Linda Lashford Artists Statement
‘Undersong’ has arisen out of two winters in Wester Ross, and more particularly the landscape that surrounds the communities of Mellon Udrigle, Opinan and Laide. At each location, the images explore the world within the ‘view’ – the weed, rocks and lichen that stretch across the tidal zone.
Linda_Lashford__The_glassal_pool2-Anysize.jpg Δ
Linda_Lashford_max250x265_The_glassal_pool2.jpg
Linda_Lashford_The_glassal_pool2_Anysize.jpg Δ
Undersong
Cradled between a shallow, landward rise and a porous boundary of seaward rocks, the glassal pool pulses to the rhythm of the tides. Replenished by periodic highs of flushing flow, it ebbs to stillness, and mirror like, forms the landscape of my enchantment. I turn to the pool on days of subtraction, threadbare, ice-bound days of bleaching grey, when the light is cold and low, and thickened skeins of cloud wad the distant hills. Amongst so many winter days, I hold out for singular dawnings of unruffled calm. For early mornings when the wind has faded to a pirr upon the water and the weighted silence is broken only by a flurry of rising ducks and the oystercatcher’s piping skim. Reaching down, I turn a tumbled stone then cup it, contemplating its form, stroking the surface, freeing it of speckled dirt. Plucked from the pool the stone has lost its lustre, fading from a bloody red to an indifferent russet brown. Its verdant floating frill, reduced to a sodden tangle of sorry weed.
Carefully, I place the stone back in the pool. Solitary now, it sinks against a background of marled bedrock and scattered shells. My own movement raises a thin film of silted sand and as I wait for it to settle, I am twice transported. Into the unbounded universe of my imagination where pitted jewel-like planets lie suspended in