Simon Shiel finds that every image in Claire Scully’s carefully illustrated psychogeographic sequence allows the reader a place to pause and reflect

Described as “a sequence of events occurring over a period of time in the search for a location in space”, Claire Scully’s Desolation Wilderness is part of an ongoing project from the artist, looking at ‘landscape and memory’ – our relationship with the environment and its profound effect on our own memory and emotions.

The book follows on from Scully’s 2016 Internal Wilderness, which explored memory and imagination, creating worlds from distant memories of childhood holidays. Desolation Wilderness also plays with ideas of environment and time, of creating landscapes in our mind based on our assumptions of its geography. 

There is a real place called Desolation Wilderness, it is a 64,000 acre wilderness area in the Eldorado national forest in California. The crest of the Sierra Nevada runs through it, just west of Lake Tahoe. It is a place of rugged, sparse beauty and over the course of 32 pages, Scully envisions its landscape in careful, cross-hatched illustrations, each one a moment of tranquility in miniature. Part of Scully’s skill as an artist is making each image a moment of contemplation for the reader, a place to pause and reflect.

Every page builds upon the last: the sweep of rain across the horizon turns to a page with a fork of lightning scratched across a night sky and then the stillness of the mountains crowding on the horizon. Each one is impressionistic, quiet and utterly captivating.

Desolation Wilderness by Claire Scully is published by Avery Hill.

Simon Shiel
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