Modern man has suffered from a deepening condition of ‘homelessness’: The correlate of the migratory character of his experience of society and of self has been what might be called a metaphysical loss of ‘home’.

- Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, ‘The Homeless Mind: Modernisation and Consciousness’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974), p77.

Links Land addresses a landscape commonly referred to as the ‘home of golf’. This land is a common feature of Scotland’s east coast and is defined by its dry infertile soil, undulating topography and natural sand traps. Buffeted by seaside winds it is here on strips of land found historically between beaches and agricultural fields that golf is considered to have been born.

Captured in the gloaming, the acute highlights and extended shadows of the rolling terrain create an aesthetic that refers directly to Edmund Burke’s 1759 essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful; a doctrine that became of central concern to the picturesque and romantic painters. “A quick transition”, writes Burke, “from darkness to light” is conducive to the sensation of the sublime but “darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light”.

Drawing heavily upon the sublime, the camera’s direct and uncompromising perspective, the scale of print and the crepuscular light combine to engage the viewer both physically and psychologically. Void of a horizon, or any obvious point of reference, the landscape opens up into a quiet ruminating space that remains true to its original recreational function as a place of refuge.

Despite purporting to romanticize the past the photographs are paradoxical in make-up, refusing to simply languish in nostalgia. Contours lit by an evanescent light evoke life’s timeless current whilst the photographs’ historical visual framework creates an estranged, almost ‘lunar’ landscape that is notably alien and unfamiliar. In this way Links Land is both confrontational and seductive, meditating between nostalgia and apprehension, the past and the future.