Last chance to see the large composite aerial artwork: ‘Burnt moorland: grouse shooting’, by Patricia & Angus Macdonald, in the Great Hall of the Portrait Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland, Queen Street, Edinburgh – until Sunday 19 April 2026 (open daily 10am-5pm). The piece may be viewed both from ground level, just inside the main entrance (in front of the statue of Robert Burns), and also from the first floor balcony (perhaps on your way to visit, or re-visit, the excellent and enjoyable exhibition of Alfred Buckham’s historic aerial photography, also on the first floor, which closes on Sunday 19 April…).  

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: Macdonald, P. & D. Macmillan, 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.     

The article ‘Environmental regeneration in a dynamic Highland glen’ by Patricia Macdonald, featuring images of environmental change – including the dramatic return of the native pinewoods – over the three decades up to 2024, in Glen Feshie in the Cairngorms, appears in the journal ‘Leaves’, edited by Sara Stevenson with co-editors Julie Lawson and Alexander Hamilton, issue 5, 2024, published by Studies in Photography (available in hard copy from www.studiesinphotography.com, and the Studies in Photography gallery at 6 William Street Edinburgh EH3 7NH).

* Saltmarsh channels and wartime concrete coastal defences, Tyne estuary, East Lothian, 1989, from the ongoing series ‘Order & Chaos’, Patricia Macdonald in collaboration with Angus Macdonald (the Aerographica Partnership and Archive). (see pp 152 & 178 in Scottish Art in 100 Works)

The accompanying text by NGS Curator of Photography Louise Pearson reads:

‘The world seen from above is increasingly familiar, but views like this may still appear initially to be a series of abstract shapes. Looking again, we comprehend the extensive natural saltmarsh channels, contrasted with the porous boundary of massive, but seemingly insignificant, human artefacts – wartime coastal-defence blocks – immediately below. Does industrial modernity, symbolised here by these cubic forms, defend us from the rest of nature or from the rising sea levels before which such coastlines may have to retreat? Such paradoxical meditations characterise Patricia Macdonald’s environmental images, which are at once topographical records and objects of profound, and often disquieting, formal beauty.

‘Patricia and Angus Macdonald – both cultural-landscape researchers and pilots – have been making aerial images from their light aircraft since 1982. Their work extends from Scotland’s Western isles to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa.’ 

A ‘flick-book’ preview of Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and photography now (Macdonald, Patricia, Ed., Studies in Photography/Edinburgh University Press, 2022) may be viewed on Katalog‘s Facebook pages at:

https://www.facebook.com/katalogjournal/videos/1044932379497248/

https://www.saltiresociety.org.uk/news/scotlands-national-book-awards-announced

https://www.saltiresociety.org.uk/news/the-saltire-society-announces-the-2022-shortlists-for-scotlands-national-book-awards 

Patricia Macdonald was one of the participants, along with Clementine Ewokolo Burnley and Janine Booth, in the panel discussion ‘Art & Resistance’, chaired by Jess Brough, at Edinburgh’s Radical Book Fair: Our Fight 2022, on 11 November 22, which you can view here:

https://lighthousebookshop.com/events/art-and-resistance

The panellists each introduced themselves with a 5-minute presentation prior to the discussion. Patricia Macdonald’s introductory presentation, on her featured book Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and photography now, and on her own practice of environmental aerial forensics (with Angus Macdonald, her partner in Aerographica), can be viewed here: