Helen Douglas & Jake Harvey – Meeting Point within the Lewisian Review

22.09.2025

Photograph of Lewisian gneiss from Meeting Point within the Lewisian.

Helen Douglas’s ‘Sand Swept Rock’ (2024) presents a compressed universe. Composed of hyper-detailed images of a section of rock-speckled tideline in the Outer Hebrides, its two constituent photographic parts, each a metre long, are revealed by unfolding a 20-by-20cm square-paged concertina booklet.

As Beth Williamson points out in an essay accompanying Douglas and Jake Harvey’s current exhibition at Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum in North Uist, “the rock itself is not on an immense scale, as can be seen by the seaweed present”. However, a grand scale “is implied, revealing an apparently mountainous landscape....There is no attempt to locate the reader using devices such as single-point perspective or the pronounced volumetric rendering of three-dimensional forms.”

Given this absence of visual anchors, the swirls and striations in the Lewisian gneiss, combined with rivulets and pools of creamy white sand, not only suggest a mountain range but also generate a sort of metaphorical immersion in a vast, flowing, uncertain space. We might be drifting through the cosmos, with galaxies engulfing our view; or perhaps suspended in a liquid marbled with inks. The overall effect is reminiscent of the tricks of perspective we might have played on ourselves as children, bringing our faces close to the surface of the earth to imagine a tiny landscape stretching off forever.

‘Sand Swept Rock’ is one of several works in concertina format that Douglas, a legendary figure within Scottish and British book arts, is presenting for this show. A handsome accompanying hardback book introduces the constituent works alongside thoughts from Williamson, curator Juliet Kinchin, geologist Alan McKirdy, and others. In two similarly formatted works, ‘Wave & Rock’ and ‘Rock & Wave’ (both 2024), Douglas’s camera pans out to reveal the tide crashing against the jagged Hebridean coastline. We read, as it were, the course of the wave from left to right, a magnificent sense of narrative drama introduced into the static medium of photography.

In conjunction with ‘Sand Swept Rock’ and other works such as ‘Stonecrop’ (2024) that home in on the miniature sublime, they show an artist musing on the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm in the natural world; and the traces of the infinite in both.

Douglas’s practice has, for several decades, involved incorporating nature photography into the artist’s book, literalising the concept of “reading the landscape” in a way that suggests a profound sensitivity to the haptic, cognitive, and symbolic parallels between reading and viewing the page and passing through the natural environment.

If the works discussed above, and scroll pieces such as the ‘Lewisian’ series (2024-25), offer a kind of seamless flow in this regards, the booklet-works presented here under the title ‘STONE’ Nos. 2-4 (2024) isolate tiny features of the natural environment in the same way the minimalist poet might home in on the single word, phrase, or syntactical mark.

As Williamson points out, much of Douglas’s work with her Weproductions imprint has focused “on the tiny details of the natural world in and around her home in the Scottish Borders.” Thus, “she has, in some respects, made a departure in this project by focusing on the massiveness of the Lewisian gneiss rock complex on the West Coast of North Uist and Berneray.” Kinchin describes the field-trips by Douglas and Harvey, from March 2023 onwards, that led to the present body of work, from an initial focus on the coastal rock structures between Hosta and Scalpaig and the stunning west beach of Berneray to the Tigharry and Balranald Nature Reserve and the sand dunes of Sollas.

Sculptor Jake Harvey is a very suitable exhibition-mate for Douglas. His works are replete in their simplicity, found stone worked to bring out a kind of hidden completeness. Joel Fisher notes that, while Harvey’s sculptures “sometimes resemble untouched rocks”, on closer examination each "has been subjected to subtle adjustments. He adjusts such things as the transitions between the curvatures and the stone’s planes and hollows until a wholeness appears. Sometimes despite the removal of a significant amount of the stone’s mass, a greater scale comes into being.”

A piece such as ‘Infinity’ (2025), in Lewisian gneiss with garnet crystals, gets the point across marvellously. In other works of Harvey’s, such as ‘No vestige of a beginning / No prospect of an end’ (2025), a grid of gneiss ovals placed on Caithness slate, the strata in the rock clearly take on connotations of infinite, perhaps intergalactic, space. In smaller-scale pieces, including ‘Eight Lines’ (2024) and ‘Basalt Flow II’ (2025), the bright, enamel-filled grooves in the rock appear to trace existing striations, in ways which imply their similarity to forms of writing, pictography, and ritual human mark-making.

In some ways, geologist McKirdy’s contribution to the accompanying text is the most important. He points out that “the rocks that build the Western Isles,...were forged in the bowels of the Earth...and re-emerged at the surface some thousand million years later.” The Lewisian gneiss is almost as old as the Earth itself (which 4.5 billion years old), formed “largely in magma chambers of molten rock found deep within the Earth’s crust” combined with sedimentary layers such as limestones and marbles “that must have accumulated on the Earth’s surface” and “later rocks including granite that were ‘intruded’ into the Lewisian complex.” The rocks are banded “in response to the monumental forces they were subject to at considerable depths below [Earth’s] surface.”

By invoking various forms of infinite visual space in their depiction of these rocks, the artists are refiguring a different kind of infinity, one indexed in their surfaces: fathomless depths of time.

Meeting Point: within the Lewisian is exhibited at Taigh Chearsabhagh until 27th September.