Sonnets
Sonnets, a collaboration with the National Poet of Scotland Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) was Alex Boyd’s first exhibited photographic series. The work was created between 2003 and 2010 and includes some 40-50 images made across Scotland.
Influenced by Romantic painting, such as Caspar David Friedrich’s celebrated ‘Wanderer above the sea of fog’ (1818) and early Scottish landscape works by artists such as John Knox, the series sought to explore and challenge contemporary depictions of the Scottish landscape rooted in 19th-century ideas.
Following a historical precedent, a white male was placed in the landscape, gazing across well-known vistas. The work sought to undermine and parody these earlier works by recreating them in places associated with Scottish romantic identity, historical trauma (such as sites associated with the Highland Clearances), or later events as the testing of chemical weapons.
The series came to an end with the death of Edwin Morgan, and was widely exhibited across the UK. Notably the work was exhibited at the Scottish and EU Parliaments, Lichfield Cathedral, and as 80-metre high projections at the Palace of the Parliament in Romania. It was the focus of a short film by director Michael Prince and Mark Huskisson in 2010.
“The ‘Sonnets’ series by a young photographer from Ayrshire responds to ‘Sonnets from Scotland’. This is a haunting series of Scottish landscape with a single figure, not seeking to illustrate Edwin Morgan’s work in any sense but to respond to it in a different medium. Similar structural elements in each picture play the role of octave/sestet or rhyme in the sonnet form of which the poet was so fond. Boyd also appeared for an hour on the Plinth, a communal artwork set up in Trafalgar Square by the sculptor Anthony Gormley, over 100 days of the summer of 2009. From the plinth, he declaimed EM’s selection of his own poems. In Boyd’s profile shot of EM, exhibited in the Scottish Parliament early in 2010, there are clear echoes of the Burns likeness by Alexander Reid”
Poet James McGonigal, Beyond the Last Dragon - A Life of Edwin Morgan, Sandstone Press, 2010. pg.
