Tir an Airm - Scotsman Review

Alex Boyd, in the last of the Projects 20 showcases for emerging artists hosted by Stills in Edinburgh, heads out into the landscape with his camera to record how Scotland’s wilderness is being abused by the military. Walking and photographing at Cape Wrath, near Tain and near Kirkcudbright – all home to extensive training areas for forces from the UK and other NATO countries – he brings back images of red flags and warning signs, shell craters and bombed out vehicles.

His stark black and white photographs – and a film made in the Outer Hebrides – are most striking when there is a contrast at work: remote sandy beaches pockmarked with shells; wild moorland which suddenly reveals the wreckage of a tank. It’s shocking and it’s meant to be: “villages” are built from shipping containers to act as shell targets, the human shapes of “dummy insurgents” discarded on the moor.

The show is far from neutral. There’s a bitter irony in the fact that the more distant parts of our land are home to “wilderness, protected wildlife and depleted uranium rounds”. But if Boyd’s stance is not neutral, it serves to remind us that landscape is not neutral either. The Ministry of Defence is a major landowner in Scotland, and perhaps we should have an opinion about that. MacDiarmid certainly would have.

Read the review at the Scotsman website here