Landscape in Pain #1646

The video Landscape in Pain is part of a multi-layered visual and social response to construction of the industrial scale Viking Energy Wind Farm in Shetland, whose landscape has been in a constant state of injury since 2020. I use drawing and photography to investigate the subject of pain as a metaphor for the body in pain, striving to give form to the rape of the landscape, to personal and collective grief, an expression of solastalgia (Albrecht 2005). The title points to the complexity of pain (Scarry, 1988) and the relationship between the human and non-human. This complexity is mirrored in the urgency of the climate crisis for which there is no straightforward solution. With Landscape in Pain I strive to make visible extractivist principles and practices as industrialisation threatens to destabilise Shetland, leading to depopulation, or as many believe, the 21st century clearances.