In this Artist Profile, photographer Rebecca Marr talks about what brought her to Orkney, her inspirations and how she balances the different elements of her work.
Catherine Louttit, the smallest horse, Festival of the Horse 2007
made during the Pier Arts Centre Art & Agriculture residency © the artist
My interest in photography and darkroom work started when I was still at school. I made a makeshift darkroom in my bedroom (and had to move my bed to the middle of the room to hide the chemical stains on the carpet from my Mum).
After Media Studies at Inverness College, I left the Highlands to study photography at Napier in Edinburgh under Robin Gillanders, and graduated in 1992.
I moved to Orkney in 2007 to take up a Pier Arts Centre artist residency working with the agricultural community, it was a life changing year. My husband, filmmaker Mark Jenkins, and I decided Orkney was home.
Meadow foxtails, Stromness © the artist
My work tends to be around the natural world, often influenced by social history. I've been into seaweed for a while now and have an ongoing project about Orkney plants, Flora Orcadensis.
I find the boundaries between project work in the heritage sector and my own art practice can become indistinct. I photograph artefacts for museums in my commercial photography work and often being up close with an object and thinking about the stories it holds can end up influencing my art practice. I've been fortunate to have had a relationship with Stromness Museum for a while now and I think the collection there has embedded itself in my thoughts. I guess I've come to know it intimately, which sounds strange when you are talking about objects, but it still manages to reveal something new, or move me somehow, when I go back again.
Just now I am scanning and cataloguing the work of Keith Allardyce for Stromness Museum. His book Sea Haven had an impact on me and working my way through his slides has been fascinating, looking at the images around the ones that made it into the book.
Common reed from Gunnie Moberg's garden, photogram & inverted photogram © the artist
Another body of Orkney work that I return to is Chick Chalmer's Life in the Orkney Islands. Gunnie Moberg's 1979 Stone Built is one of my all time favourite photography books. I came across her work when I was at college, it was amazing at that time to see a Scottish based woman's photography. Later I was in a dream job working with Gunnie's archive at Orkney Library & Archive. I show her work to my photography students, it's very generous work, there's always a gift in there somewhere. She said 'I photograph things I want to look at a little longer', now that's some motto.
Tangle of Knotted wrack Ascophyllum nodosum, photogram inverted © the artist
Conversations can start me headed somewhere and it was like that with my neighbour Willie Thomson back in my Burray days, when I suddenly fell in love with seaweed. Recently I was fortunate to work with Mark Edmonds on his book Orcadia. We spent over a year walking and talking and his way of thinking about the landscape was mind altering. Diana Leslie is someone who thinks in a really interesting way, attentive to things, I like having her work as company at home. Ingrid Budge's work is beautiful.
Ships worm on driftwood (inverted) photographed during time working with
Mark Edmonds on Orcadia © the artist
Dark seas
photographed during time working with
Mark Edmonds on Orcadia © the artist
More widely I would list artists like Anna Atkins, Madame Yevonde, Karl Blossfeldt, Imogen Cunningham, William Egglestone, and a new one to me, the 70s work of Luigi Ghirri. The modernist photographers heavily influence me, I like to fill my eyes with them regularly.
I work across digital and traditional darkroom photography, sometimes hovering between the two. I make quite a lot of photograms, I love the compositional challenge of working in such a stark medium. Mark is upgrading the darkroom for me at the moment so I can have a sink down there - deluxe.
Any advice to other artists?
Find your own network of creative people who make you buzz. Absorb as much as you can of where you are. Make your work have a backstory that informs what you are doing, what I mean by that is do your research and even if it is not implicit in the final artwork it will be there as hidden scaffolding, supporting your ideas and giving the work meaning.
How has lockdown affected your work and what are your plans as we begin to come out the other side?
This situation has had a profound effect on me, this doesn't feel like living, or rather I feel like I'm living in a Ray Bradbury story. What scares me most is the effect on our mental health of being on the constant verge of something, having your senses in fight or flight mode over such a long period is draining. It's not conducive to creativity. I spent the first few weeks of lockdown slowly watching a cabbage grow.
Covid Cabbage © the artist
Back in May last year I made a book about the daily walks along the Stromness flagstones Walking Lake Orcadie. My friend, archaeologist Antonia Thomas (who is great for a stimulating chat), wrote a foreword to it framing the deep sense of time. It felt like that was a way I could travel, time-travel, look into the stones and get lost in their micro-landscapes.
Moonscape in Stromness flagstone
from the Walking Lake Orcadie series © the artist
Dancing fossils in Stromness flagstone
from the Walking Lake Orcadie series © the artist
Art is what you do to make sense of the world and explore connections, hard to do when nothing makes sense and you feel disconnected. But something has come along to save me and root me in things and people I can connect to.
Currently I'm working on a collaboration with pal and poet Valerie Gillies called When the grass dances, and this has been a total release. We were pleased to get a Creative Scotland grant to observe the wild grasses of Scotland. It's a topic that we both woke up to - why had we not seen the diversity in the grasses before? How have they been ubiquitous yet anonymous to us? Val is in Edinburgh and we can't meet up to work together so we exchange poems and photographs by post and e-mail and have weekly phonecalls. I'm looking forward to getting in to Soulisquoy printmaking studio to work with Diana Leslie on the grasses, and walks with plant recorder John Crossley, and Orkney chairmaker Kevin Gauld will be making a box of grasses to hold the work. Thinking of the year of grasses has given me some resilience, as Val says 'they grow from the root not the tip', cut them down and they'll come back.
See more of Rebecca’s work on her website www.rebeccamarr.co.uk
Cocksfoot, Netherton Road, Stromness © the artist