In 2009, my friend Ruth asked me to put on an exhibition in an arts venue that she was starting up. The Bowery became a legendary venue in Edinburgh through her hard work.
I had just returned from three months living in New York and was feeling a bit of a misplaced person. The exhibition explored this feeling of loss and the strong desire I felt at the time to find a place that I could call home.
I’m interested in language, but find it difficult sometimes to express myself in words. I took short extracts from books that communicated my feelings. I then developed illustrations that didn’t exactly translate the meaning of the words literally, but made sense to me at the time.
I also made two films. These were based on the books Watership Down by Richard Adams and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Again, I developed somewhat opaque illustrations of these books that probably didn’t make much sense to anybody else, but seemed right to me.
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Christmas inspired a bit of a creative flurry this year. I woke up one Sunday morning with a notion that I should make a Christmas tree out of a cardboard box. In my head, the tree was to be at least 5ft, but after two hours of furious carving, I decided that a miniature tree would be more practical.
I went for a mix of abstraction and twee on my Christmas cards.
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I A few years ago I worked at an after school club and was asked to design a project on birds. I came up with an idea to make some papier-mâché sculptures and was pretty impressed with the results – I think the owl is particularly spectacular!
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In 2007 I did an artist residency at the Highland Print Studio in Inverness. I spent half my time developing my own work at the print studio. The other half of my time I worked with elderly community groups on the west coast of Scotland to develop short animations.
I discovered linocut printing during this residency and made these prints of a car scrapyard in Evanton. I really like the depth of colour you can get from linocut.
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In my final year at art college I did a lot of drawing. I really enjoy playing with line and colour, although there’s not really that much colour in these two drawings.
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Creation was the first film I made after I left art college. I was thinking a lot about the Big Bang and the start of the universe at the time.
The film was shown at RSA Darkspace in Edinburgh. It was also selected for Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries by Michael Landy, Nigel Cooke, and Linda Norden and shown at the New Art Gallery in Walsall, Cornerhouse in Manchester and the Rochelle School in London.
Creation from Mary Ferguson on Vimeo.
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