The artist on North Uist ©RCJ Jansen
*NOTE: In 2014 the artist was awarded a Nature Scotland 'EPS' Licence, (European Protected Species), allowing her to legitimately hold natural history specimens protected by law.*

Sophie Morrish’s work is characterised by her imaginative interaction with the landscapes she inhabits. Acknowledging the realities of chance and synchronicity, her work emerges from prolonged acts of close attention to the events and objects of the natural world around her.

Walking, exploring, beachcombing, photography and collecting – feathers, carcasses, bones, pebbles, egg fragments, seaweeds, beached flotsam – are her principal means to an intense primary engagement with the dynamic actualities of life and death within all nature.

Her re-working and arrangement of these media and materials in beautiful and meticulous drawings, paintings, photographic displays and spectacular arrays of natural objects are rich with ontological, taxonomical, political and aesthetic implications. Her deeply coherent and constantly thought-provoking works turn our gaze back to the natural world and re-defines our deepest connection to it.

Mel Gooding