More than Rock and Wood

Tansy Lee Moir and Norman Shaw use their chosen mediums to explore the under-the-surface aliveness of things that are too often seen as inanimate. They remind us that a mountain is more than rock and a tree is more than wood.

Tansy Lee Moir's excitement when she meets an ancient tree is palpable. 'A tree that has been there for four hundred years, could be there for four hundred more’, she reminds me, ‘and the scars and growths they bare come from being more than just a witness to history.’ The nine new works in our current exhibition pay homage to ancient alders from open wood pastural areas. Here, on the grazed boggy land, they have grown wild and unruly for hundreds of years and their sprawling limbs are captured in Moir's wonderful charcoal-based works.

Norman Shaw is a lecturer and an artist steeped in the sights and feelings of Gaeldom. His paintings of mountains ooze with the stuff of life. If you were to observe them for long enough, you would see the peeks and trees grow and swell with light. This reflects Shaw's wider interests in music, psychedelia and literature. With roots entrenched in the Northern Romantic tradition, Shaw’s syrupy oils open doors to psycholandscapes and myths that are rarely caught in paint.