‘This Island Earth’ explores relationships between nature and human innovation, using paint to represent contested environments, particularly those shaped by power and excavation. Marianne Greated has a long-standing interest in landscape, rooted in her research on renewable energy and how power is manifest in our collective psyche and visual understandings of the Earth.

The work references two sites of personal and environmental significance. The first is a granite quarry in Stubbeløkken on the Danish island of Bornholm, where Greated’s mother is from. The quarry is a compelling visual manifestation of the scarring of the land resulting from extraction, symbolising ownership and taking from the land. The second site, located only four miles from Callendar House, is the UK’s oldest oil refinery at Grangemouth, which ceased operations on 29^th April 2025. Here, the looming structures characterise declining industries, prompting reflection on environmental responsibilities and sustainability.

These environments represent the temporal dissonance inherent in our ecological processes; lands debated, disrupted and marked by the effects of consumption. They reckon with the past, evoking a slippage of time, a sense of loss, and a yearning for rejuvenation in a depleted landscape, while also capturing the awe and wonder of nature. Their imposing structures create an uncanny ambiguity within these familiar yet otherworldly industrial landscapes.

Greated reclaims landscape painting by drawing on historical references while deconstructing and challenging its conventions. Painting, itself a colonised territory, negotiates how we represent and inhabit our environment through a directness and intimacy with paint. Visual interruptions, literal and metaphorical gaps, flatness, heightened colour and temporal uncertainties disrupt narrative interpretations of the land. These representations of our landscape affirm painting's persistence and its enduring capacity to reflect, question and reimagine our world.

Marianne Greated (b. 1976) is an artist and researcher based in Glasgow. She has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions in India, Belarus, Denmark, Greece, Spain and the UK. She has a doctorate from the University of Edinburgh (2014) and was awarded a Readership in Painting from Glasgow School of Art (2021). She is currently Head of Art at Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh.