Artist Focus :: Andrew Mackenzie

"I have long been interested in reservoirs. They are always man-made in some respect but are often landscaped to present a “natural” appearance. It is this relationship between the function, the form and the aesthetic histories which attracts me to make work. I am deliberately referencing the romantic tradition of landscape painting in Scotland, with its focus on waterfalls, burns and lochs, but gently subverting it to show the role humans have in creating and adapting these places, acknowledging the beauty and balance often present in places of utility."

"In the past when photographing places on 35mm film, it was often the combination between the positive and negative images I was interested in – both would feed into paintings. This interest has continued into digital photography, and I regularly print inverted images to inform paintings. Also, as I’m working on paintings or drawings, I often photograph them in progress and flip and invert the images to help make decisions on tone, colour and form. It seemed natural that I would begin making work based on these accumulated negatives."

"When I visited Glasgarnoch in the summer of 2013, making the photographs from which I developed these negative drawings, the water level was very low, revealing the long-submerged road. In 2020, the level got so low that croft houses and bridges were revealed. With drought becoming more common due to the climate emergency, this revealing of lost landscapes and habitation will continue."

"Because the drawings are made in negative, if you photograph them and then invert the photograph (an inversion of an inversion) the image is returned to something that seems almost recognisable but is transformed and altered slightly."