In lightly, tendrils, Annalee Davis and Amanda Thomson examine nature and landscape, with work rooted in the artists’ experiences of living in, walking around and mapping their respective landscapes of Scotland and Barbados. The exhibition will open Saturday 9 April, with a preview from 3pm - 6pm.

"lightly, tendrils" suggest a sense of movement, an itinerant journeying toward and through different zones of thought and practice. The exhibition suggests this journey through Amanda Thomson’s work in and around the Scots pinewoods of Abernethy forest in the Scottish Highlands and Annalee Davis’s examination of post-plantation economies within the landscape of Barbados. In producing cartographic representations, creating a scatter pattern in relation to a memory of a place and persons, the exhibition hopes to create registers that stretch out, thread-like and twine around as a wayfinding guide for us to think about our connections and positions to look from…

Tea Sessions

Davis will also present (bush) Tea Services, incorporating porcelain shards found on her family property in Barbados to form a new set of tea cups, saucers and teapots. From the tea set, she will serve 2 varieties of tea created for this show with Scottish-based herbalist, Tariqua Gorrissen, matching herbs that grow in both Scotland and Barbados. There will be a tea session every Saturday 3pm - 4pm in the gallery, wherein visitors can sample the 2 varieties of tea.

Artist's Talk

Watch a conversation from 4th May between the artists discussing their practice and how they relate to the natural landscape on CCA Annex.

Plotting Resistance: An Afternoon with Annalee Davis and Peggy Brunache

Join us for Plotting Resistance: An Afternoon with Annalee Davis and Peggy Brunache as we close the exhibition on Saturday 21st May with a talk in the CCA theatre with Annalee Davis and Peggy Brunache.

Video interview with Annalee Davis and Amanda Thomson

Video by Siri Black.

Annalee Davis

Annalee Davis' hybrid practice is as a visual artist, cultural instigator, and writer. Her work sits at the intersection of biography and history, focussing on post-plantation economies by engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados. Her studio, located on a working dairy farm that operated historically as a 17thC sugarcane plantation, offers a critical context for her practice.

Annalee is currently exhibiting in "Staple: What’s on your plate?”, an inaugural show at Haay Jameel (Jeddah). Recent exhibitions include “And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” (Kunsthalle Wien, Austria) and “Potential Agrarianisms: Will there be sugar after the rebellion?” (Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia). Upcoming exhibitions include the group exhibition, “Vanishing Lines” (Venezuela, Uruguay, and Bolivia), the Sharjah Biennale and a major commission for the National Trust for Scotland exploring historic links between Scotland and Barbados.

In 2011, Annalee founded Fresh Milk, an art platform and micro-residency programme in Barbados. She has co-founded several pan-Caribbean initiatives, including Caribbean Linked, an annual residency in Aruba; Tilting Axis, an independent visual arts platform bridging the Caribbean through annual encounters with a fellowship programme; and Sour Grass, a curatorial agency focussed on contemporary Caribbean art practice.

Amanda Thomson

Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer whose writing and art is often about the social and natural histories of the Highlands of Scotland. Thomson’s work lies at the overlap of the human and the more-than-human, the seen and the unseen, and the visible and invisible things that tie us all through movement, geography and time. Her practice-based doctorate in Interdisciplinary Arts Practice combined anthropology, geography, ecology, art and writing in its exploration of some of the forests of the north of Scotland.

She has shown internationally, and her essays have been published in books and journals including The Willowherb Review and the anthologies Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, The Wild Isles and Gifts of Gravity and Light. She lives in Strathspey, in the Scottish Highlands, when not teaching at Glasgow School of Art. Her first book, A Scots Dictionary of Nature, a compendium of found words from 19th century Scots language dictionaries, is published by Saraband Books. Her second book, belonging, natural histories of place, identity and home will be published by Canongate Books in August 2022.

She is currently one of the Endangered Landscapes artists-in-residence with Cairngorms Connect landscape restoration project, with Elizabeth Reeder and Robbie Synge.

Acknowledgements

Amanda would like to acknowledge and thank Ellie Dimambro-Denson from Cairngorms Connect, for so generously sharing her time and knowledge, and also Elizabeth Reeder, for their ongoing conversations, and collaboration on twinflowers.

Annalee would like to acknowledge and thank Rhea Small, Pepe Dívi and Kayla Archer, Tariqua Telahun Ighile Gorrissen and Greg Kenicer for their support over the past few months while she was working towards this exhibition.