Kate Downie | Grasslands

We're at the old Victorian port of Port Allen near Errol, about a mile out of Errol. We're just walking down to the edge of the reed beds and there's a really complex maze of little waterways that come in and out through the reed beds but when the tide goes out it's about a mile out from the edge of where we are now and the Tay reed beds are the largest continuous reed area in the whole of the UK which is amazing. It's the most amazing gorgeous day of sun and clouds and possibly the odd rainstorm coming. It's June the 9th and around us I can see so many wild birds and you can hear them. I think that might be a bearded pig clacking away in the distance and right up beside me are bumblebees and honeybees and the main subject for a whole body of work that I did this time last year are the reed beds of the Tay. Funnily enough they're not as big as they were last year but there's something about how they grow which I find fascinating. It's the speed of growth and the upward force that they make and how they're reminiscent of Chinese bamboo with the shape of the leaves but on a huge scale. So today I'm going to have a little go with my ink painting and I'm going to cut a pen from one of the last year's reeds if they don't mind. Here are the empty seed cases from last year's reeds. These are not this year's reeds. The fresh ones that you see, the pure green, that's what's going to be forming this year's flower and ultimately the reed seed and they are this amazing magenta purple and they sway in the wind. You can see the breeze passing through. I think the first grasses that I fell in love with were the dune grasses and the marram grasses which we're going to walk amongst at Tentsphere just now. From the age of seven until 17 I grew up in the village of Newborough in Aberdeenshire and we were blessed with this fantastic dune system on the Isle of Estuary which I think was featured in previous exhibitions in the Scottish Gallery especially the one called Estuary. Now that I'm in Fife Tentsphere is my nearest and happiest dune system and it's also an incredible nature reserve. We're going to walk across it towards Tentsphere Beach where I've been making drawings and lithographs and all sorts of things for the exhibition. Let's head in there. Some of the works that I've made on the Chinese paper have become almost fallen apart with the intensity of the mark making and the print making and all the different things that I do to the paper and then I re-bond it onto a heavier backing and sometimes it reminds me of the kind of restoration work that's been happening all along the coastline with fragile grasses and there's been a huge amount of volunteer work to restore things like salt marshes, dune systems, weed beds and it's the grass that was being eroded but it's the grass that will stitch it all back together which is lovely.