Gruzy is part of a developing project between Lesley Sharpe and Lee Milne, The Resident and The Tourist, that focuses on the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig, a local landmark in an area of great significance to both.
‘’A stepping stone for giants, the ‘dumpling’ we used to call it, Paddy’s Milestone; a halfway point between Glasgow and Belfast, ‘fairy rock’, once a haven for smugglers now a sanctuary for gannets, the heart of a volcano, a competition stone, forever shapeshifting, an island in limbo’’
The island serves as all of these things providing social, historical and geological matter for each artist to explore whilst questioning their changing relationships to the area and the elan that draws humans towards islands.
Gruzy is an assembly of printed images, associated with the island and the surrounding landscape, exploring vocabularies of information, material, colour and scale.