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Alexander and Susan Maris

I visited Alexander and Susan Maris at their home, perched near Schiehallion, across from the dense, ancient sweep of the Black Wood and not far from the wild expanse of Rannoch Moor, some of their most significant sources of inspiration.



Their practice is deeply rooted in the wilderness surrounding them, exploring our landscape in its present form while also transcending time. They weave together cultural, environmental, and personal experiences, anchoring them in physical space. Their mediums range from photography and weaving to physical interventions in the landscape.


AM: At first, Sue would take photographs from the back of the motorbike during our drives through Glasgow. She used this amazing film called Dia Direct, which was 20 ASA, meaning the exposures were several seconds long. The result transformed these urban scenes into perfect landscapes, untouched by humans. Nicholas Logsdail at the Lisson Gallery really liked them and offered us a solo show upstairs. Sue took the photographs, and I processed them- that was our first collaborative work, Momenta. The landscape is part of why Sue never went back home to Norfolk. She’s been here for 34 years now.


EB: Out of all of Scotland, Rannoch Moor and the Black Wood have been among your biggest sources of inspiration. How did you first discover this landscape?


AM: My very first experience of the Black Wood was cycling past it when I was quite young with my pal. It wasn’t until Sue and I came up on the bike that we stopped to look for mushrooms. We camped at Kilvrecht and would go walking into the woods in the evenings, and it just drew us in. That was before we had really focused on Kinloch Rannoch itself.


SM: This was before Beuys called us.



Therapeuticum (Friday Objects)


Therapeuticum (Friday Objects) comprises works that Alex and Sue made during their research into a journey that Joseph Beuys- a German performance artist, teacher, and art theorist- made to Rannoch Moor in 1970.


AM: Beuys was so captivated by Kinloch Rannoch that he named one of his most important works Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony. He performed in Edinburgh over five days, opening with a prelude on the moor, where he and his son buried an offering of butter in the bog. They did this in two locations on the moor: one was publicly documented and filmed, and the other was a private ceremony. We were obsessed with trying to figure out where the private ceremony was. It took us ages, but eventually, we figured out that it was a full mile away from the original performance. We found the exact spot and placed a similarly sized white stone from the beach in Kinloch Rannoch there.


We were so immersed in our research into Beuys that we started dreaming about him. Sue had a series of incredibly lucid dreams, one of which involved Beuys sanctioning the idea of becoming a female Beuys. Beuys was dead- there was no way of ever meeting him. But we thought, "How can we make contact with his spirit?" and that’s when we started the Therapeutical Project. The Therapeutical Project lasted 25 years and moved us closer and closer to the moor until, eventually, we were living here.


Because Beuys was famous for his fishing vest, Sue made herself a perfect Beuys vest, and we managed to procure a hat that had once belonged to him. Sue suggested we learn to fly fish, so we got fishing rods. At the time, we lived just outside Glasgow, and the nearest place to learn to fly fish turned out to be one of the most difficult- so we got season permits for the upper Tweed. But we couldn’t catch anything. Ever. It was impossible!


We met lovely old characters who laughed and joked, gave us flies, and giggled when Sue fell in. Sue designed and learned to tie the Rannoch Brown Fly. The first time we used it, we went to Rannoch Moor, to the little river that joins Loch Ba to Loch Laidon. I made the first cast. It was taken as soon as the fly hit the water. The fish was over a pound in weight, which was unusual for that area, and we knew that this was what we were meant to do. We wrote a card that said: "Alexander and Sue Maris are fly fishing in Scotland from 15th March 1996 until 6th October 2020" and sent it to the Lisson Gallery.


We had timed the Therapeutical Project to conclude on the 50th anniversary of Beuys coming to the moor. We planned to host a big meal and invite everyone who had come to the original performance. The menu was inspired by the Howgate Inn, where Demarco used to take the artists. By chance, Beuys’ very first meal in Scotland had been at the Highgate, and the crockery he ate from was Wedgewood Summer Sky. So we bought loads of it, and it’s what we use every day now.


We set up a table in the woods under the oak tree, and we managed to acquire an exact replica of the paraffin lamp that had hung in the restaurant, which we also placed there. We had the wine we knew Beuys had enjoyed. The invitations had all been sent. But, of course, COVID shut everything down. In a strange way, it was perfect- a silent table in the woods on the anniversary. We sat with all the ghosts. And that was the end of the Therapeuticum Project. We still go fly fishing.



We had been sitting in Alex and Sue’s fishing hut, a unique gallery space for their varied practices. Set beside the wood where the final meal of Therapeuticum (Friday Objects) took place, the hut felt like a fitting space to reflect.


Alex and Sue offered to show me the woods behind their home, a place they visited daily. As we walked up the hill through the dense bracken, Schiehallion rose above the treeline, its ancient presence commanding the horizon, framed by a narrow clearing cut for the telegraph poles. Noticing this, Sue remarked on how much she liked the regularity of the poles, their straight, geometric lines interrupting the wild, untamed landscape. They represented the quiet infrastructure that made living in such a remote, elemental place possible.


Walking with them felt like stepping into a dialogue with the land itself; a weaving together of history, memory, and observation. I loved hearing their stories- the kind that felt less like anecdotes and more like the threads of a larger, living tapestry. They spoke of their experiences in these woods, their walks and their work, and the many years they had spent observing, learning, and creating. Their stories felt like layers of time, both personal and environmental, histories folded into the landscapes they moved through every day.



Last Mountain


Last Mountain, a single work dated (1896) 2001, chronicled a journey to a mountain thought to be the last ever climbed in the UK. Upon reaching it, Alex and Sue made the decision to leave it unclimbed.


This project represents Alex and Sue’s willingness to push boundaries in pursuit of their craft while maintaining their thoughtful engagement with the landscapes they explore. There were so many stories I could have included in this short article, so many projects I wanted to delve into more deeply, but Last Mountain stood out as a poignant reflection of their approach to exploration.


AM: We were commissioned by the Photographer’s Gallery to photograph what was reputed to be the last mountain ever climbed in Britain, which is in the Cuillin.


It is an outlying spur, it’s not a Munro, so no one is particularly interested in it. The cairn is completely mossed over. It has an unbelievably wild corrie underneath it, which, of course, nobody goes to. This meant we had to camp at the head of Loch Coruisk and scramble up into the corrie with all this gear. We used to lug around a large-format camera, all the lenses, film holders, and tripods. It probably weighed about 25 pounds on top of our camping gear.


When we got the boat in, the boatman said, “I hope you’re prepared because I won’t be able to come and get you if the weather gets bad.” We didn’t care. We had loads of food, and we knew there was always the possibility of getting stuck if the river got too high. We managed to get some good pictures, then came back to the tent and made tea.


Later, a massive storm blew up- a real tent-wrecking storm. We watched, over the course of 24 hours, as Loch Coruisk rose by a metre from the sheer amount of water pouring off the hills. The river next to us was becoming wild. We were on the only dry patch in that whole landscape. We thought: If that river breaks, we are gone.


We were stuck for four days. We tried to walk out, but it was impossible. That wind was like a dragon circling around. We had planned to be picked up five days after we had gone in, and even then, we thought we wouldn’t be able to get out. It wasn’t a day for the tourists. But we made it back, and the boatman gave us tea and biscuits and a nip of whiskey. He had a twinkle in his eye, he knew what we had been through. That was a testing one. It was an epic one.



Alex and Sue say that everything they have ever done is symbolised in the tapestry The Pursuit of Fidelity (1475–1500): the motorbike standing in for a horse, the deer representing their totem animal, the flowers Sue uses for her dye, and the mountain symbolising Schiehallion. However, I’m not sure they can be so easily summarised.


Their practice isn’t about the physical objects they create; it’s about the long, slow exploration of place- the unspoken and unseen histories of the land and the stories that emerge in the spaces between trees and sky. Their narratives felt deeply personal, yet also universal: a meditation on the relationship between humans, memory, history, and place.


You can view Alex and Sue's work here:

The Pursuit of Fidelity - https://flic.kr/p/2nM5TYE


 

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