Pebbles in the stream

THESE days, when artists talk about “suffering for their art”, they usually mean living in a chilly loft apartment with barely enough government subsidy to pay for their caramel macchiatos.

Lotte Glob, however, is from the old school. She would never claim to have suffered in her 50 years as a ceramic artist – she’s far too tough for that – but some of her more adventurous exploits would have today’s trendy conceptual set quaking in their asymmetrical haircuts.

A large part of her practice involves installing her work in the landscape – and not just any landscape, but the rugged, unforgiving landscape of the Scottish Highlands. In the late 1980s, Glob embarked on a project called The Ultimate Rock Garden, which saw her place 50 of her strange, alien-looking sculptures on mountain tops and in hidden valleys over an area of some 5,000 square kilometres.

Then, between 1994 and 2005, she hiked hundreds of miles in order to launch her trademark “floating stones” into 111 different lochans all over Scotland.

In the course of her adventures, Glob has been dive-bombed by skuas and attacked by swarms of bloodthirsty midgies. She has been repeatedly blown off her feet in ferocious winds and, on one particularly extreme winter walk, she could easily have been killed after straying on to a cornice that was ready to collapse.

The photographic records of her Floating Stones project, along with sketches and diary entries, are now the subject of a new book, published by the Watermill Gallery in Aberfeldy. In most of the photographs, her ceramic stones look perfectly at home in their surroundings, as if they had always been part of the landscape. Some of her more brightly coloured creations, however, look as if they have recently arrived from another planet, and in each image there is something deeply surreal about the fact that these heavy-looking objects are floating when they should be sinking.

Over a cup of tea in her spectacular, award-winning house on the shores of Loch Eribol – the product of a lifetime of saving and dreaming – Glob explains how she first started installing her sculptures in the great outdoors.

“By the late 1980s, I had made a lot of work and I thought: ‘It’s time I promoted myself,’” she says, “so I spent a whole winter talking to galleries down south. I did all the correct things, writing to them, sending photographs and then I did a big trip and visited them all, but I had a really bad response because of where I lived.

“They would ask where I was based, I would say ‘the North of Scotland’, and they would simply say: ‘Oh, in that case forget it, we like our artists to be around.’ I had a few places – one place in London where they were really interested and another place in Manchester – but by the time I came home I was so disillusioned and I felt so bad I thought: ‘I don’t ever want to go south of the border again.’”

Had it not been for this moment of despair, though, Glob might not have started a project that was to change her life forever.

“Whenever I’m depressed I go out for a long walk and then everything seems OK again. So I took my rucksack and my sandwiches and my camera and my writing book and, just as I was going out, I saw some of my sculptures standing there and I thought: ‘I’ll take them out to where they belong – the clay and the rocks and the glazes are all from out there.’ So I put one in my rucksack and I set out for Cape Wrath.

“I walked from Cape Wrath down to Sandwood Bay and halfway there I took the sculpture out and put it in a little curl of rocks. I got so happy to see it sitting there that I took photographs of it and wrote a little diary about it. Then I thought to myself: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one right over there on top of that mountain…’ and that’s how the Ultimate Rock Garden started.”

As Glob spent more and more of her time installing her sculptures in the hills, she began to fall in love with the many inaccessible lochans she discovered. In 1994, by complete accident, she made her first floating stone, and started to experiment with the possibilities of the form. First she made a huge circle of 333 floating stones on the beach at Balnakyle near Durness and waited for the tide to come in. Some of the stones were washed out to sea, never to be seen again, while the rest were left scattered around the high water mark. After that, the next step was to start taking stones up to the lochans.

“I took three stones and floated them and took pictures, and it just sort of grew from there,” Glob says simply. “Eventually I thought: ‘I should really visit 111 lochans because then I’ll have floated 333 stones.’ It has been magical. I’d actually like to do 3,333.”

Numbers play a big part in Glob’s work, but she is reluctant to reveal why. When asked why a lot of what she does seems to involve multiples of three, she simply smiles and says: “That’s for people to find out.”

Glob was born in Denmark in 1944. Her father was an archaeologist, and from a young age she remembers the thrill of going with him to “scrape the moss off things”. As a child she hated school, but one day when she was 12 the teacher got the class working with clay. Straight away she was hooked. At the age of 13 she started taking evening classes and her parents bought her a kick wheel for her 14th birthday. Shortly after that, Glob left school to dedicate herself to ceramics.

From 1959 until 1962 she studied under the renowned potter Gutte Eriksen. Then in 1968, after brief spells in Scotland, France and Ireland, she moved to the abandoned early warning station at Balnakyle with her husband, three children and “a ton of clay”.

A deserted military base might sound like an unlikely place for an artists’ colony to spring up, but in the late Sixties and early Seventies Balnakyle was a thriving cultural centre. “At first we were just five or six craftspeople there,” says Glob, “but then it was advertised in the early Seventies through the national press that there was space for artists who wanted to come, so after that there was a big influx of people.”

More than three decades later, in 1999, Glob bought a croft on the shores of Loch Eribol and set about building her dream home. It took four architects and as many years, but she is clearly delighted with the result – a huge, airy house with a barrel-vaulted ceiling and stunning views across the water to Ben Hope.

Now that the house is finally complete, she is in the process of turning the grounds into a sculpture garden.

“I’ve planted about 3,000 native trees and a few foreign ones,” she says, “and there are already lots of pieces scattered around. What I’m dreaming of is when the trees are a bit higher, but I’ve already started making the footpath. My strimmer is my pencil now. There will be a path that will go on for 100 miles and get nowhere.”

Squelching around from sculpture to sculpture, it’s easy to see that, in a year or two, Lotte Glob’s garden will be a truly magical place. Were he alive today, Scotland’s most famous artist/gardener, Ian Hamilton Findlay, would doubtless approve.

• Floating Stones is published by Watermill Books, and sets of three stones in signed boxes are available to buy from the Watermill. A retrospective of Lotte Glob’s work will be at the gallery from 25 July. For more info, see www.aberfeldywatermill.com