Slow Water
Victoria Clare Bernie

Victoria Clare Bernie's practice centres on the representation of landscape in Northern and Western Scotland. 'Slow Water' is a new project created during a Leverhulme Trust Artist-in-Residency post at the Scottish Association for Marine Science Research Laboratory (SAMS) based at Dunstaffnage near Oban in Scotland.

The project takes the form of digital video, drawings and photographs. Video works are projected large scale depicting scientific fieldwork practices and hydro-electric infrastructures. Smaller video works are shown on wall mounted flat screens. Groups of photographs depict tiny water creatures and the minutiae of landscape across the seasons.

For ten months of the residency, Victoria worked in collaboration with marine and freshwater scientists and the Hydro to research and create a type of ‘liquid atlas’. This atlas aims to map the present condition of water in Scotland, to study change in the landscape over time and to record the activities of industry and stewardship that maintain that landscape. Working with digital video, drawing and photography, Victoria's work seeks to identify and record an alternative image of Northern and Western Scotland as a worked and working landscape, in contrast to the more familiar image of the Highlands as an under-occupied, melancholic and apparently untouched terrain. The exhibition as a visual document is at once beautiful and unsettling in its ability to depict the details of insect life and death in a Highland loch, the particularities of water science and at the same time, the monumental charms of industrial infrastructure.