From fulmars to furniture, two of High Life Highland’s Inverness venues are offering visitors a unique view of Scotland’s natural environment.
At the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, a new exhibition is showcasing the Ash tree and its beauty and importance as a material for distinctive furniture and artworks. A short stroll away – through the beautiful Ness Islands – people can enjoy the energy of Scotland’s coastal birdlife at the Inverness Botanic Gardens and Café.
Coastal birds
Highland artist Renate Jephcott’s latest exhibition ‘Cacophony’ can be viewed within the Inverness Botanic Gardens Café until the end of April. Her colourful works are a celebration of the start of the breeding season with field sketches and more complete works masterfully capturing the energy, noise and movement of these busy seabird colonies.
Puffins, kittiwakes, gannets and many more all feature in Renate’s sketches and paintings, the result of many hours spent observing coastal seabirds from the country’s cliff edges, from Shetland and Caithness in the north to the Firth of Forth in the south.
Woodland inspiration
Meanwhile at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery from the 29 March to 17 May, it’s the fragility of the natural environment that is under the spotlight in a new exhibition titled ‘Ash Rise’. This new exhibition has been created by the Scottish Furniture Makers Association in partnership with Scottish Forestry and the Association of Scottish Hardwood Sawmillers, with additional funding from Creative Scotland.
The ash tree is an important native tree in Scotland that supports biodiversity and is home to a range of rare moss and lichen species that are key to the country’s ‘temperate rainforest’.
‘Ash Rise’ presents work from 20 leading and emerging furniture makers and artists using timber from ash trees grown in Stirlingshire, which had to be felled to due ash dieback. Their works show the diversity of uses of ash as a material through new work from makers working with wood across Scotland. Each piece in the exhibition has been thoughtfully and meticulously crafted to reflect the beauty and characteristics of the ash tree.
