This is a collaboration between poet Valerie Gillies and photographer Rebecca Marr. It is a collection, a harvest, of poems and photographs made over the course of several years. We invite you to take a walk among the grasses with us, an experience which we have found to be reviving. By learning to recognise the grasses and to respond to them, we re-connect with the plant world and with our own human history.
In 2020 we received support from the Creative Scotland Open Fund. Using a sustained period of research and development to respond at first hand to the wild grasses of Scotland, we collaborated at a distance: Valerie (Galloway, South Lanarkshire, the Borders and Edinburgh) and Rebecca (Orkney, and the Highlands), exchanging our findings in our own artforms. At times we responded directly to each other’s artform – writing to a photograph or photographing to a poem – but largely our collaboration was based on our conversations and findings in the field. In this way we found that we could make work at the same time, together but apart, communicating through our art.
You can read more about our approach to the grasses here.
We both used collections, the Magnus Spence herbarium at Stromness Museum, the James Sinclair herbarium and the wider collections at RBGE. We amassed a stack of books, collected a glossary of grasses in the Scots leid and in Orkney dialect. We were joined in the field by Orkney Plant Recorder John Crossley who has been our consultant for the project.
To date the collection has been expressed as an online exhibition, talks, workshops, a Kist, an exhibition at the Pier Arts Centre, and now as a book published by Luath Press.
Valerie Gillies: My creative practice is part of a continuum of experience gained over several decades. Poetry has become my way of life, whether composing or combining it with the work of other artists, or encouraging others to use the reading and writing of poetry as a medium for their recovery of health.
Ideally, my own writing practice takes place outdoors. On long poetic journeys where I’ve followed the River Tweed or the River Tay on foot, or where I’ve set out to discover the source of springs on mountain or moorland, I try to become ‘a pair of boots and a pencil’ (Tim Robinson). I condense this first-hand experience into poems where the rhythm and the words take the reader far beyond the page.
Deeply ecological, the writing conveys the inner dimension of living beings, of the plants, animals, birds and humans I encounter. I am versatile enough to employ a full range of poetics, from a brief imagist observation to the traditional mastery of varied metre.
www.valeriegillies.com
Rebecca Marr: My practice is research-based, often resulting from conversations, collaborations or discoveries. My photographic artwork can be analogue, digital or hybrid processes. I like working in the darkroom, whether it be traditional printing, processes like photograms, or as a starting point for digital work. I have begun working with printmaking techniques.
My work is dominated by the natural world and in particular plants, seaweeds, sea and clouds. I create artworks that offer some understanding of the form and shape of flora, sea or clouds but also hope to communicate something beyond identification, something towards a sense of its being and how I relate to it. I enjoy the tension present in photography: it is a scientific medium with which to record accurately, yet at the same time a medium with which to interpret the subject creatively.
www.rebeccamarr.co.uk
Valerie & Rebecca would like to thank the following people
John Crossley, Consultant Ecologist, Plant Recorder for Orkney
Contributing artists
Mark Jenkins
Kevin Gauld
Frances Pelly
Joanne B Karr
Diana Leslie
Collections access
David Harris, former Herbarium Curator and Deputy Director of Science, RBGE
Lesley Scott, Assistant Herbarium Curator, RBGE
Max Coleman, Science Communicator, RBGE
Janette Park, Curator, Stromness Museum
Katy Firth, Exhibitions Assistant, Stromness Museum
Orkney Library & Archive
Curation staff at Orkney Museums: Ellen Pesci, Siobhan Cooke-Miller, Rachel Boak
Tradition bearers
Neil Leask, Custodian, Orkney Museums
Michael Fortune, Folklore Collector, Ireland
Alison Miller, Orkney Scriever
Publication
Gavin MacDougall, Luath Press
Jenny Renton
Kira Dowie, Luath Press
Amy Turnbull, Luath Press
Mark Edmonds
Exhibition
Andrew Parkinson, Pier Arts Centre
Kari Adams, Pier Arts Centre
Isla Holloway, Pier Arts Centre
Gordon Brown, Harley Brown, Brown’s Gallery
The Artists’ Families
William Gillies
Mairi NicGilliosa
Maeve Gillies
Lachlan Gillies
Mark Jenkins
Sarah Marr
Avril & Iain Marr
The late Jean Robb
Thank you to Creative Scotland.
WHEN THE GRASS DANCES 