Exhibiting Artists: Lesley Punton

Lesley Punton is interested in how we experience scale in landscape, multiple temporalities, and the interplay of the subjective alongside the monumental. The works in Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation are informed by her ongoing interest in the ontological repercussions of walking and ‘being’ within remote landscape, and in relation to deep time. The work is made over an extended time, collecting rocks and minerals on her travels primarily in Scotland, but also meditates on rocks that have originated in Sweden, Iceland, Algeria, The Netherlands, China and England. These initial rock samples were collected somewhat casually, but as the project started to coalesce, Punton became more systematic in her collecting. The accompanying written narratives emerged from a broader writing practice seeking to contextualise these ordinary objects by text that shifts across personal meditations on place, experience, science and literature. The work on show at the Lighthouse includes, and builds on ‘Collection’, and other pieces in a body of work related to geology and time, 2018, Studio Pavilion  by the addition of a new studio drawing, considering drawing as a process analogous to walking, where the traverse of a landscape is equated to the traverse of a line on paper. The informal, exploratory nature of drawing as a creative practice, and exploration as an embodied process could be seen in parallel terms in this work.

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TOP IMAGE: Lesley Punton
‘Collection’, 2018 (Detail); 3 parts: vitrine case with rocks, inkjet print, and A2 poster stack. Photo: Jack McCombe