The Scottish Gallery is delighted to welcome Alison Dunlop for her first solo exhibition, Between Heaven and Earth, this January. From her home and studio in Scotland’s Wester Ross, Dunlop explores nature’s forms and symbolism while drawing upon the sensibilities of her childhood in Canada.
Where I now live, on the NW coast of Scotland in Wester Ross, is a vast, ‘wild’, open landscape and has a powerful underlying spirit and energy – in so many ways like Canada. Painting here in the North-West has broadened my vision further and loosened the formality of my work. From the very first watercolours completed in my studio here, a fresh, freer language of expression has emerged from my brushes. The expanse of nature to which I respond here is the sea – the drama which constantly unfolds beyond my studio windows, toward the horizon over the Inner Sound. Here, I have found the freedom not only to explore my intuitive perception of a ‘northern shore’ as a place of distillation, transformation, but also to try to discover a distinct visual vocabulary for this idea.
