Victoria Clare Bernie's practice centres on the representation of landscape in Northern and Western Scotland. 'Slow Water' is a new project of work derived from research undertaken during a Leverhulme Trust Artist-in-Residency post at the Scottish Association for Marine Science Research Laboratory (SAMS) based at Dunstaffnage near Oban. It takes the form of three video works, projected large scale in rotation, which depict scientific fieldwork practices, hydro-electric infrastructures and the minutiae of water and landscape across the seasons together with digital drawings and bodies of photographic works relating to that theme.
For ten months of the residency, Victoria worked in collaboration with marine scientists, freshwater scientists and the Hydro to realise a form of liquid atlas which aims to map the present condition of water in Scotland, to study change in the landscape over time and in doing so to record the activities of industry and stewardship that maintain that landscape. Working with digital video, drawing and photography, Victoria's work seeks to identify and record an alternative image of Northern and Western Scotland as a worked and working landscape, a counter to the more familiar image of the Highlands as an under-occupied, melancholic and apparently untouched terrain. It is a visual document at once beautiful and unsettling in its ability to depict the details of insect life and death in a Highland loch, the particularities of water science and at the same time, the monumental charms of industrial infrastructure.
Biography
Bernie undertook an MA in Fine Art at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, a Postgraduate Diploma at Edinburgh College of Art and a Master of Architecture History and Theory at McGill University, Montreal. Her work has been exhibited in gallery and non-gallery sites including Mount Stuart (Isle of Bute), Bonhoga (Shetland), Drum Castle (Aberdeenshire), Catterline Arts Festival (Aberdeenshire), 'Northern City: Between Light and Dark' at Lighthouse, Glasgow and 'Can art save us', Millenium Gallery Sheffield. An earlier work was included in 'Invisible Fields', new moving image work by women artists in Scotland, shown at An Tuirrean in Skye and at Street Level Photoworks in 2005. Her work was included in the Film and Video Umbrella submission to the Zoo Art Fair.
A minigraph with a commissioned essay by Eric Laurier, Fellow in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh, accompanied the show.
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 Islas Orcadas |
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 From the series 'Portraits' |
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 From the series 'Portraits' |
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 Bloomscape (detail) |
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