Proving the existence of a large aquatic dinosaur lurking in the murky depths of Loch Ness has engaged scientists and the media for decades. Artist Gerard Byrne has been on the trail of Nessie too – filming and photographing around the Loch, mostly in black-and-white, over the past ten years. Byrne’s presentation in Milton Keynes features a film cut to a soundtrack of readings from first-person sightings of the creature, arrangements of framed photographs and a vitrine containing images of bound copies of the Inverness Courier from 1933, which include Nessie articles. A large cut tree stump is placed in front of an accompanying wall drawing of it, on which has been printed quotes from the film’s testimonies, suggesting a correlation between the timeline of the tree’s rings and the years in which these sightings ocurred.
It’s such common currency now for artists to merely ‘present’ documentary style ephemera on an interesting subject as their art, that one could easily believe that this is Byrne’s sole preoccupation – he even titles the show ‘Case Study: Loch Ness (Some possibilities and problems) 2002-2011’. But it isn’t Byrne’s relationship with the slippery Scottish water beast that he is questioning but a complex series of more subtle relationships with landscape: the relationship between landscape and photography, landscape and text, landscape and memory and how the photograph functions as an object. And there’s also a playful nod to an older generation of land artists. Byrne’s circular tree drawing uses the same font and black-and-red text colours that Richard Long has used. Even Byrne’s choice of quotes cleverly recall the senior artist’s walks made into minimal text works – ‘two stumps resembling a sheep’s broken horns’, ‘flat and snake-like’.