Death by Landscape

Death by Landscape was a duo exhibition of new work with artist Pippa Thomas, curated by 16 Collective. The show was the outcome of a long period of shared research, and a residency at 16 Collective, 173 Trongate, in the winter of 2025. Curatorial statement:

“Reckoning with landscape and bodily forms, the exhibition reflects on gender and ecological collapse, and the ways in which violence and extraction have historically - and continually - been enacted on women and the natural world.

An unreliable pathway traverses the exhibition space, withholding then revealing visual information, playing with narrative subjectivity. Viewing the works from darkness and from varying vantage points creates slippages of perception; interrogating how notions of gaze, distance and intimacy play out across landscapes and bodies. 

Holford adopts a forensic lens. Exploiting dynamics between truth and fiction, she integrates text and slippery forms of storytelling into her installations. Thomas’ sculptural drawing transforms materials recycled from both ecological and industrial processes. Her destructive mark-making and elemental stitching mimic nature’s persistent reclamation and recovery, echoing the complexities and patterns of gendered hurt and healing.

Through different materials, each of the artists’ sculptural series has been scaled up from a rigorous drawing practice, with Holford and Thomas sharing a desire to break away from the frame. The installations act in dialogue, inviting you to also break away from inherited frames of seeing, and inhabit the disquiet within landscapes close and far away, familiar or made alien. 

Lining the exhibition entry path, Forensic Series contains a trio of sculptures by each artist that consider the sculptural potential of framing images. These are perched on metal stands, inspired by those found in forensic crime scenes, ubiquitous in images of gendered violence. 

Holford’s Seamless matter I, II & III mummifies parts of a dismantled drone. These plastic limbs, obscured by layers of polythene sheeting, attempt to offer a “drone poetics” (Brady, 2017) of memorialisation or mourning to unseen and unknown bodies and lives lost to the inhuman eye of the drone. What kind of looking has made possible this cruel aerial gaze of the military drone, which seeks to track and execute? Her enshrined figures are haunted by these violences, their diminutive size and low height playing with the omnipotent scale of the sky-dwelling drone, re-enacting this uncanny looking at the scale of the body. 

Nourishing spoils I, II & III by Thomas also play with scale, creating unnatural perspectives which displace the ease with which we expect to view and take stock of a landscape. The small, unsettling wax and dirt sculptures, present throughout Thomas’ works in the exhibition, appear as geoarchaeological occult artefacts - formed by natural processes of aggregation, secretion and fragile deterioration - countering the value logics of finite extraction and industrial processing. 

Arboreal, fabricated from Thomas’ automatic drawing on Lokta (Nepalese tree bark paper), incorporates fragments of images both real and imagined emerging from the Scottish rainforest currently home to the artists’ family. Torn and sutured with waxed cotton thread, the cartographic installation interrogates our hunger to know, to map and surveille, pondering what we lose when we parse out land along these lines. The resulting stitched patches refer both to the hedges and walls that divide common land, and the similar faultlines that are (often violently) drawn across women’s bodies.

In Palm’s eye, oak chalice, organ root, Thomas’ wall-mounted wax tokens raise overlooked organic debris often trodden underfoot, such as acorn shells and feathers, to the status of a trophy, prompting us to question systems of material value and to celebrate decomposition. These works create tension by monumentalising objects carved from a steadily degrading wax material, a process literally enacted by the same steadily melting material in Arboreal’s copper crucible.

Holford weaves flash fiction texts ‘Aberration scene’, ‘A mocking’, and ‘confronting dark with dark’ into her sculptural installations. Alongside text, materials are important storytellers in Holford’s work. In Birth Rubble / ‘Aberration scene’ the sandstone block is from the original eaves course of the Tolbooth in West Wemyss, marking a civic site of barony, governance and trade administration. Holford’s use of the stone reflects her research into Scottish Witch Trials, and Fife’s infamous history of brutality and use of torture in Witch Trials and executions from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Tolbooth would have been a site for administering taxes and overseeing land ownership, while also overseeing legal proceedings, including Witch Trials. The work highlights how material extraction used to build civic structures of land occupation is connected to gendered state violence.

The Illumination / ‘confronting dark with dark’ beckons the viewer to first scan aerially and then sink into different fields of vision. Layering fragments and flash impressions of images from memories, recordings, and news photographs of places and sites in the artists’ life–the artists’ studio in Govan, the hospital where she gave birth, murky riverside brownfield sites–shards of variegated political positions and proximities; Holford asks through drawing how one is implicated in location, in violences near and far.”

— Nell Cardozo, Kelly Rappleye