Artists come together to create a new Atlantic treaty

On September 1, 2019, four artists — two Chinese and two British — gathered at Haymarket railway station in Edinburgh, en route for Oban and thence to Carscaig on the Isle of Mull. It was planned as the first stage of an international collaboration involving residencies, travel and exhibition.

The four, Kate Downie, Helen Goodwin, Ju Hongshen and Professor Xu Yun, had taken part in other exchanges and projects in China and Europe.

Goodwin, currently based in Brighton, worked from 1999 to 2007 in China, where she had met the two Chinese artists. Downie had completed two previous residencies in Beijing in 2010 and 2013, and it was during the latter that she had met the Chinese duo.

Their time at Carscaig was brief but action-packed. Downie describes it as “a week-long brainstorming of ideas, drawings, walks and creative responses to this wild land, seascape and to each other’s art” which included “battling the elements, finding common ground and forging new territories in an ancient coast redolent with historical narratives, be they geological, human or animal”.

Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine two more culturally, climatically and geologically opposing places than Beijing and Mull.

So, for the Chinese artists, the shock, novelty and sense of readjustment must have been enormous. But as if to impose a more level playing field the artists (all sharing the same living and working space) used, at least for some of the time, similar materials such as watercolours, Chinese rice paper and Chinese ink.

Such materials lent themselves to depicting the moisture-laden climate of the Atlantic seaboard in early autumn, with imagery that is as watery and ethereal as the place from which it is derived.

Goodwin’s ink paintings are exquisite mixtures of happenstance and control, where the osmotic processes of water and pigment create random patterning of intense delicacy and beauty.

Works by Ju show his response to the Atlantic light in a series of images which derive from direct observation of immediate surroundings merged with the Chinese tradition of incorporating text and cyphers into landscape imagery.

The artists also worked collaboratively investigating the area’s rich topographies by mark-making in the sand, etching lines on cliff faces and cave painting, as well as creating scrolls — partly responses to the landscape and partly narrative commentary.

The second part of the residency, in China, had to be abandoned because of the Covid pandemic but on the strength of the material here it would have uncovered many more poignant artistic truths and treasures.

Until Nov 13, royalscottishacademy.org