The Consolidation series
Consolidation is an open ended black and white photographic series, documenting derelict farmsteads and associated buildings across the Angus glens of Scotland. The work traces the material remains of a profound rural transformation that began in the mid-eighteenth century, when agricultural improvements were reshaping the landscape. Small, subsistence-based holdings were systematically absorbed into larger, more efficient farms or converted into orderly satellites of a larger farm, displacing communities whose presence had long been embedded within these glens. Some were forced and some opted to migrate toward towns and cities, where the accelerating forces of industrialisation, factories, mills, and wage labour, offered some measure of security.
What endures in the glens is not absence alone, but a layered and complex aftermath. The structures depicted in this series, roofless cottages, collapsing byres, fragmented enclosures, stand as quiet witness to a process of consolidation that was both economic and human. Once sites of habitation, labour, and continuity, they now exist in a state of dereliction, neither fully erased nor actively maintained. Time operates visibly across their surfaces: stones loosen, timber decays, and vegetation encroaches, gradually reabsorbing these built forms into the surrounding terrain, which more often than not is treeless heathland.
The decision to work in black and white reinforces this sense of temporal distance while sharpening attention to material detail. Stark tonal contrasts emphasise texture and form, rough stone, weathered wood, the soft intrusion of moss and grass, allowing the physicality of each site to emerge with clarity. In the absence of colour, light becomes a structuring force, articulating the subtle interplay between solidity and erosion, presence and disappearance.
Human absence is central to the work, yet it is not an emptiness devoid of meaning. Rather, it becomes a palpable condition, shaping how these spaces are encountered. The images resist romanticising the past or framing the glens through nostalgia. Instead, they consider the consequences of transition: how landscapes are reorganised, how lives are displaced, and how traces of those lives persist in altered forms. The farmsteads are not simply ruins; they are records of lived experience, carrying within them the imprint of habitation even as they fall into disuse.
Through a restrained visual language, Consolidation offers a space for contemplation. It foregrounds the persistence of place beyond human occupation, where silence is not emptiness but accumulation, a convergence of histories that continue to inhabit the landscape in subtle and enduring ways.