Window on the wild: Landscapes with a difference

The artist Rory Middleton and I are at Cove Park, the artists’ residency centre that consists of some innovative architecture cleverly tucked into 50 acres of unspoilt hillside in Argyll. Outside, the local crows are mobbing a buzzard and Middleton shows me a picture of a newt that he found in the woodpile in his studio.

Nature is never very far from working life here. Middleton has been alone on site for a few days. “It’s a wonderful place,” he smiles. “You’re so in touch with nature. Last night I was trying to make a phone call and the number of mating frogs was incredible.”

We look out of the window. From where we’re sitting the view is the landscape of Loch Long, all green and grey shadows in the foreground and a spectacular, mountainous backdrop. Views are important to Middleton, and the Portobello-based artist has made the best of them. He once set up an infinity pool on the rooftop of a tower block in Zagreb, Croatia. And he has built a temporary pavilion to best exploit the craggy beauty of the Rocky Mountains.

Next weekend, commissioned by Cryptic Nights – director Cathie Boyd’s scheme to help emerging multi-disciplinary artists – he’ll invite his audience to walk through Cove’s muddy landscape at dusk and encounter a view of their own.

The View, as he has called it, will be created with live help from Phantom Band drummer Iain Stewart and some recorded compositions from Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy. Quite what will happen, Middleton won’t disclose. But expect architecture, installation, video and an element of performance.

Middleton worked with Stewart when the artist completed the Masters in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. Back then, in 2006, he couldn’t be accused of lacking ambition. He built a small mountain in Glasgow’s Tramway and placed a building on top of it. He became friends with McCarthy when laying the flooring in his house.

But not all of his performers, it turns out, were as co-operative as the musicians. The filming that Middleton has undertaken in advance involved that most spectacular of Scotland’s creatures, the eagle.

“I filmed real live eagles,” Middleton recalls. “There were two of them. One of them was meant to be a specialist at soaring. During its day as a film star it was meant to fly over a loch but it went straight head first into it. The handler had to jump right into the loch! If the bird gets wet it can’t fly.”

That eagle comes from a long-standing fascination with the bird’s metaphorical possibilities. This began not in the kind of wild landscape which helps artists and writers at Cove Park reach new creative heights, but on a London building site a decade ago, when Middleton was scraping together a living as a labourer.

One of the men on the site told him an old medieval story: “On a stormy night, some men are drinking in a mead hall,” he recalls, “and an eagle flies through the building. It comes in through one window, over the fire and out the other side. It was seen as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of life.”

Middleton thought of the image for years, before bumping into his old workmate in a Byres Road supermarket, and learning that The Venerable Bede wrote down the story, and the bird in question was a far less glamorous creature, an ordinary sparrow.

For The View, though, it will be an eagle. You get the impression that Middleton, a cheerful kind of chap, likes a bit of drama. He has come back to Scotland to complete The View straight from another, more extreme, rural landscape, that of Fogo Island in Newfoundland, Canada, where the winds are fierce and the snow deep.

“It’s an incredibly beautiful place,” he says. “Skies like I’ve never seen before: purples, pinks and blues. People are at one with nature and very connected to the island.”

He took part in one of the artists’ residencies there that have put the community back on the map since the collapse of the cod fisheries that had sustained it for generations.

He spent three months preparing a spectacular evening event that sounds like a logistical nightmare: constructing a modernist building on a frozen pond, he pumped water on to netting to form a layer of ice-cladding on his creation and then projected a film of a sunset from the highest point of the island.

“The viewers were on the frozen lake,” he explains, “and they arrived on skidoos. It created this kind of science fiction atmosphere; the locals really added to it, everybody was wearing helmets and skidoo suits. I had compiled a soundtrack including the sounds of cracking ice and then there was a real crack. Ten per cent of the population of the island came.”

We won’t need snowsuits, but Middleton warns me that waterproofs and wellies will be obligatory during March on the west coast of Scotland.

As we walk through the site, it is beautiful but damp underfoot. We stop for a moment by the track where events will take place, looking at the woodland and listening to the birds.

“This is a place for the viewer to stop and think,” says Middleton. “People can project their own ideas on to the piece. It’s about a place that’s always there, but it gives you an altered perception.”

The View is at Cove Park, Thursday and Friday, 7.30pm. A bus departs from the CCA in Glasgow at 6.15pm. Tickets are £5 including return transport to CCA and refreshments. Tickets are also available on the door at Cove Park. Wet weather clothing and sensible footwear is essential