Mahmoud Khattab: The Dog Sat Where We Parted

weeks living off-grid as part of a residency with Borders Forest Trust supported by Connecting Threads and The Southern Uplands Partnership. It is a response to a landscape undergoing a programme of ecological restoration which has seen over two million native trees planted across 31km² by Borders Forest Trust, a charity established to restore native habitats in an area with the lowest percentage of native woodland in mainland Scotland.

This work is a meditation on a specific landscape and on the changes slowly unfolding there at differing physical and temporal scales, linked to the seasons, cycles and processes of nature.

“In an abundance of northern light, soaked up and accumulated by the growing trees, I began to see photography and photosynthesis as analogous to one another. Day by day I watched the sun’s path rise to its midsummer zenith. At night I bathed in the light of ancient summers, released from the embers of a fallen Ash tree.” – Sam Laughlin