Jackie Flanagan Visual Artist

The Shetland series is an archaeological inquiry into the study of temporality and ephemerality. I visualise temporality as pockets of time (with varying depths) akin to the inner spaces of consciousness. The ephemeral is fleeting and is at home on the surface plane -  reminiscent of the flickering light dancing across Shetland's waters. Shetland is in and of itself a geologic temporality of deep-time. Visually and texturally, the use of bitumen as a medium can capture the sense of mystery and metamorphism associated with deep-time. The Shetland series echoes my sensory and emotional response to its landscape. Shetland is cold and nestled in the dark waters of the North Sea and brings with it a sense of journeying into the unknown. I see it as a liminal space (Shetland IV), a halfway point between Ireland and the Arctic, where mystery and matter intersect.

The series began as an existential response to the Arctic (after a journey made to Greenland) by investigating the unknown through sheer experimentation with bitumen. Bitumen was generously poured over a large sheet of canvas. Its rippling effect, once dried, created a textured decorative plane which inevitably captured the light and in doing so, metaphorically, added a substrate of evanescence onto a substance of permanence. The experimentation was rolled up and stored away. It was unrolled almost a decade later after visiting Shetland as memory and place began to converge within the strata of materiality.

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The outstretched bitumen canvas became an archaeological site of investigation (and performance) and as I stepped into it, samples conducive to my innate sense of compositional design were taken. These fragments are artefacts of deep-time that not only evoke the geomorphological impact of time and tide that make up the landscape of Shetland but are also metamorphic Caledonian 'rock samples' uniting Ireland, Scotland, Shetland and Greenland through a shared bedrock. Through bitumen and acts of excavation, I have traced my sensory response and inner landscape of Shetland and in doing so have formed a subtle thread that connects these ancient lands across time and stone.