Alan Rutherford

Immersive Residency Program | June 2025
Website | Social Media

ABOUT THE WORK

An Exploration of Landscape and the Body at Las Salinas, Spain. This work was a site- specific exploration of the historical salt mine of Las Salinas, experienced through the body. Using natural wild clay found on-site, I applied it directly to my skin, aiming to create a work that was inherently part of the landscape – ephemeral, leaving no physical trace of either the work or myself.

I intended to become a temporary human sculpture. Standing in the intense heat of the sun for approximately an hour, the experience became profoundly transformative. Attempting to articulate it, one might describe it as a sensation of vast geological time compressed into a fleeting moment—a deep immersion in temporal stillness.

Time felt molecular, as though it passed through the eye of a needle. Alone, I could hear the wind, feel it pressing against my body, and sense the heat of the sun gradually drying the salt-infused clay that coated my skin.

During that time, I felt as though I had become a mountain — once soft, now hardened by the sun — absorbed into the landscape. The sun and wind weathered my surface, not unlike the earth itself, while I remained a living body within.

This may be the closest I have come to merging with the landscape and becoming part of nature. To experience such a broad range of atmospheric conditions directly on the body was a powerful catalyst for thought, sensation, and emotional reflection.

In some ways, the experience recalls the actions of the great master J.M.W. Turner, who famously strapped himself to the mast of a ship to endure and internalize the full force of a storm — seeking not just to observe nature, but to embody it.

BIO

Alan Rutherford is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1999 with a BA(hons) in Sculpture and was awarded an MA in Fine Art in 2019 from the University of the Creative Arts, London. His practice is based primarily in sculpture and filmmaking and seeks to explore this condition of loss, disappearance, and change, where the past environments become ‘sites of memory’. He creates pastiche interpretations of places, objects, and scenes through film and corollary sculptural ‘props’.