On Looking At Mountains.

by Thomas A Clark.

This essay on Lesley Punton’s work features in the monograph Mountains Without End.

As a young boy, the American poet Gary Snyder first encountered Chinese landscape paintings in a museum in Seattle. "I saw first that they looked like real mountains of an order close to my heart ...they were real mountains and that these mountains pierced into another reality which both was and was not the same reality as 'the mountains'". Many years later, Snyder would begin a long poem, intended as his major work, entitled Mountains and Rivers Without End, which would be continued for years in imitation of the continuous unfolding of Chinese landscape scroll paintings. The poem would place him, again and again, among real mountains and rivers, confronting "another reality".

If we leave aside for a moment the question of two levels of reality, the more urgent problem arises of finding a form, like the Chinese scroll, which will not only be adequate to experience but will further it, in an art that will be a continually renewed invitation to experience. Snyder's "without end" is one solution, in two words effecting a shift from the immediacy of mountains and rivers to their scale and scope, and from the confrontation of looking to a more extended and resourceful acquaintance. A scroll or ongoing poem suggests that the scrolling and going might continue indefinitely, and that time might drop into the timeless.

How long can you look at a mountain? The truthful answer is, not for long! Any such encounter must surely bring up a discrepancy between the immense dignity and geological reach of a mountain and our own limited attention span, our ability, or lack of ability, to remain present to an answering gaze. While the mountain is solid and inescapable, the gaze addressed to it is intermittent, of uncertain depth and origin. This discovery is in itself sublime, as vertiginous as a cliff face. Its fascination and ethical urgency may quickly replace the original object of inspection. Looking at a mountain easily translates or collapses into looking at looking.

But is there not a similar problem with art? Is it not increasingly the case that art gives rise to occasions of bad faith where we shy away from the demands that art would make on us? We are too busy; the gallery is too crowded or too noisy; we are slightly drunk! In contemporary culture, such evasions or excuses are likely to occur whenever art is not a diversion from everything including itself. Serious art must not only struggle with the motif but with our own resourceful strategies of evasion.

Lesley Punton is a mountain watcher, and a mountain climber, who knows Schiehallion and Stob Coire Easin from distant and from close acquaintance. She makes drawings, photographs and paintings which deepen, prolong and interrogate her experience of mountains, islands and other landscapes. Painting and photography are pictorial media but Punton's interests are less in depiction and documentation than in enquiry: how do you look at mountains, how do you make art about mountains, how do you look at art?

The problem of time is tackled directly in a dyptich by Punton, called Duration. A white painting (silverpoint and gesso on board) bears the inscription 186 Days, being the number of days of light at the north and south poles. A black painting (oil and gesso on board) carries the words 179 Days, the number of days of polar darkness. What are we to make of this information? What are we to do with it? Might it not have been as effectively conveyed if typed on a sheet of paper? Are we supposed to empathise, to look forward to the light, to endure the days of darkness? The contrast within the dyptich dramatises a real difference which seems to demand a response.

The paintings are beautifully made, the surface built up and sanded down, layer upon layer, to give a depth of texture and colour. The white is creamy and tactile. The black turns out to be a deep prussian blue. Spread across the centre of the paintings, the words stand in the way of access to this tonal richness. A gap is opened up between concept and craft, or between discourse and content. After all, what does this information tell us about polar experience? Can there be any equivalent of, or substitute for, living through darkness? Perhaps the distance between information and knowledge is the ultimate concern of these paintings.

If so, the distance is partially crossed in two fog drawings. While the shapes of foliage and branches are barely discernible, wrapped in a graphite blanket, the drawings are less concerned with the obscuring properties of fog than its insistent presence. A visual impoverishment concedes to tactile awareness. The touch of fog on face and hands is duplicated by the touch of pencil on paper; graphite clings to the paper as fog to the branches. The softness of the touch of the pencil creates an intimacy, bringing the viewer closer, increasing visual, tactile and aural acuteness in proportion to the reduced circumference of perception.

Can a drawing drench you like a fog? Can it dampen down ambient sound, sealing you into a hermetic reduction, a light grey parenthesis? Looking at these drawings is very close to touching them. You want to stroke them with a finger, to recover a little of the tenderness of the mark-making, of the pencil passing over the paper. The even pressure across most of the drawing amounts to a more-than-local condition. Everything slows down. There is nowhere to go. In the middle of the drawing, with the pencil touching the paper, time and self are suspended. Where have you put yourself, in the absence of external referents? Most of Punton's work is small, in part because she doesn't want to confuse size with scale, but also to draw the viewer closer in to the work's concerns. The tonal range is deliberately reduced. We have to make do with what is there, or augment it in imaginative variation. An overall coverage of the surface area avoids the power of the central image. All these strategies are at play in three small drawings of Dark Mountains, recording the light at midnight on Ben Cruachan, Beinn Eighe and Stob Coire Easain. We are given the dark shape of each mountain, reduced to an outline against a dark sky.

It is only for impatience that things are dark. If we wait for long enough, there is always some available light. The three drawings are means of elliciting this resourceful waiting. The two principal tones in each drawing, mountain and sky, are close but might be closer, or more distant. We catch them at a moment that will change. To see the drawings properly is to wait until the tones separate, until we can distinguish mountain from sky; and then to go on waiting, in anticipation.

We might speculate that landscape is not an inevitable location for Lesley Punton's work, that it might be taken up with its own making, or that her interest may be as much psychological as geological. Certainly, the moment when the directed gaze turns back on itself seems to come up very quickly in the pieces I have mentioned. But the involution is never allowed to become all absorbing. This remains an essentially outwardly directed art, concerned with landscape through the full measure of concern. How to be true to it, to keep faith with it, to see it, to stay with it? If there is "another reality" to be discovered, it will be one that engages at a deeper level than that of the verbal and visual information, but also one to which such information may be a hint or lure. Close in, these small paintings and drawings, for all their modesty, seem on the brink of a revelation.

One might say that Punton's methods are more conceptual than pictorial. To show is only one possibility; there is also to say and to do, to inform, to speculate, to re-enact. You can look at a mountain, think about it, weigh it, walk on it, bivouac on the summit. The different devices Punton employs in different works are means of returning to the terrain, of inhabiting the ground, of enjoying the weather, of sharpening the intelligence of both artist and viewer, of slowing down response. These are slender means, given the size of the task, and our own entrenched habits of digression. But concepts are capacities. Like Snyder's little phrase, "without end", Lesley Punton's conceptual ingenuity and focused working methods are just enough to give some purchase on space and time.

Thomas A Clark

Review of the solo exhibition Below, the Rocks Plunged Into Darkness.

by Frank McElhinney.

This review first appeared in WoSP (Writing on Scottish Photography), June 2018.

Lesley Punton's Below, the rocks plunged into darkness meditates on time and light, the naming and physical experience of encountering mountains and the stories embodied by rocks one might hold in the hand. The work is varied in its forms: video, photography, drawing and painting, text and.... twenty-six fascinating rocks (and a bonus crystal).

Travelling around the gallery in a clockwise direction, the wall on the left holds photographic works referring to darkness and light but also a Platinum print proposing that: "Remoteness is a medium of clarification". On the middle wall is an exquisite, selenium toned, silver gelatin print of Strontian made from a Polaroid negative. Strontian is a place, a chemical element, and a pivotal childhood memory for Punton that helped nurture her love of the physical stuff of the earth. In the bay of a large window there is a copy of the artist's book Upland Birds. At first this seems slightly incongruous but again and again a viewer chooses to pick up the book and sit on the window ledge and read. A point at which to pause and reflect is a metaphor for the exhibition itself.

In a corner of the room on a smaller window ledge stands a tiny Sgurr or mountain of silicon carbide, material for bulletproof vests and the mirrors in astronomical telescopes. Along the wall on the right of the room are a series of text paintings where the Gaelic names of mountains are reflected by the colours of the paintings themselves. The light grey of Beinn a' Ghlo (misty mount) contrasts with Meall Buidhe (yellow hill) and so on. The final wall work consists of two digital super 16mm films looping on a small tablet to the sound of birds. The film titles A Darkening and The Hide allude to the passing of day into night and an actual 'hide' from which to view nature without disturbing it.

All of the work in the exhibition is relatively small in size save for one large photograph of a rock face into which a shaft has been mined, and a wall map of the contents of a vitrine. The vitrine stands on trestles in the middle of the gallery and is filled with a collection of rocks. On the floor of the gallery is a stack of A2 information sheets, a version of the rock map for the viewer to take and read. This map contains twenty-eight short texts, one for each rock and two referring to mysterious places where no stone was collected, perhaps places we must now visit for ourselves, (Glen Roy and The Fossil Grove). Rock 22, a small piece of Gabbro, comes from the Black Cuillin Ridge on Skye where, we are told, compass navigation becomes slightly unpredictable due to the magnetic properties of the rock underfoot.

The Collection has magnetic properties of its own. Visitors circulate around the space looking at the works on the walls but afterwards almost inevitably gravitate towards the Collection where, map in hand, they match each rock to the outlines on their sheet and to the corresponding anecdotes. Who knew that the sand-mines of Lochaline yielded some of Earth's purest of sandstones, shipped around the world as an essential tool in the manufacture of camera lenses and other optical instruments? And how on earth did Lesley Punton lay her hands on fragments of meteorites recovered from the Sahara and Guangxi? Sea coal, Muscovite, graphite, pure white chalk, obsidian, iron pyrites, it is all there, but it is not 'fools gold'. The Collection is real treasure both for the intellect and the senses, it is the stuff that mountains and memories and paint pigments and scientific knowledge are made from. These rocks measure time in millions, sometimes billions of years.

The work follows in the tradition of British land art where text and images and geological objects convey the experience of walking and being in a landscape rather than literally describing or representing it. The quiet, contemplative, journey through the light filled space of this exhibition returns us to "Remoteness is a medium for clarification". The effect of all this visual, textual and physical matter is to transport us to other places, remote places where minerals and crystals can be collected and where one can be in landscapes that are not filled with digital devices and the data they pour over us and suck out of us, places where we are confronted with nature and ourselves as we are.

Frank McElhinney, June 2018

Walking As Knowing.

by Dr. David Watson.

This essay on Lesley Punton’s work features in the monograph Mountains Without End.

I barely know Lesley Punton.

We've met only once - on my side of the earth - the day Lesley and her family dropped in for a cuppa at our home studio after she'd projected images of her resonant work up at Sydney College of the Arts, here in urban Rozelle. Later we strolled a few hundred metres together, with Angus in his pram, around restored harbourside parkland on Iron Cove - named, some say, for the iron shackles worn by convicts there in the 1790s to prevent their escape - north, some dreamt, to China!

We've kept in touch since, sent each other stuff - catalogues, texts, images - emailed sporadic enthusiasms. Though often months in the making, and usually delayed by the variegated demands of life, our missives are always delivered (somewhat unnecessarily given their lengthy gestation) at the speed of light. No stamps these days, no weeks spent jostling quietly, expectantly with other packets and packages down in a creaking wooden hold.

We early adopters, we privileged navigators of the contemporary West appear strangely unphased by this new-found duality: the blending of often-unhurried analog experience with usually-instant digital gratification. Lesley and I have tapped out paragraphs on occasion (Generation Y call this 'speaking') about how the cadences, exertion, focus and freedoms of walking help to 'unlock' new experiences of place. Immersion at a meandering pace certainly does seem to help remove a little of the contemporary clamour, the 'background noise'. Perhaps, as Rebecca Solnit has observed, the mind works best at three miles per hour; Lesley has even wondered, in an entirely 'pre-GPS' sense, whether cognition might be motion sensitive and site specific:

The geography of Scotland has started to make sense in new physical ways with rivers, glens, and mountain groups providing every bit as many connections as the roads that previously formed my understandings of how things linked.

Walking loved places (even unloved ones) delivers tiny epiphanies, imaginings, meditative pauses and memories, personal, occasionally sharable palimpsests of meaning and emotion. Nourished by metaphysical spaces such as these, artists can inflect and embroider, add nuance, help to transform space into place. Lesley's favoured sites - often-remote corners of Scotland - are for her never void of calories:

The wild places I seek out... are about as full as I could hope them to be, and that includes vast expanses of moorland such as Rannoch Moor or the rock outcrops in the North West of Scotland where not much other than heather and grass can grow.

Throughout our two-year 'conversation' Lesley and I have spoken often about what it means to walk at a time of accelerated, largely city-based living, and of our love/hate relationship with new technologies. Interestingly, and contrary to our initial prejudices/fears, we have both come to admit that the slow progress of [our] work 'won by walking' has been immeasurably enriched, opened up, via access to digital research materials.

For example, instantaneous key-word searches for specific place names (across previously amorphous, inaccessible archival-image collections) had fuelled and embroidered Wild Ryde, my seven-year photo-based walking and swimming odyssey across suburban Sydney. Via home computer the immersive 'now' of my transit had been enlivened, entwined with the 'then' of history in (almost) real time: 'fact', fiction, dream... the personal, the anecdotal, the entirely fanciful, borne along, buoyed by until-recently unresuscitated (but far from worthless) digitally derived minutiae and detritus.

Sometimes I think about Lesley in Glasgow - all those molten earthy rock-laden kilometres away through the earth - and her latest mountain walk, or artwork. Via her website (at the rather poor industry-standard screen resolution of 72 pixels per inch) I can bring to mind but not properly appreciate the true surface and depth of her imagery, nor her oft-laborious technique which, beyond traditional landscape representation, viscerally, softly echoes her journeying. As I think about our ant-like wandering, wondering, googling and inscribing, upon separate hemispheres, poles apart, I gladly recognise though that our practices are more immediately communicable, alignable, mutually sustaining in this 'post-digital' age than ever before in history.

When Lesley mentions Scotland's fiercely defended 'right to roam' in an email, for example (in response to my outrage re the access coal seam gas companies are being allowed beneath people's farms up and down our east coast: unchecked legal pilfering which has lately spawned the unstoppable Lock The Gate protest alliance) I flash back immediately to indigenous notions of walking and caring for country here in the South. In seconds I'm able to recommend that Lesley read a new book, Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth - How Aborigines Made Australia, about the extensive, until now barely acknowledged good stewardship of aboriginal people via the walking and firing of 'country', over millennia. I can even attach a PDF review of the book with a couple of swiftly empowering keystrokes.

Alongside and despite the lure and marvellous utility of the virtual, it becomes clearer to me by the day that most human beings, whether indigenous or newly-arrived (Lesley, I know, regards herself as a 'native' of Scotland) still crave an immersive relationship with 'country' - within their most familiar, loved, often local physical environments - whether they be urban or rural, built-up or people-free.

Aboriginal people regard 'country' as:

a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived and lived with. People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country, and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, is sorry or happy. Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place, such as one might indicate with terms like 'spending a day in the country' or 'going up the country'. Rather, country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Because of this richness, country is home, and peace; nourishment for body, mind and spirit; heart's ease.

Last year Lesley sent me some extracts from The Living Mountain, a remarkable 1940s prose meditation by the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd. Like Lesley today, Nan was a lover and climber of mountains. During her long life she covered thousands of miles exploring the Cairngorms (in north-eastern Scotland) on foot. In a 2008 review of her recently republished paen, English nature writer Robert Macfarlane observes:

The book is about the Cairngorms in the same way that Ulysses is about Dublin, or Mrs Dalloway is about London - which is to say, it is attentive to the specifics of its chosen landscape, but also passionately metaphysical.

Lesley Punton's work is similarly extracted, abstracted. Derived directly from the places she walks and pursues connection to, it also simultaneously experiments with (in her case visual) language, which seeks to parallel the experience.

Macfarlane goes on to note that most mountain literature is written by men 'focused on the summit', and that in utter contrast, Nan Shepherd goes into the Cairngorms 'merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him'. '"And" is one her favourite words... being the conjunction which implies connection without hierarchy', he writes. Shepherd speaks of recapturing 'the pristine amazement not often savoured', and of sleeping upon the summit, where 'emptied of preoccupation, there is nothing between me and the earth and sky.'

Walking barefoot (a favourite Sydney pursuit of my own, not always achievable in Scotland) the author muses - so memorably you can feel it - that "a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment'. Concluding her ode, Shepherd writes of 'living in one sense at a time to live all the way through' so that 'the body may be said to think.' Schooled in Buddhism, Nan Shepherd's spirit and approach to 'country' sound, at least to these white Australian ears, extraordinarily, refreshingly aboriginal: indigenous Australians have believed, for 60,000 years, that they are part of the land, that it owns them, not the other (Anglo) way around.

In 26 views of the starburst world, his recent re-imagining of early Sydney through the eyes and burgeoning indigenous sensitivities of William Dawes, the colony's first astronomer, author Ross Gibson observes:

To be in country most beneficially, you have to be absorbed by it, you have to redistribute yourself in it, you have to flow with its dynamics.

Amidst that flow, those dynamics, those earthly and celestial heavens, a mere 180 degrees to the north, walks Lesley Punton, an artist in touch with mountains, whom I have come to know through walking, and email, and to respect. One day I hope to see Lesley's work with my own eyes. And to spend a night alone upon a Scottish mountain: witness, like her, to the fleeting 'maximum black' of a summer solstice. My rucksack, I assure you, will be free of all technological devices.

David Watson