ANCESTOR HOUSES

Hugo Winder-Lind’s figures often appear as apparitions, or ancient righteous heroes waging a battle between humans and animals, good and evil, light and darkness. The animals he depicts, primarily sheep and horses, represent a certain wildness — a landscape contained within the animal, and an animal within the landscape. His works illustrate worlds of animistic wonder, as well as familiar and collective fantasies. They convey a sense of place, both real and imaginary, illustrating how pattern recognition can create meaning, and how meaning can make memories.

The artist came here, to the Highlands, to build small chambers in the landscape; he referred to these constructions as "ancestor houses." After three days of solitude, Winder-Lind unconsciously began projecting these ancestors onto the landscape. He wanted to acknowledge this unseen world, to contain and protect it. The houses he created in turn fall within a space between shelter, shrine, and sculpture. They often include architectural features and finishes, yet hold the powerful presence of an artifact. These vessels represent not just a tacit knowledge of the thresholds between the natural world and the built environment but also of the memories held in these layered deposits of sediment and sentiment.

While on-site, Winder-Lind also created studies of the landscape and monotypes of rock formations, melding geological time and folklore. When he returned home, he continued processing this sense of place once removed. The exhibition brings together this series of paintings and prints created during his time in the Highlands, along with a short film titled Clerestory Window, made with Nina Winder-Lind, which captures the creative act between the artist and one of his closest collaborators. Nearly any of these works alone could stand as a keystone in this exhibition, each leading to the next, mapping a path the artist traced through the hills and shores of the Applecross peninsula, each telling a story of a time past or one not yet to come.