Strata – Visual Arts Scotland

Strata is an exhibition exploring how ‘landscape’ takes shape; through material, across surface and in form.

Strata begins with landscape as material, surface and form.

Working across painting, print, textile, photography and mixed media, the exhibition focuses on how landscape is held through surface and shaped through form. Layers accumulate, marks settle, materials shift. Whether working through depiction or material process, the artists consider landscape as something formed rather than fixed. Each work holds a relationship between what is seen and what is made.

Presented at Inverness Creative Academy, the exhibition is grounded in a context where land is not distant, but lived and worked. The works reflect this through their attention to material, structure and change.

Landscape is often understood as something we look at. In Strata, it is approached as something we encounter through material and form.

This exhibition brings together wall-based works that operate across image, surface and structure. For some, landscape begins in observation and is translated through paint. For others, it emerges through process, where materials are layered, compressed or reworked over time.

The works hold traces of their making. Layers build and recede. Marks are altered, repeated or obscured. Form is not imposed but developed through interaction with material. There is a shift here from landscape as depiction to landscape as construction and the works move between describing land and embodying it, between representation and formation.

Visual Arts Scotland was originally founded in 1924 as an organisation for women artists and since 1990 has championed all craftspeople, makers, designers and applied arts practitioners. Today, our membership is composed of “Artists” and “Makers” celebrating the best in innovative contemporary visual arts. The conversation between disciplines – to encourage challenging and ambitious ideas – is at the heart of Visual Arts Scotland’s mission.

VAS has a vibrant, active and participatory membership of over 1,400 practising artists. The society provides a platform to support and connect them, and to showcase their work.