Featured Artist: Andrea McIlhatton Cardow

Glasgow Print Studio presents Land, a series of new screenprint editions by Andrea McIlhatton Cardow. 

Cardow completed a residency on the Isle of Skye in the summer of 2023, from which these new works developed. They explore the thoughts and feelings the landscape created in Cardow and combines these with memory, exploration of the imprint of human experience on the landscape, and how this can be reflected back in the sensations and atmosphere that places hold. Looking at views which were reflected in lochs and lochans, the silhouette created by the land and its reflection appeared to Cardow like a soundwave. This created the idea of the landscape having its own unique sound; its own song. The series presents an idea of the landscape, and how it contains its history seeking to capture this in the colours and composition. Cardow used photographs of the land at various places around the island and combined these with photographs of flowers growing in or near these places and worked the images through several stages to obtain something that gave her the sense that she had of that place. The image was then separated, and screenprinted. 

"This idea of 'reflection' also fitted with the feelings I experienced on Skye. I had been there before as a child and forgotten memories of the places I went to on the residency came to me so that, as I looked at the land, it was there in its current state, beautiful and solid, but holding within that current state all that it had ever been - holding its own history, which, in a very small way, overlapped with my own history. This led me to think of how the land contained and held humanity and I sought to express this in the images of intimate garments of clothing, delicate and transient and man-made, which, once worn, are discarded then become part of the land, part of the earth through landfill or other means of decomposition."