ANN DAVIDSON outlines the work on show in her exhibition of Paper Collage Abstracted Landscapes of Sutherland and Iceland and Photographs of Iceland at the Timespan Gallery

THE SUTHERLAND-ICELAND show will be the introductory part of a larger project. The aim of the project is to try to identify and create links between Sutherland and Iceland, and to try to proclaim the beauty of both. Although I now paint Iceland too I have painted Sutherland all my life. It is my native county – I grew up in Tongue and Helmsdale.

I have always been fascinated by Iceland, which I finally visited last year. The show will comprise ten collage-paintings (five of Sutherland and five of Iceland) and more than 100 photographs of the landscapes of Iceland. In about two years time I will show a larger collection of Sutherland-Iceland collage-paintings at Lancaster University, and sometime after that I will have a major show of them at Timespan. I then hope to take this show to Reykjavik.

My collages are made using a technique I’ve developed which enables the composition of a piece to be completed before glueing is done and yet, after the glueing, is retained with precision (I am currently writing a feature article describing this technique for International Artists Magazine). The collages at the August show will not be for sale, but copies of a print of ‘A Gale in Strath Fleet’ will be for sale in aid of the North Atlantic Salmon Fund. I am giving a talk at Timespan early in the month on how Sutherland and Icelandic landscapes have affected my work.

When I was at college – at art school in London – I wrote my thesis on life in Sutherland, my native county. To convey the remoteness of it I said that Sutherland is “half way between London and Iceland”. From that time, I wanted to visit Iceland, because it is more remote and more northerly than Sutherland – a land beyond Sutherland. I wanted to see a landscape I thought might be like that of “Sutherland, exaggerated”.

I finally managed to go in 2002 and found that much of the country is indeed similar to Sutherland, with its isolated land masses and odd shapes rising out of low land and the lack of tall vegetation to obscure vistas of those masses. The vegetation, mostly, looks just like that of the Scottish Highlands and there are fjords similar to our sea lochs. As most of the landscape is generally mightier in scale, it can indeed be said to be like an exaggerated version of Sutherland.

The lingual connections which derive from the Viking ones are intriguing. Icelandic is very similar to Old Norse. The Icelandic word dalur means valley (Helmsdale); tunga means tongue of land (Tongue). They too have a Vik, on a bay, as is our Wick in Caithness. As it was the Vikings who called Sutherland ‘Suthrland’, the Southern Land, I looked for a Suthrland on the maps of Iceland. I found none, but the southern town of Selfoss has many businesses named as “Sudurland Furniture”, “Sudurland Motors”, “Sudurland Video,” etc.

The painted corrugated iron buildings of Iceland are like those which in the twentieth century were fairly common in Sutherland, especially at Syre and Elfin. However, the volcanos, glaciers, icecaps and geothermal areas ensure that there is also a great deal in Iceland that is very different from Scotland, and the mountains have more serrations and pinnacles.

Hitherto, all my work – abstracted landscape paintings and collages – has been based on Sutherland, and much of it will continue to be. However, before my trip I felt I also wanted to do work based on Iceland, for the same reasons I wanted to visit it. I expected the country to have a certain atmosphere; it was not disappointing. It is mainly this atmosphere I hope to evoke in my abstracted landscapes of Iceland.

I shall use colours which are prevalent there. I hope to convey the starkness of the landscape offset by the (frequently occurring) mist. I will particularly enjoy working from the icebergs of Jokulsarlon, the red hills of Jokulsargljufur, the green lake of Asbyrgi, the black lava fields of Krafla, the fumeroles of Hverarond and the beach at Hraunhafnartangi. This beach is a couple of miles from the Arctic Circle. The atmosphere there can be described precisely as being like that of the north coast of Sutherland – exaggerated! It was ultra bleak and the solitude was quite frightening.

I am glad to show in Timespan as it is located in my home village and in the county which has inspired my work, and the gallery space is exceptionally good.
The exhibition of Ann Davidson’s Iceland-Sutherland work is at Timespan Art Gallery, Helmsdale, Sutherland, from 2 – 29 August 2003. The exhibition will run alongside a show of Scottish Crafts by other artists.

© Ann Davidson, 2003

Related links

• Ann Davidson
• Timespan