These experimental prints were developed by artist Andrew Black in response to author Ursula K Le Guin's writing of landscapes, and what  Black speaks of as ‘the complicated fantasy landscapes of the archipelago in the Earthsea series’. 

Drawn from Black’s video work Revenge Fantasy, commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts for the exhibition Seized by the Left Hand, these editions are a personal consideration of the layered complexity of the Scottish landscape, and how it is written, and overwritten, in various narratives. References to the miltarised West Coast of Scotland sit alongside inclusions of the natural landscape, from its topography to specific flora and fauna causing us to reconsider representations of nature and its hospitality, or inhospitality from different perspectives: 

…[it] tries to navigate all these elements in a sensory way…the anxiety and paranoia of the industrial machinery of state violence lurking under the surface… from a queer position - a position with a different set of identifications and sympathies than of the macho, masculinised narratives of bodily endurance and wilderness attached to the leisure industry framings of Scotland's mountainous landscapes. (Andrew Black)

Black includes intentionally opaque layers of narrative text, developed through playful research in DCA Print Studio. The ‘armored subaquatic bodies’ of great diving beetles, an erotic drawing, a sword symbol, a branch of bog myrtle - all sit together, deliberately messy and hard-to-read:

"We decided to make the image entirely by woodcut - I was excited by the intrusion of the material and how unsuited it is to making a nuanced photographic print...I like this idea of disguise - something behaving like something else - ...We spent a lot of time trying to make each print as imperfect as possible…no two will look exactly the same."  (Andrew Black) 

Each edition is uniquely embossed with plant detritus gathered by the artist and signed by Black using gestural traces of cow dung from the Isle of Skye, circumventing the traditional act of the artist’s name as signature.

Courtesy of Dundee Contemporary