In 2017, I spent 6 days running across Scotland with a friend. Motivated by many things but in doing so, I found more than just a journey. I found a fascination with the idea that in each footstep, the landscape released a little of the story of who has passed here before – humans, animals, sometimes nobody for a very, very long time.

I am very privileged to live somewhere so heart-achingly beautiful and to be able to walk and run in the hills. Through spending a long time in a place, moving through it, hearing, smelling, sensing it, something transformative happens. It gets under your skin; into your mind.  And as it turns out…emerges again when invited to appear through watercolour applied to paper.

“As I envisage it, landscape projects into us not like a jetty or peninsula, finite and bounded in its volume and reach, but instead as a kind of sunlight, flickeringly unmappable in its plays yet often quickening and illuminating.” Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

In the journeys I make on foot, I allow myself to wonder about why the path is here, who has been this way before, the times I have been this way before. The paths create a connection not just between two points, but with the past, the future and the landscape. Expressing something of these connections is what motivates me to paint.

I walk, run and paint because that is how I ‘know’. It is the process by which I make sense of a place and my place in it. It is how I understand and remember the people I know, how I reach in and connect with the memories I hold and the memories held within the landscape.

ABOUT ARTIST: Corri Black

I have a hard stop in time wired into my brain. In January 2021, my husband died. Years later, the passing of time remains distorted - infinitely elastic as it stretches out into possibilities and snaps back to absence. Time no longer feels a linear progression of memory. Painting helped me - initially to lose my self, then to start to see in colour and depth again and now to explore how the layers of landscape hold memories of time.

"This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain.

For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life."

Carlo Rovelli 2017