Joya: AIR / Justin Carter / GBR

“Staying at Joya: AiR was a fantastic experience which gave me the opportunity to explore the local environment and to learn more about the landscape, agriculture and hydrology. The accommodation and studios are the perfect base-camp to work from, and the steady stream of artists and writers creates a supportive and nurturing situation to make work in and to refresh your ideas and thinking. All of this is made possible by the amazing hosts Donna and Simon who are there quietly supporting and facilitating the resident artists and sharing their amazing experience of setting up Joya. The magic glue that keeps everything together is the wonderful food cooked up each evening – a healthy mix of tasty delights prepared with skill and affection from local ingredients.

Whilst staying at Joya, I found myself writing and painting, as well as exploring more familiar methodologies of intervention in the landscape. Most of the work was quite provisional and exploratory in nature, but I did manage to make two versions of a work called ‘Mirage’. This site-specific intervention was installed along a dried-up gorge which suffers severe drought followed by flash flooding, causing massive erosion in the landscape. The project involved carefully harvesting microplastics from the local area to make small blue 'colour fields', (suggesting water) just beneath the dried-up river bed.

The process of collecting and photographing the plastic material aimed to accelerate the normal process by which this harmful microplastic material (a waste product from the surrounding agriculture) will inevitably enter the soil and water table, eventually ending up in the sea. In this instance, the plastic material was safely removed after the images were taken, preventing any harmful impact. The work is supposed to lure and then shock the viewer, acting as an environmental warning about the dangers of microplastics in the ecosystem”.

Justin Carter

Justin Carter is an artist based in Glasgow. Recent exhibitions include: The Howse Shal Be Preserved at Rockingham Castle (2021), Practicing Landscape: Land, Histories and Transformation at The Lighthouse, Glasgow (2020) and Blood From Stone at Fineshade Wood, Northamptonshire (2019). Last year his work was included in Dark Mountain Project publication (issue 21) which focussed on the theme of confluence. He has exhibited throughout the UK as well as in Europe, Japan, China, Australia and the United States. He is a Reader in Contemporary Practice; Art & Environment at Glasgow School of Art, and works in the Sculpture and Environmental Art Department, based in the School of Fine Art.

“My work is an attempt to understand the natural environment we are part of. How do we sense it and make sense of it? The resulting artworks are an attempt to make this connection tangible. Looming environmental concerns have caused me to engage with active elements within the landscape exploring the extent to which the artist can move towards a non-human perspective”.

Joya: AiR / Justin Carter / GBR