Sheephill (WIP) — Daniel Mooney Photography

Gazing toward the Glens and Loch Lomond, the silence becomes paradoxically loud. The elemental landscape layered with hundreds of years of ‘the Scottish condition’. Where I stand, atop the hills overlooking our family home for the last time, I am struck by the awareness that the only collective living memory of this land is mine and my family’s own. Contemplating the farewell, the rumbling of heavy machinery and blasting invades the environment, gradually enveloping Sheephill and our history.

‘Sheephill’ is the culmination of a long term endeavour to reacquaint myself with home, family and the self. For all of our family, the course of life has led us along a path away from the familiar comforts of home. This place, however, is woven into the fabric of our being, an inextricable part of who we are. During our time at the Farm, Sheephill nestled in the scenery. Behind the hill widening its operation is the Quarry. Granted a lease to quarry for 51 years since 1980; it was recently also granted the rights to excavate through Sheephill and all the way up to our back garden, despite there being millions of tonnes of un-excavated rock.

The destruction has driven us to leave home. ‘Sheephill’ is a memoir of the experiences we shared and that shaped us there.

‘Sheephill’ considers the pain of memories and loss experienced when one loses a sense of their being. A theme of equal importance that arose through production, highly topical, is the aspects of the Anthropocene. The Quarry raises larger questions of the impact man and industrialisation have on our environment, further worsening climate change and displacing people all around the world. The project highlights this and challenges the necessity of causing further damage to our planet.

The Wet Plate Collodion process instils in the images these feelings of distress. The personal trace left on the plates coupled with their fragility, alongside pushing the boundaries of a large format camera take the storytelling aspects of an image to their limits. Unnatural focus, warping of light and uneasy composition create a ghostly appearance of an otherwise familiar world. The final Carbon Prints of the images are made using a pigment created from the burnt out firewood from home, binding them there. Whilst un-referred to in the images, due to state-like security preventing it, the accompanying sound piece to the body of images emphasises the impact the Quarry has on ones experience as it overpowers family testimony.