Fabricated Land: Kieran Dodds

In the new body of work 'Fabricated Land', Kieran Dodds takes a radical approach to photographic print-making by physically cutting and hand-weaving together images, based on standard tartan and tweed weave patterns. The resulting prints allow for new historical, cultural and geographical connections and expose the gaps between the perception and realities of Scottish land, history and identity. They reveal our past and current dislocations from the landscape, and the way in which both the physical geography and our conceptions of rural land have been fabricated.

"I uncovered personal family history from the time of the Lowland Clearances, Scotland’s lesser-known mass migration which were larger in scale than the Highland events that followed them.  I was able to pinpoint when my Scottish Borders ancestors became dislocated from the rural landscape. Their shift from farm labourers to factory workers to fabric designers within a global economy tells the story of my country. Weaving together photographs has become a way for me to gather the fragments of these family memories and re-embed them within images of the landscape

The weaves offer a new topography of Scotland in response to recent research and ongoing discussion of land ownership, dispossession, rewilding and clearance. The debates are as much about projections of reality as reality itself, so the first weave I created drew together seemingly opposed perspectives, enmeshing the vision of sporting-estate owners for an area of land with that of rewilding proponents."