‘Old Man’ & ‘Coruisk’

Rachel Tennant 05 October 2022

Old Man (2021)
42cm x 59.4cm
Mixed media on acrylic paper

Old Man

Root of ashy lava
crown of red stone
bare in wasted fury
at a fevered ocean
whipped to wrath
where currents collide
hawking icebergs
from a foaming mouth.
Dogged pounding
is all you have known
scouring debris from Geo’s
crevices flushed to failure
sinews split from jaw bone.
Your own canines reduced
to a single cracked tooth
rotten in spongy gums
ripe for collapse.

Coruisk (2022)
42 x 55cm
Mixed media on acrylic paper

Coruisk

A cauldron of water slaps
black toes of the Cuillin,
stone mute faces funnel
boiling mists, echo
kelpie myths
and swallow stories
of Elgol boat wars.

Enduring extremes
smoke-streaked
tortured layers
of chrome spinel
litter a landscape mixed
with boulder-black
forced intrusions.

I am an intruder
in the cataclastic flow
of dolerite and basalt,
my mind reduced to fine
grains by the towering
wildness of earth’s
heart rock.

Creator’s biography

Rachel Tennant is a landscape architect, poet and photographer. Her work is an exploration of landscape and people—the tentative relationship of people to the land through ownership, use and displacement; the cultural heritage of landscape through language, place and memories; and our perceptions of beauty, nature and wildness. She aims to distil a physical and emotional response to a location that captures and renders the ‘spirit of a place’. For her it is hard to separate the words and the image from the place and more increasingly her work has combined all these art forms together.

Rachel’s work has been included in Poetry Scotland, Vernal Equinox, the Scottish Writers Centre 10 year anthology; Earthlines; The Joy of Living; Brushes with War pamphlet; Glasgow Review of Books; Pushing Out the Boat; the Arts Council; the Glasgow Anthology, ‘Tip Tap Flat’; Glasgow Women’s Poets anthology; Prole Magazine; Glasgow University’s Glasgow to Saturn.

Website: www.rmt-images.co.uk
Instagram: @rmtimages1
Email: rachel@rmt-images.co.uk