One of Scotland’s most contemporary and innovative art galleries, the Watermill Gallery in Aberfeldy, will be holding a solo exhibition by the iconic environmental artist Lotte Glob.

This year marks Lotte Glob’s 50th year of working in ceramics. In April, The Watermill celebrated this remarkable milestone by publishing the book Floating Stones. The Gallery is following this with a major exhibition of Lotte Glob’s work, including retrospective pieces.

Well suited to the Watermill Gallery, which has a particular interest in abstract art influenced by the landscape and elements, Lotte Glob’s work involves an intimate and continuing relationship with the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands. Having exhibited nationally and internationally since 1964, Lotte Glob is renowned for her long hikes into the mountains, from which she brings back rocks and sediments to work with in her studio. Combining these materials with different clays, she creates sculptural forms in a direct response to the physical nature of the materials with which she works. Fired in a kiln at 1300 C white heat, physical alterations occur, reflecting the landscape’s volcanic origins.

Heating rocks, glass, clay and sediment to temperatures at which they melt holds very real dangers, and despite Lotte’s experiments over years of artistic investigation, the power of nature is ever-present, and ever threatening.

Glob explains: “First I used to grind the rocks up to powder and it’s really very boring. I asked an expert what would happen if I put a big bit of rock in [the kiln]. And he said, ‘Oh you can’t do that.’ People shouldn’t say that to me ‘You can’t do that’ because then I want to find out.”

“The landscape is my studio”, Glob explains. “I’ve spent so much time out there, you just get absorbed in it. The more you are in the landscape the more you see and I find a lot of things echoing each other – like the shape of a rock and a shape in the sky, or a shape of a snow pattern in the roadside, so many things like that.”

The Watermill, now in its third year, is a unique space containing a 100m2 contemporary art gallery combined with the largest bookshop in the Highlands, music and coffee shop. The setting for The Watermill Gallery is a Grade-A listed mill where artworks are displayed against a dramatic backcloth of exposed stone walls, roof timbers and mill machinery. The Watermill has a full program of events throughout 2008.

‘The top floor is dominated by a hugely impressive gallery space, which enables them to display work with the same care and precision as a big-city arts venue’
- The Herald

‘A treasure house full of riches and surprises’
- Country Life