Farewell to the Familiar Earth

Installation, Talbot Rice Gallery, 2024

Farewell to the Familiar Earth was shown as part of Talbot Rice Residents at Talbot Rice Gallery, March–June 2024. Its title is drawn from the words of Calum MacLeod from Uig, Lewis, who in 1851, turning his back on the village of Crowlista, sang:

I saw the day of parting
At that great church,
Bidding farewell to the stones
And to the familiar earth.

In the era of the Clearances, as the Highlands’ environment and ecology were transformed, native plants such as nettles and ferns became emblems of loss — their persistence threading itself into the poetry of the time. Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, in Nuair a bha mi òg (When I was young), remembers:

The cheerful young folk would be with music and dance,
But that time has gone and the glen is in mourning;
Andrew’s ruin was full of nettles,
Bringing to mind the days when I was young.

The work brings together poetry, 35mm film, reel-to-reel tape, archival prints, and imagery from Gaelic medical manuscripts to tell a story of people and place, and of a Highland landscape altered in the shadow of the nettle.

Research drew on Scottish archives including the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the School of Scottish Studies, Tobar an Dualchais, and the Gaelic Medical Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, tracing the layered meanings of this enduring plant:

Willows and rushes,
Thistles, bent-grass and yarrow
Choking the springs
Where I often drank deeply;
The cold ruins
With ragwort and dock to their tops
And the red nettle
Growing in the hearth that was once warm.

— Donald Maciver, An Ataireachd Àrd (The High Surging Tide)

In the prints, the botanical specimen notes are replaced with lines on nettles from the poetry of Màiri Mhòr and Donald Maciver. A three-screen video loop combines a recipe for nettle-kale with photographic development processes using nettles in place of toxic darkroom chemicals — the plant becoming both subject and material.

At the work’s centre is a series of tape loops sampling songs by Màiri Mhòr and Donald Maciver. Over time, the loops degrade, and voices from the past dissolve into a tide of sound — a slow ebbing-away, where memory and landscape fade together.

Exhibition Catalogue Text:

Farewell to the familiar earth focuses on the nettle, a plant connected to wilderness and a symbol of what is outside human habitation. It takes its title from a Gaelic poem by Calum Macleod, written when he was forced to emigrate from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. Zurowski is Interested in Gaelic culture and how it creates a space for exchange between human and non-human beings, experimenting with the traces of distant traditions.

The reel-to-reel player transmits old songs about nettles from the School of Scottish Studies re-recorded and remixed by the artist to the point of degrading. The prints are taken from nettles as they are catalogued in botanical collections and the film includes images of foraged nettles processed using chemicals from the plant. With diagrams from ancient books of herbal remedies integrating with modern technology, this work is about ecology and what is important about traditional ways of being in the world.

Text by James Clegg, Talbot Rice Gallery

All photos courtesy of Sally Jubb, Talbot Rice Gallery

Permissions:

Prints were inspired by specimens from the Herbarium of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (E). Gaelic manuscript (citation using Creative Commons 4.0 License): Adv.MS.72.1.2 - Gaelic medical manuscript, Gaelic Manuscripts of Scotland Collection, National Library of Scotland.

From BBC Radio nan Gàidheal: George Clavey, BBC Collection MOD 1986 GR01270 Reel 1, Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches. Courtesy the University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections: John MacLeod & Seordag Murray, Nuair bha mi Òg, School of Scottish Studies archive SA1955.163.B1, Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches, Farquhar MacRae, An Ataireachd Àrd, School of Scottish Studies archive SA1968.009, Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches.