As part of the recent Remembering Together Dumfries and Galloway commission that I’ve been working on alongside fellow artist t s Beall, I spent the first few months of this year leading on the making of a series of five sculptural markers for each of The Dispersed Memorial Forest sites.

Following a series of conversational workshops and sharing sessions working with interested groups and individuals where we used a series of creative prompts to discuss ideas including material, form and function of the markers, we then worked up a series of proposals that were shared and developed with each of the five site partners.

The markers have a nice visual relation to one another, but are each uniquely considered for the individual sites, leaning in towards the requirements and personalities of each environment alongside the interests of local people. Working in a range of materials including the familiar red sandstone and Dalbeattie granite, locally sourced oak and bronze, the markers include beautiful benches, ground-set paving designs and sandstone standing stones and way markers.

I spent a very busy couple of weeks at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop creating a huge (no exaggeration) stack of resin-bonded sand moulds before a record (for me) number of bronze pours, 25 moulds in three pouring sessions. The bronzes include handwritten texts re-imagined as three dimensional text plaques, alongside more traditional marker plaques – a whole variety of lettering made it’s way into this particularly project.

The markers were also a joyful opportunity to work with a mixture of craftspeople and experienced installers, and included the logistical challenge of moving a variety of different shapes – and crucially, weights – of stone around the region. Much of this sort of work is reasonably invisible at the close of a project, but definitely the best part of any public art project.

As a person really driven by process, here’s a small selection of images sharing some of the different stages of the process of making the bronze pieces.

Without good technical teams and open-access resources like Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, projects on this scale just aren’t possible, especially by artists keen to be quite as hands on. Thank you to Steve and the brilliant team for keeping me on my deadline schedule. If you’re an artist and interested in building a sculptural practice, I’d really recommend ESW as a place to start, especially if you can travel to Edinburgh and back in a day.