As part of “Book Week Scotland”, the Scottish Book Trust’s annual celebration of books and reading, there were many events across Scotland in the penultimate week of November. I went along to “Landscapes of Hope and Inspiration” held at Fruitmarket for an evening exploring the works and artistic processes of writer Linda Cracknell, visual artist Julie Brook, and musician and composer Duncan Chisholm.
Linda Cracknell’s novels Doubling Back and Writing Landscapes were written by walking and immersing herself in landscapes like Highland Perthshire where she lives, or the small island of Erraid, or the Flow Country. She spoke about how “immersion in the landscape will reliably spark up ideas and words” and how sometimes she will simply write “here I am” at the top of the page in her notebook as she walks.
Brook introduced her work, such as the sculptural piece Ascending, a carved out staircase in a quarry in Japan. By making steps in the landscape she wanted to allow people to interact with remote landscapes in a way they had never been able to before. The film she showed of her “Firestacks” was particularly breathtaking; all the elements come together with these earth stacks that are ablaze until eventually the wind and the waves put out the fire and it’s all washed away.
Chisholm interspersed his conversations about the creation of his albums Sandwood and Black Cuillin with almost haunting sections of his compositions on the fiddle. He described how ancient Celts used to call places like Sandwood Bay “thin places” where the distance between heaven and earth was very short. With his albums he has tried to create soundtracks to places that have been home to his paternal line for over 600 years. He recounted how when his childhood fiddle teacher taught him to play “Mrs McDonald of Dunach”, written by Willie Lawrie, he became enamoured with the story of Lawrie writing the famous march while working in a slate quarry. As he played it into the quarry, an echo would play back – the landscape helped write the song.
All three related to this idea of landscape prompting and influencing their work. Chisholm described how he is drawn to wild places when composing; he’ll take a trip out to solitary place like Loch Coruisk and in that landscape will make a pencil sketch of the tune.
Cracknell’s Doubling Back was published in 2014 but she read an excerpt from a chapter she added recently because she felt the climate issue has become so powerful that she needed to talk about the future, rather than the past and memory. The piece was about the Flow Country, an expansive area of bog peatland in Caithness and Sutherland, northern Scotland. It is the largest blanket bog in Europe and has now been recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its significant role in capturing carbon. Cracknell described it as a landscape that was “unreadable… sometime ground, sometime water place… generous in its abilities to cleanse”.
All three spoke of the importance of solitude when encountering a landscape but also the importance of connecting with people through their work. One of the questions in the Q&A at the end was “would you still make art if you thought no-one was going to read, see or hear it?”. Chisholm underlined that “all art is storytelling” and you need people to hear that story. Brook agreed, saying “a work of art isn’t complete until it’s seen”.
Photo provided by Scottish Book Trust