Andrew Mackenzie: Ground Lines

In drawing and architectural plans, a ground line is the baseline that represents ground level or the floor plane. The word geometry itself derives from the Greek for “measured land.”

Andrew’s father trained as a cabinet-maker and worked for a time as a house builder. From childhood, Andrew remembers the use of orange twine and pegs to mark out lines on the ground before construction began, setting out the plan of a future building in diagrammatic form. These taut, temporary lines projected an imagined human space onto the muddy ground, only to disappear once the foundations had been laid.

The twenty-two paintings in this exhibition were developed over the past twelve months and are all rooted in places the artist visits regularly near his home and studio in the Scottish Borders. Together they explore the relationship between the physical surface of painting and the illusion of space that has long defined the landscape tradition. Observed and imagined landscapes are interwoven with coloured linear drawings that pass over, between and through natural forms.

These lines evoke the ground lines of the title while also functioning as ambiguous framing devices: uncanny apertures within the landscape or fleeting suggestions of walls, thresholds and fences. In the Ground Lines series of ten small paintings, abstract traces of imagined architectural structures haunt the woodland. These subtle human interventions—or quietly disruptive framing devices—also appear in the two square Viewpoint paintings, based on a location the artist visits on almost daily walks near his home and studio.

The title Viewpoint alludes ironically to the tradition of naming celebrated scenic outlooks, such as Scott’s View in the Scottish Borders. The elevated winter landscapes recall Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565), famously reproduced in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. Yet these are not depictions of fixed viewpoints. They emerge slowly and intuitively through accumulated marks, subjective colour and invented forms that shift throughout the painting process, resisting the notion of a single, authoritative view.

In Boardwalk, the hovering linear presence of the walkway guides the eye through the landscape, suggesting the protection of the fragile ground below, as in a nature reserve. This imagined pathway skirts—or frames—an ordinary felled pine tree in a local woodland that has undergone clear-felling. Delicate new saplings emerge, rendered in pale reddish-pink against the rich dusk colours of the land.

These paintings arise from repeated encounters with familiar places while remaining open to imagined histories and possible futures. Their images are discovered gradually through an extended process of building, obscuring, marking and revealing.

Ground Lines is Andrew’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. It continues his exploration of landscape, memory and the ways we map, inhabit and shape our relationship with the land.