Visual artist
creative collaborator
Work
Gillian Adair McFarland is a visual artist living and working in Fife.
Her practice is an ongoing conversation with the world as she encounters it. Four generations of her family have traversed the same rural landscape where she lives. This offers her a place of embedded history with exposure to historical densities that connect. “I am drawn to the ambiguity of how things come together, like strata, building up over time. interconnecting realities”.
A graduate of St Martins, London, her work is informed by her interest in place, process, materials, and the erosions of time.
Collaborations
Developing connections is central to McFarland’s practice which is research based, spanning a range of disciplines and timelines.
Interdisciplinary projects include collaborations with art therapists, artists, astronomers, geneticists, and social scientists.
McFarland inhabits a landscape that shows her wonder, that reminds her of the preciousness of our planet, provoking thoughts on our moral obligations to each other and the natural world. Paying attention and noticing engages her in processes of mapping occurrences through place and across time.
Artists are well placed to hold slippery, contradictory and complex things in reflective working processes, observing and developing connections. This is the manner in which McFarland approaches her work. The archaeology of marks and objects invite investigation, to draw closer, connecting in understanding.
They speak to her of the individual and of community, of the fragility of occurrences and the adjustments that can be made.
“The relation between what we see and what we know is never really settled. ….There is a particular relation between the present and the past. If we can see the present clearly enough we shall ask the right questions about the past ‘ John Berger
Bio
McFarland’s bio evidences decades of creativity, curiosity and collaboration.