The Colour of Ashes Despite the best laid plans, working at the Senej Printmakers Workshop near Moscow for two months in 1992 had an unexpected impact on me. What I experienced was totally unpredicted. Within a few weeks, the pure white snow in the surrounding forest and on the frozen lake melted. The ground began yielding up all sorts of intriguing finds and I came home with a beautiful feral cat skull among other things. This, along with the particularly Russian images of the silver birch trees and ubiquitous hooded crows around the workshop, revitalised my childhood interest in natural history and my fascination for museums. Secondly we were witnessing the collapse of communism at first hand in Russia alongside the violent break up of Yugoslavia where my friend and fellow Glasgow Print Studio exchange artist had been living and working. The silver birch trees that I had started drawing looked more like they were belching smoke rather than casting shadows (an old visual habit of mine). In my present state of mind the skulls, crows and trees became synonymous with watching the news of the Balkans conflict on Russian television listening to my friends horror stories. I had arrived at Senej with a theme in mind, that of "a cloudburst of material possessions" having seen something of the misguided Soviet craving for superficial Western values during a previous visit to soviet Russia. But I came away with "the colour of ashes" symbolising the frightening legacy left behind by the collapse of the communist political and social systems.

 All too soon I was back home in Scotland. But the whole experience caused me to look again at a series of photographs that I had taken some years previously of Italian roadside shrines. The image of the crucifixion, along with the significance that I now place on the trees and the various animal and bird skulls, all seemingly innocent objects, has produced a vocabulary of images that I was to develop beyond the next three and a half years spanning the Russian works.   Even now I am still coming to terms with them.