Bagging interrogates how highly synthesised military and hiking materials have become common place within the Highlands, embedding themselves within environments but going unnoticed in romantic readings of the landscape. The work also speaks to often overlooked connections between military culture and mountaineering, with its masculinist and imperialist rhetoric of ‘conquering’ summits and ‘bagging’ Munros.

Placed within the landscape, these sculptures offer viewers (passing hikers and tourists) a sense of familiarity and allow them to be drawn into the work as they are reminiscent of sleeping bags, emergency blankets and tents. At the same time, they also reflect military and industrial structures in the Scottish landscape, such as parachutes and windsocks, to encourage viewers to reconsider conventional perceptions of the environments they are engaging with.

The soft-shelled sculptures are speculative and are designed to be read differently by each passing viewer, as deformed tents abandoned to the elements, obstructive obstacles erected by landowners or odd military experiments. The use of colourful and soft Taffeta fabric aims to playfully mirror synthetic hiking materials and challenge associations between mountaineering and masculinity and the gendered geographies that script high-elevation environments as what the critic Ann Colley calls ‘the heroic domain of a brotherhood of men, replete with male energy’.

Arrochar 

Selected screen shots from related video work

Angus transmitting station