The large composite aerial artwork ‘Burnt moorland: grouse shooting’ by Patricia Macdonald in collaboration with Angus Macdonald, from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, is currently on display (until 19 April 2026) in the Great Hall of the Portrait Gallery in Queen Street, Edinburgh.
Burnt moorland, grouse-shooting (24-part work), Central Highlands, Scotland, 1998-2001, from the ongoing series The play grounds: Deadly games
This is a grouse-moor seen from the air after a fall of snow. The dark patches are tall heather. The lighter areas, with blue shadows on the snow accurately reflecting that of the sky, have been recently burned as part of the intensive management procedures of driven grouse-shooting, which have changed this ‘wild’ place into an ecologically degraded and highly unnatural, commercial landscape. Contrasted here are ideas of freedom and constraint, and different modes of perception: the linear grid of mechanist modernity with the circling, nonlinear forms associated with a holistic or organicist world-view.
For further information and comment, please see: Airworks: 2001, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh / BCA Gallery, London; Stevenson, S., 2004, History of Photography, 28, 1, Frontispiece and pp 43-56; Lenman, R. (Ed.), 2005, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, Oxford University Press, p. 9 & opposite pp 42-3; Normand, T., 2007, Scottish Photography: A history, Luath.