An exciting new exhibition, curated by The Changing Room in Stirling, opens at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre this week. Landfall is an exhibition by Donald Urquhart, an artist whose work is primarily about the Scottish landscape. The exhibition deals with landscape in terms of how it relates to people, to the past, and how the landscape evolves. His fascination for the natural environment was instilled by his father taking him into the hills of Perthshire at an early age.

Taigh Chearsabhagh also commissioned Donald to create a new site-specific installation. Entitled ‘Three Indicators of a Notion of Serenity’, the work consists of three roadsigns located on a stretch of the old Lochmaddy road a few miles south of the centre. The installation was launched with a mackerel barbequeue after a piped procession and walking of the signs.

He is primarily a Scottish landscape painter but his work has little in common with sentimentalist landscape artists, preferring the close-up to the panoramic vista. The landscape is studiously observed and stripped of romanticism. Urquhart demands that we look again closely at the landscape and feel our bond with it as he does.

Urquhart often combines photography and painting or drawing, disguising the original image to reveal the innate pattern or texture. His work is spare, stark and generally monochromatic. The patterns of random marks left by nature are broken or disrupted by Urquhart’s formalised framing within geometric patterns often created with grids or rows of panels, implying man’s presence.

His public artworks, such as the newly commissioned “Three Indicators of a Notion of Serenity”, are minimal interventions – lines and planes - which similarly seek to pose questions regarding our relationship with the environment.

LANDFALL is in Gallery 2 at Taigh Chearsabhagh from 16th October to 15th December.