Self-Portrait Dreaming of Portavadie (2019)  23” x 27”
Stained Glass light box, permanent collection, National Museum of Scotland.

"Portavadie was an idyllic, unspoilt corner of Scotland. My grandad had a tiny cottage there. There was no electricity or running water, but it was his pride and joy and we all remembered those summers as the happiest times of our lives.
In the 1970s, 110 acres of land around my grandad’s cottage were completely transformed into a construction site and a concrete workers village was built to house hundreds of workers, costing £14 million of tax payers’ money.  The shallow bay we had loved to bathe in had explosives placed in it, to deepen it and turn it into a dry dock.  The sandy beach became sheer cliffs. The whole area around it was devastated. But it quickly became apparent that there were too few orders for this type of platform and the site at Portavadie became obsolete before it was even completed. The company went bankrupt, leaving the government with an embarrassing mess to clean up.  Portavadie was described in the press as the ‘most expensive man-made hole in Europe".