.

We project ideas onto environments in many ways, choosing to see some land as useful, or profitable, and some as ‘pristine’ or wild. Shetland shows us that nature and biodiversity exists in many ways, entangled with a human history over thousands of years. I feel we should ask ourselves what sustaining life in Shetland really means in terms of this ongoing story, fully recognising this interdependence and nature as the foundation.

All of my research so far will feed into Views of Shetland, a drop-in drawing day in Mareel’s auditorium where all are welcome to come along and create large-scale collaborative drawings, exploring our diverse views of Shetland’s landscape. Please visit the booking page for event, for more details.

Further events for this project:

• Open studio event – Thursday 17th and Friday 18th September, 11am – 6.30pm, Bressay Hall (further open days will be coming up at my studio in Speldiburn Community Hub, Bressay, where I’m normally based)
• Artist Meet Up – Tuesday 17th November, 6.30pm, Mareel Green Room
• Drawing Workshop – Sunday 22nd November, 2pm – 4.30pm, Mareel Green Room

Look out for the ticketed events on Shetland Art’s What’s On listings.

Follow Aimee’s work: Website: Aimee Labourne | Artist  |  Instagram: @a.labourne