Bass Rock

David Moore (Artist), Kate Davis (Artist)

Research output: Non-textual formArtefact

Abstract / Description of output

Scottish Landscape Awards

Exhibition dates: 4 November 2023 – 3 March 2024
City Art Centre, Edinburgh


BASS ROCK by Kate Davis and David Moore
First prize winners of The LAPECA Scottish Landscape Award and £10,000 donated by the Howell Family.

BASS ROCK is our largest woven music score work to date and took one year from inception to completion. It was the Open Call of the first Scottish Landscape Award that gave us a much-needed deadline and reason to commit to embark on such a time-demanding work.

Kate began to weave music scores as a response to her mum’s death when words were not enough to express her sadness. Weaving the music score gave a sound and sense of duration and time passing to her feelings.

BASS ROCK follows earlier smaller more abstract collages that are made by weaving music scores. The woven music score work ‘Listen to the Darkness Sleeping at the Water’s Edge’ 2022 was the steppingstone to making the Bass Rock. In this work we realised that by digitally inverting and re-scaling the music score we could convey a sense of mass or solidity. We described this work at one point as ‘a malevolence made from its own material.’
It was after a boat trip and a close encounter with the Bass Rock, the world’s biggest gannet colony which lies off the coast of Edinburgh, that we knew it was the right subject for us to work at a larger scale using this material process. The Bass Rock is made of phonolite rock, a ‘sounding stone’, so called because it makes a metallic noise when hit with a hammer.
The scores are selected from ‘Songs of the North Vol 1’, a collection of 18th century traditional folk songs gathered from the highlands and lowlands of Scotland which are all about the landscape, love & death. (Selected titles are legible in the work i.e Drown’d, The Weaving Song, The Twa Corbies etc)
Our creative work is rooted in sculptural and three-dimensional thinking; however, a substantial portion of our recent output has taken the form of collages and two-dimensional pieces. The BASS ROCK is our most significant work of this type to date.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationCity Art Centre Edinburgh
PublisherScottish Arts Trust
Edition1st
Media of outputDrawing
Size180 x140 cm
Publication statusPublished - 4 Oct 2023
EventScottish Landscape Awards - City Arts Centre, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Duration: 4 Nov 20233 Mar 2024
https://www.scottishartstrust.org/2023-landscape

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Art, Landscape,
  • Woven composites
  • Exhibition
  • awards

Type (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Drawing

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