Jackson Whitefield

In a Highland field, low circular walled troughs form a series of enclosures. Within each ring, the wider environment is held as a compressed field of perception, biology, colour, light, and weather. The deeper observation of these spaces was prompted by seeing Horatio McCulloch’s Glencoe (1864) in a hotel near this location, leading to a consideration of the difference between imagined experience and direct presence. Like a painting, these viewing spheres allow the earth to be read directly, as an image of the landscape. But unlike painting, which organises colour, light, and feeling through human authorship and romanticisation, these do not reshape or translate what is seen.This study considers beauty across human history and the natural world as something constructed through perception, where heightened versions of reality are more readily recognised as beauty, while the simplicity of the natural world may no longer feel enough.