Inspirational projects gather what can be called ‘imitiations’ but are rather galvanised responses to a uniquely right idea.

Dumfries and Galloway has some of the best environmental art in Scotland, if not in the UK. This ‘public art’ is a series of sculptures in key places in the landscape, designed to speak to their locations and to mediate the relationship between people and what they see around them.

The artist, Andy Goldsworthy was first commissioned by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), in partnership with Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association (DGAA)  to create a series of four red sandstone arches – the Striding Arches – in the region’s landscape.

These are like a giant’s croquet set, inviting strategic games to be played across the natural amphitheatre at Cairnhead near Moniaive. Each single arch intervenes between the landscape and the individual by inviting a specific focus – in two directions.

This led to other projects at Cairnhead. In summer 2005, poet and artist, Alec Finlay and his collaborator Alexander Maris spent a week exploring Cairnhead glen. Out of this experience has come an artwork comprising a walk, sound recordings (on the website) and a poem.

With The Hill of Streams (Letterbox Walk), Alec Finlay has traced a truly beautiful walk which follows a course punctuated by eight letterboxes. Each wooden box, mounted on a wooden stob, is concealed close to a point where a burn running down from the hills joins Dalwhat Water in the glen. ‘It was Alexander’s idea that we make our work about the burns and their confluences. This became a perfect way to explore and gradually understand the glen. It allowed us to encounter the flora and fauna, to listen and to look.’

The locations of the letterboxes are indicated on a map inside the lid of a letterbox at the Byre, where postcards listing the confluences can also be found. Inside each letterbox are a rubber stamp and an ink pad. Eight successive impressions taken from these in the course of the walk – which can be done by following Dalwhat Water either upstream or downstream – make up a Renga or circular poem.

The Hill of Streams (Letterbox Walk) is part of a worldwide project to install 100 letterboxes with 100 circle poems at locations around the globe – worldwiderubberstampletterboxcirclepoem.

Following the success of the Striding Arches project, the two bodies collaborated again, this time focused on the Cairnsmore of Fleet National Nature Reserve. Chris Miles from SNH and Jan Hogarth from DGAA were instrumental in writing what SNH’s Area Officer, Andrew Bielinski, describes as ‘a loose brief’, leaving room for the imaginative response of the local artists who were asked to tender for the project.

Artists were asked to propose projects linking art with the very specific landscape of the Nature Reserve and with the people who go there.

A proposal from a partnership of two artists was selected from the submissions. They were the sculptor, Matt Baker and the writer, Mary Smith, who were then commissioned to realise their vision, with funding mainly from SNH. The pair visited Cairnsmoor and afterwards discussed their plans with Andrew Bielinski and the reserve’s Manager, Kevin Carter.

Matt and Mary chose five words, each of which relates to the Cairnsmore of Fleet reserve for very specific reasons. The words were:

• Erratic: the landscape of the reserve was itself sculpted by glaciation and features boulders ‘erratic’ to the area but deposited there after being dragged from elsewhere
• Hush:  profound silence is a feature of the place, countered by the baffle of winds which can sweep across it, itself countered by the sudden silence in sheltered places. (The Hush sculpture is pictured left.)
• Heart: there’s a heart to everything – sometimes the trick is to find it. The sculpture for this word is two heads, joined together by a chain and placed some distance apart in a very ruined settlement in the reserve. One is in an exposed position and one sheltered. One is already shrouded in lichens and one still clean and sharp.
  
• Ocean: much of the land at Cairnsmore of Fleet was under water before what is known as the ‘Southern Uplands mountain building event’. This happened when England and Scotland, previously separated, moved together, with the earth’s crust buckling under the pressure and forced upwards to form mountains.
• Scene Shifter: within the reserve there is a railway viaduct, relic of the Dumfries to Stranraer line built in the 1890s and one of the infamous Dr Beeching’s sweeping nationwide line closures in the 1960s. The sculpture for this is on a rock in a nearby stream, shaped like a comb, its arches echoing but subverting the shapes of the viaduct in the background. Which will outlive the other?

After agreeing on the choice of these five words, Mary Smith wrote a poem on each work and Matt Baker found specific sites in the park relating to each word, creating a sculpture for each.

Part of their work in preparation was finding local people who knew Cairnsmore well and talking to them about what they knew about it and about what they individually felt about the place.

Curiously, when the project was done and each poem was read at the sculpture sharing its name, the correlation between stone and word was markedly strong. This bred the assumption that the artists had shared their individual responses to the words during their creative processes. But no. From the selection of the five words, they had worked independently. The marriage of what they each then produced is part of the mystery of artistic creation.

Competent but pedestrian art is formed when the artist in wholly in charge of the source of inspiration, of its translation into the chosen form of artistic expression and of the means of that expression.

Art that defies absolute comprehension is born of something deeper, messier, intuitive and sometimes, to a degree, possessed.

The five sculptural pieces by Matt Baker, set in the dramatic landscape of the nature reserve, are juxtapositions of stones whose shapes and inter-relationships tease and invite. Their organic nature and their understated contrivance leaves the question open on whether they are in fact wonderful accidents of nature and time.

The sculptor has, of course, intervened in the shaping of the granite – as seen above in the lips and mouths visible in the stones that together form the sculpture ‘Hush’.

The project was consciously managed to come together with the opening of a new Visitor Centre for the Cairnsmore Reserve. This was completed in October 2007 and formally opened in the late Spring of 2008.

The locations of the sculptures are not marked on any of its site maps. They are there to be happened upon. Some people like this and enjoy the surprise of discovery. Some, who come to the reserve just to see the sculptures in their locations, are frustrated by it.

The single concession made here has itself been another tease – the production of five postcards, each featuring one of Matt Baker’s five sculptures and each bearing am obscure clue to the location on the back.

The determination of the sculptor and the resolute support of the reserve’s management not to make the finding of the statues certain, is somehow emblematic of the courage of the entire enterprise. In art as in life, we must accept that our individual experience is unique and is formed as much by chance as by pre-determination.

There were two final imaginative flourishes to the project. One related to its presentation to its public; and the other to its embedding in the ownership of its local communities at Gatehouse of Fleet and Creetown.

For its introduction to its audiences, the partnership of SNH and DGAA commissioned – this time with funding from DGAA – the creation and performance of five ‘scripts’ from the local performance group, Surfacemen, led by Alex Rigg. (A surfaceman is a railway worker, a platelayer – and its specific relevance to Dumfries and Galloway may come from a local poet, Alexander Anderson, himself, at one point in his life, a surfaceman and who wrote under that name.)

The performances that emerged and were played out at each of the sculptures are described by Andrew Bielinski as ‘extraordinary’. He regrets that they were not recorded – yet had they been, they could have been no more than that – a record of the event. You cannot reproduce the impact of something created in one art form by what is effectively its translation into another. You can create a dialogue with it, if the ‘recording’ is itself an jndependent creative act – but that is another matter.

120 people saw these performances and they will live and mutate in their imaginations and their memories.

The final act of the project was cementing the relationship between what had been created and the communities who are its nearest witnesses.

Two sets of 300 limited edition ‘Passports’ were made – one for each household in each of Gatehouse of Fleet and Creetown. These ‘Passports’ had Matt Baker’s sketches for the sculptures on one page, with some of his thoughts as he gave shape to them; and with Mary Smith’s poems on the reverse. Each limited edition was distinguished from the other only by the design of the special clip that held the pages together.

This astonishingly imaginative project has, of course, contributed to the local economy and it has been transformative for all involved:

• It has given Dumfries and Galloway precedence in Scottish local authorities for leading the use of art as a mediator for significant landscapes.
• It has given SNH an identity in the public consciousness far beyond its usual perception as a body that either opposes or does not object to wind farms
• It has taken Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association to the head of its peers for the heart to conceive of and undertake such major innovative projects
• It has given Dumfries and Galloway an earned respect as showcase and adviser for the evolution and management of such projects.

There has just been an Art in the Environment workshop there, with over 30 delegates from all over Scotland and the rest of the UK. This brought together land managers, interpreters, artists and others to debate a variety of issues arising from the challenges of combining art and the environment.

This was hosted by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) in partnership with Forestry Commission Scotland (FCS), Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association (DGAA) and Scottish Agricultural Colleges (SAC) at Browne House, Crichton Campus.

Jan Hogarth, Public Art Officer for the DGAA, said of the event: ‘SNH has been instrumental in the development of a number of significant environmental art projects in Dumfries and Galloway. We have been working really hard to develop the distinctiveness of the region and its landscape through a strong partnership between the arts and the landscape. It was fantastic to get so much encouragement and recognition from delegates outwith the region’.

Chris Miles, SNH Area Manager, added: ‘It was excellent to have this workshop here to showcase what has been achieved by a range of environmental art projects in Dumfries and Galloway. There were complimentary comments from other parts of Scotland and the UK about what we have done. Interpreting the environment with artworks enriches the enjoyment and understanding of our natural heritage for local people and visitors alike’.

The obvious response to the utterly inspiring initial project is the seduction of what a similar initiative could do in and for Argyll. Sculptures could become a feature of one of our long distance walking trails – like the Cowal Way. They could interrogate so many of Argyll’s awe-inspiring lanscapes – like the Mull of Kintyre, The Oa on Islay, Glen More on Mull, Kilberry in Knapdale, St Blane’s on Bute, Barcaldine Forest…

Kilmartin Glen in Mid Argyll is a landscape already mediated by the public art of other times. A ground-breakingly bold intervention would be the addtion of a single modern piece designed consciously to converse with what is already there – to add our voice to the dialogue.

The possibilities in the wealth of landscape in Argyll are infinite. Who wll take up the challenge?

The photographs illustrating this feature were supplied by the copyright holder, SNH and are reproduced here with permission. They show:

• three of Andy Goldsworthy’s four Striding Arches at Cairnhead near Moniaive – the third is The Byre, where Alec Finlay’s Letterbox walk begins;
  
• Alec Finlay and his collaborator Alexander Maris at one of the Poetry Boxes
• a detail from Hush, by Matt Baker, at Cairnsmore of Fleet National Nature Reserve (2nd photograph from the top);
  
• and, bottom, the delegates at the recent Art in the Environment workshop in Dumfries and Galloway, gathered at Matt Baker’s Hush in the Cairnsmore of Fleet Reserve.

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