An other wild: some thoughts on making place, and making art

In this paper I will draw on my arts practice based research on some of the landscapes of the Highlands of Scotland. In my work, I am interested in how landscape is perceived and conceptualised. The writer Kathleen Jamie described how the Scottish landscape is full of ‘subtle marks’, and others such as Hampson and Smout note that the Scottish landscape essentially contains the marks and influences of humanity over millennia - thus ideas and perceptions of wilderness (and ‘untouchedness’) are, therefore, not necessarily straightforward. In this paper, I will talk about my work about the ‘native’ Scots pinewoods of Scotland and my relationship to them, drawing on the work of Tim Ingold and his ideas of ‘the temporality of landscape’, and the geographer John Wylie's explorations of ‘self and landscape’