Enrique Ramírez: sea thinking

CEH co-director Paul Merchant, writes on his blog

In early April, I spoke to the artist Enrique Ramírez, whose work returns again and again to the ocean as a source of inspiration, a place for reflection, and a material with which to make art. Ramírez was born in Santiago de Chile, but has lived and worked between Paris and Santiago since 2010.

Ramírez told me that he feels like a Chilean artist when he is outside Chile, but that when he returns to his home country, he feels like something of a tourist. This sense of displaced identity emerges in his work: much of it has to do with the particular political significance of the sea in Chile, but Ramírez also makes art that explores travel and migration across oceans, as well as ecological problems that ignore national borders.

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An Interview with Patrick Laurie

Reblogged from the Pen and the Plough

Patrick Laurie is a hill farmer and writer from Galloway. He is the best-selling author of the Wainwright Prize-nominated Native, and his ‘Bog and Myrtle Peat’ blog attracts around 30, 000 visitors a year. He is currently a mentor on the Pen and Plough creative writing programme for land workers. This interview with Dr Pippa Marland took place by email in April 2021.

Native recounts your return to Galloway to farm cattle after being involved in a number of other lines of work. Can you explain a bit about what made you decide to do this?

It was really important for me to make a life in Galloway, but it’s not easy finding work here. I trained as a gamekeeper when I left school, and that gave me a real taste for practical, hands-on conservation. Looking around me, it became clear that many of the most worrying declines in wildlife are closely linked to agricultural change, so it made sense to get stuck into an industry where I could really make the biggest difference. Despite strong family connections to agriculture, I began as a relative novice almost eight years ago and I’ve been on a very steep learning curve since then.

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