Artist Interview: Shaun Fraser ‘Notions of Identity, Links to Landscape and Connections with Place’
Photo by Alexander Baxt
“My practice questions how the landscapes, spaces and places which we inhabit form us and can be translated through personal engagement, privileging one’s own memory as a principal source. Through this I acknowledge that memories of landscape, recalled with clarity when first encountered, can over time shift to become completely obtuse and non-linear, they become part-remembered-part-imagined places. In particular, much of my most recent work has been evidence of my attempting to recall through visual means a fleeting sense of a specific place and time.”
Shaun-Fraser, ‘Ach-An-Cuan - The Atlantic Series Part 1, Cast Glass with Metal-Oxide and Nova Scotian Soil, 2014.
Senem Çağla Bilgin: Could you please tell me about yourself and your background?
Shaun Fraser: I’m an artist based in the Scottish Highlands. Much of my work deals with links to landscape and connections with place and often grapples with notions of identity bound to these. My art education was at Edinburgh College of Art and then later at the Royal College in London.
S.C.B: Your practice questions how the landscapes, spaces, and places that we inhabit form us and can be translated through personal engagement, our memories as a principal source. David Harvey animated time not as a flow, but as memories of living places. Therefore, he defends the opinion of history -as the main material of social expression leaving its place to art and time leaving its place to space. How would you link the perception of time with landscape and connections with place through your work?
S.F: I’m really interested in our symbiotic relationship with our environments and how we mutually form each other. I’ve previously looked at this through my work and also the idea of landscape as a palimpsest which is redrawn over again and again and again. The land leaves markings and clues to past episodes. I suppose through this way of looking time becomes a physical part of a place.
Shaun-Fraser, ‘Ach-An-Cuan - The Atlantic Series Part 1, Cast Glass with Metal-Oxide and Nova Scotian Soil, 2014.
S.C.B: You are interested in the idea of a place as the place itself and think the actual and the imagined versions are equally valid. How do you create that disposition in your works? Do you think working with the topographical material has a role to re-build that imagined space?
S.F: Absolutely, one of the methods I use to work in this manner is to utilise topographical materials from particular sites – I often incorporate soil and other organic matter into my works in order that the place is integral to the work, becoming both the subject and the medium.
Through recent works I’ve come to focus on vague memories of places, glimpses, faded. I try and extract aspects of these recollections to create works which are depictions of this.
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Shaun Fraser, ‘Moine’, Glass, Peat, Various-Dimensions, 2017.
S.C.B: Tell me a bit more about the ‘This Place Where I Stand’ at No20 Gallery? What does your work aim to say?
S.F: We had been working towards ‘This Place Where I Stand’ for over a year and it was a relief when it could finally open. It had been postponed twice due to recurring lockdowns.
For this show I worked with two other artists whose practices I really admire. Each of us deals with themes of landscape and place in our work and I felt the pairing was really organic. We each respond to our respective sites where we base ourselves in order to understand ourselves and communicate identity. There’s a united principle there for sure and the show’s title seemed to reflect this perfectly.
S.C.B: Being from Scotland, growing up in that environment has surely an impact on you. How is your relationship with sustainable life? Is there anything specific that you do to reduce the use of the Earth’s natural and personal resources?
Shaun Fraser, ‘Shifting', 2020, Ink on Panel, 22cm x 16cm. Photo by Ufuk Yuksel.
S.F: Without a doubt, it has definitely impacted upon me. Landscape has always been a huge part of how I define myself and I suppose this stems from my upbringing in the Highlands. There’s a bond there which is precious to me.
In terms of reducing my environmental impact, in recent years I’ve started working in much less intensive materials and processes – focusing on canvas works and drawings rather than sculptural works in bronze and glass. I still work with these materials occasionally but less than I had previously. Glass and metal casting are extremely fuel intensive processes so reducing this footprint is important.
Shaun Fraser, ‘Let It Flow’, Bitumen & Soil on Canvas, 1m x 1.5m, 2018.
“I often find that I’m as interested in the idea of a place as the place itself and think the actual and the imagined versions are equally valid. What I attempt to do through my practice is to tap into some of that disposition. Including peat and local soils into my sculpture gives the work an innate link to the landscape, something which I believe to be very important in my practice, the ability to evoke that sense of place.”
About the artist:
Shaun Fraser is a young artist and sculptor based between the Scottish Highlands and Amsterdam. Having been awarded a Residency at An Sùileachan on the Isle of Lewis in 2016, Shaun's artistic development has drawn on his identity, notions of belonging and connection to his homeland. He has completed further artist residencies in Nova Scotia, the Irish Gaeltacht and sub-arctic northern Iceland. Shaun's artistic practice is deeply evocative of the raw and emotive power of the Scottish Highlands, and he uses local soils in his glass castings, while continuing to experiment with screen prints, antlers and glass sheep skulls.
Shaun graduated from the Bachelor (Hons) programme in Glass at the Edinburgh College of Arts in 2012, and completed a Masters degree at the Royal College of Arts in 2017. He has received awards for sculpture in his native Scotland and his work has been exhibited internationally.