dominique cameron RSW

 

I made this book as part of my residency in Italy. It is a piece about a walk I took every day up the zig-zaggy path to the top of a hill where the remains of a pre- Roman fort are found. It is a guide of sorts, a description, a literal and imaginative making of this route. I am thinking about guides and map making as part of my practice as a result. Recently I bought a small red guide book dated 1906 which details all that is required to visit the Northern Highlands of Scotland – how one should travel, where to stay and what you might find .  Here is an entry for Thurso on the north coast of Scotland where in the towns cemetery lie the remains of a man named Robert Dick….

‘…..this striking example of a self taught man…was born in Clackmannan under the shadow of the Ochils, but in early manhood he set up in Thurso as a baker. Though he continued the active exercise of his calling almost to the day of his death, he contrived to acquire such a complete mastery of botany and geology that Sir Roderick Murchison said of him – ” I found that this baker knew infinitely more of botanical science than I did ”. The rocks, crannies, mountains and moorlands of Caithness were as familiar to him as the oven of his own bakehouse. How far his talent and industry were substantially appreciated during his lifetime may be judged from the fact that all through the long years of his residence at Thurso he was never in possession of enough ready money to enable him to visit his birthplace. He died in 1866 at the age of 55 – of hard work and to some extent, of privation. Read in the light of his untimely end, there is a pathetic significance in a simple line of one of his letters to Hugh Miller – ”Geologists”, he wrote ” should all be gentlemen, with nothing else to do”. If Robert Dick had been one, the world would have been more advanced in knowledge than it is, and Thurso would, perhaps, have been none the worse off for ”cakes”.

This is a small entry amongst many. The writer finds all sorts of things of interest in his travels and I shall go and find the gravestone to Robert Dick next time I am on my way to Orkney.

 

 

Small sketch looking over the Forth. Mixed media on paper – 32 x 18 cm.

 

 

Back from Italy. Sunshine On Fife. Acrylic on paper – 28 x 20 cm. A small sketch of the coastline in the East Neuk.

 

 

 

Residency drawings. Ink on paper A3.

 

 

Behind Angelina’s garden the hills are alive with things that dart, skip, float, sway, creep and sting. A brown snake curls itself into a gap in the wall. From that moment I see them everywhere. Green black beetles, wasps, bees the size of golf balls, flowering thyme, pink orchids, violet scabious flowers, birdsfoot trefoil, blue butterflies and a cow. We meet, stare at each other –  It wins, I scarper. In the village I take a look at the information board. I can’t read what it says but I recognise a drawing of a wolf and a bear…….

 

Watercolour crayon.

 

 

 

Lesions of lichened stone rain these fields. I lie in a hollow, a shallow scrape of earth bedded in clover and buttercups and the hill holds me still. Cow bells, chainsaws, dogs barking, church bells dawdle on the warm breeze. A pair of orange butterflies tumble . I hold in my hand a piece of lead glazed pot, turned green in the firing. A cuckoo calls my name.

 

I almost stand on it, sitting in the doorway like that. Without my glasses first thing in the morning I think it must be some mud I brought in on my shoes yesterday. Something says its not though. I step over it, fetch my glasses and peer down at the scorpion. Funny wee thing. I fetch the broom and gently sweep it away. It raises its tiny angry fists at me. Scolds me. I desist, leave it be. It goes back to its business, muttering… Upstairs I hear the crow tapping on the kitchen window, impatiently, insistently, furiously.  I feel sure its beak will shatter the glass. I open the window to watch it fly away only to land in a puff of pollen on the branch of the walnut tree. We look at each other. Yes, what ? It flies away to the hill where I walk every day. No not today, I am here, washing and cleaning and trying to find words.

 

 

 

 

Three drawings – ink on paper -A4 landscape.

 

 

Above the wood on the plateau a battlefield of bleached bones of stones. Walls wide, thick coarse mortar dusts where green lizards flick their tails and disappear. I try whistling a blade of grass, clamped between thumbs I blow. Silence. I try again and then remember I don’t speak the language. In patches of bare earth shards of pottery, the grooves in the clay still visible from the wheel. A rim, a lip. My fingers touch where someones once did a thousand thousand moons ago.