i: Artist of the Month
Tansy Lee Moir www.tansyleemoir.co.uk Originally from Matlock in Derbyshire, Tansy studied Three-Dimensional Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. After working as a puppet-maker and performer, she moved to Edinburgh and now lives beside the Forth. Over the next 25 years, Tansy evolved a practice using art and creativity to support marginalized communities throughout Central Scotland. In 2008, she began to focus more fully on her drawing, setting up a studio in St. Margaret’s House, Edinburgh. In 2017, she moved to her purpose-built garden studio, where she now works full-time as an artist and educator. She is passionate about trees. In 2015, she was commissioned by South Yorkshire Biodiversity Research Group to work on Tree Stories, a project examining tree carving and graffiti in the Peak District, funded by Arts Council England. In 2016-17 she was Artist-in-Residence at Howden Park Centre, Livingston, where she collaborated with poet and photographer Steve Smart to produce Drawing Breath, inspired by Calder Wood in West Lothian. Back at St. Margaret’s House in 2017, Tansy curated Grown Together— an exhibition of the tree-related work of twenty artists and makers. In 2018, she collaborated with fellow artist Anne Gilchrist to document Dalkeith Old Wood in Midlothian, with its nationally important collection of ancient Oaks. The study resulted in the publication of Dead Wood and New Leaves. A joint show, Out of the Wood, scheduled for NTS Drum Castle in 2020, was cancelled and subsequently shown online at Edinburgh Palette, where Tansy will be exhibiting again later this year. She is currently exhibiting at An Talla Solais, in Ullapool. Tansy writes: My drawing trips to the woods are partly open-minded wanderings, partly focused foraging— and I’m always searching for trees that have a story to tell in their contorted forms, broken
branches, or indecipherable graffiti. When I find a tree I want to draw, I slow right down, listen, walk around it, settle into tree-time, focus on the moment. Trees are constantly engaged in a dialogue with their surroundings— with the ground they grow in; the prevailing weather; the other plants, animals and people that live alongside them —and there are physical clues in their forms that provide a record of that dialogue. Similarly, the process of drawing is one of dialogue— it’s a record of the moment of interaction between the artist and the subject; the eye and the tree; the hand, the paper and the mark-making tool. As John Berger says, a drawing of a tree is not just a tree, but ‘a tree being looked at’. I learned a respect and appreciation for wood as material from my wood-turner father, and I developed that through my degree and my own making practice, but writers and academics like Oliver Rackham, Richard Mabey and Ian Rotherham have taught me to look beyond the immediate appearance of trees, towards the historical and cultural stories their forms represent. My latest series— Rivers of Oak (Cascade, Rapids, Undercurrent) —is inspired by the ancient Oaks of Dalkeith Old Wood, just south of Edinburgh. I was immediately struck by how their solid, sinuous forms seemed to flow, and by a powerful feeling of my being a short-lived creature amongst ancients. In the studio, I set out to capture the fluid movement in the way the trunks have grown, trying to transfer this slow dance onto the paper with a mixture of bold gestural
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