Artist

A Rolling Landscape  

Sea separates from sky

Earth from sea

All things take shape

From darkness

Thomas A Clark, Farm by the Shore

The landscape of Assynt, the corner of the north west Highlands that I call home, is an ancient one, with exposed rocky mountains, tumbling burns, lazy peat bogs and a litter of ruins that betray the pioneering and harsh lives lived by earlier human inhabitants.

I have long enjoyed the early maps of the land around my studio, with their curious spellings and charming drawings of crops and springs and dwellings. And I have used maps and aerial views of this landscape as the basis for much of my work over the years, filling the textile surface with clues to the nature of the land and my relationship with it, by using print-making, stitch and collage, words and symbols.

This week is an opportunity to develop your own language for mapping or illustrating your world through stitch and we will use the maps local to my studio as the basis for the week’s activities. We will make short walks into the landscape so that you can make visual records of the shifts in perspective as you move from a high to a low vantage point and as you turn through the points of the compass. And we will do a little creative writing too, so that you have personal descriptive words that may be written into your stitched work as you make your own textile interpretation of the dramatic landscape of Assynt.

The textile surfaces we will work on will be printed, marked and coloured by your own hand and then stitched and collaged to create the imagery. The aim is that, rather than a literal representation of your surroundings, by the end of the week you will have created a playful memory map, full of colour, atmosphere and details selected to express your experience of a week in this part of the Highlands. This may be in the form of a scroll or a simple sculptural book form, with the emphasis on celebrating your mythical interpretation of the rolling Assynt landscape.

Please click on an image below to see the full picture.

Jan's studio is in Elphin, overlooked by the magnificent mountains of Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beag. This remote location means that accommodation is a little more difficult to find, but the experience of visiting this area makes the search well worthwhile. Many course participants opt to stay in Ullapool, which is 20 minutes drive away. It is a most picturesque fishing village, with a good range of accommodation to suit all budgets. There are many restaurants and takeaways and shops, as well as some evening entertainment, should you have any energy left at the end of that day's workshop. And students often group together and car share for their daily trip up the road, past Stac Pollaidh, to the studio. Please look at the Accommodation links page to find out more.

To read about an innovative community partnership approach to preserving and improving this landscape for the benefit of all, have a look at Coigach and Assynt Living Landscapes. To find out about the fascinating geology of this area go to North West Highland Geopark.