EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS
Studies in Photography
The Killing Time
Iain Stewart
13 June - 19 July 2025
Image credit: Let Earth and Stone Still Witness Bear, Iain Stewart
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My family history in the South West of Scotland goes back ten generations - at least - and is deeply entwined with the troubled events of the late 17th Century - the Covenanters and the dark period known as The Killing Times. Researching my forebear John Milroy, one of the Lads of Kirkcalla - three men connected to the story of the Solway Martyrs - has taken me on an emotional journey through time, visiting & documenting locations and stories; and meeting other descendants. John, along with two other men, William Johnson and George Walker, shares a grave in Wigtown churchyard with Margaret Wilson and Margaret MacLaughlin, the Solway Martyrs, two women who were tied to wooden stakes and drowned in the Bladnoch River on May 11th 1685 for their refusal to swear the Oath of Abjuration. The three men were hanged later the same year, for the same reason. The images and writing are collected together in The Killing Time, a body of photographs and words set for publication and exhibition in June 2025. The photographs, lyrical and dark, document land and sea, river and woodland; the very sources of the Martyrs stories. Places these folk lived, worked, sought refuge - and ultimately died, for their beliefs. So many others died too. The making of this work has at times been deeply affecting; things that happened are seeped into the land and water and have not gone away; the stories are there, and need to be told.
Iain Stewart, May 2025
Artist's Biography
Iain Stewart was born in 1967. Working in Scotland, predominantly the Highlands, his landscape photography has explored relationships and connections with the natural environment for over 30 years. His LAND/SEA/SKY works have been exhibited and collected widely in UK/USA and European venues including the International Center of Photography, New York, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Photographers’ Gallery, London, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Land, sea and sky act as metaphor in his work; a starting point for self-examination, learning and reflection. Images have often referenced painting - the abstract expressionists, German romanticism; quietly evoking stories or memories, conjuring moments of connection that are both personal and universal. Writing about his INNER SOUND project in 2020, Robert Macfarlane noted; ‘There's something original and ambitious at work here; a shard-like hard-cutting between image and place and text. Sometimes it's bewildering -- but then that's true of the places Stewart is fascinated by as well...’. In the foreword to The Killing Time, Scottish novelist James Robertson notes that ‘The story Iain tells is personal, communal and very Scottish, but it is also universal... wonderful, sombre images of present landscapes and waterscapes, haunted by people long departed from them, and they carry a warning: do not forget, and do not think that such things as happened here cannot happen again. ‘I can stand on what was their land and be thankful for the freedoms I have, and what has changed,’ Iain writes, ‘but I see too what has not changed, what we have not learned from the dark days of The Killing Times. The darkness is still there, around the world.’