LONDON.- How is it that one small isle, miniscule compared with the Earth’s landmass, should draw so many artists and have such a profound impact on three sculptors – Julie Brook, Steve Dilworth and Angela Palmer.

This exhibition considers the ways in which the Isle of Harris’ ancient materiality, elemental force and enduring mystery has influenced the work of these three artists. The title for this exhibition is from a poem titled The Glen by Kathleen Jamie, from her 2015 collection of poems, Bonniest Companie. In this poem, the speaker quietly appreciates a Scottish glen on an April morning, conscious of their position as a temporary human observer of the landscape.

Julie Brook (b.1961) is a British artist who for thirty years has roamed, lived and worked in a succession of uninhabited and remote landscapes in Northwest Scotland (and beyond). Her sculptural work is often transient in nature, inspired by and made from the materials of the landscape itself. Brook documents these transformations through film, photography and drawing, which then become the expression of the work.

Central to this exhibition is Julie Brook’s Winter Wall, a circular stone construction which she built in Aird Mhór in 2019. The sculpture is made of Gneiss, a 3-billion-year-old material which forms the bedrock of Harris. Three years after building Winter Wall, Brook returned to the work to capture Harris’ midwinter light upon it – a selection of these photographs taken in 2022 feature alongside new drawings made in retrospect. Other significant works represented in this exhibition will be Brook’s Firestack (2016) and her Surrag Path (2023), both made on the remote Aird Mhor and Aird Bheag peninsulas on the Harris border with Lewis.

Alongside this more recent work by Julie Brook, Pangolin London displays a monumental painting, measuring over 3 metres long, made in 1991 when she was living in solitude on nearby Jura. As well as revealing an earlier chapter in Brook’s practice, the painting demonstrates Brook’s desire to get closer to the landscapes in which she immerses herself, an impulse which has underscored her work from her time on Jura to the present day.

For Steve Dilworth (b. 1949), the Isle of Harris has been home for over forty years. He has both a deep respect for the landscape as well as recognising the absurdity of his position there – as writer Ian Sinclair has put it in a previous catalogue essay, ‘of man trying to live, play at domesticity, in these magnificent, pre-human places’. This exhibition presents a selection of works made by Dilworth between 2000 and 2024, to include carvings from Harris’ ancient Dunite stone to distinctive sculptures built from the inside out, encased with capsules of air, water, or other materials – referred to by Dilworth as secrets.

Pangolin London is presenting – for the first time – a poignant sculpture by Dilworth titled Mountain Air, conceived in this way from the inside out. On the night before Midsummer’s Day in 2001, Dilworth climbed a mountain on Harris to trap air within a glass phial using a blow torch. Enclosed within the bronze carapace of this sculpture, shaped to rock gently on its axis, is the phial of air. ‘What you’re trying to do is make three-dimensional poetry’, says Dilworth of his approach; ‘by weaving these elements, by changing the form and the density, you try to create an object that is stronger and more powerful than the space it occupies.’

Angela Palmer (b. 1957) explores time through material history, led by her interest in the stories stones can tell and her curiosity for what lies beneath the surface. This exhibition presents a selection of sculptures by Palmer comprised of 2.5-billion-year-old White Anorthosite rock which she acquired from a disused quarry on the Isle of Harris after a six-year search. Each sculpture is gently carved and polished – the artist being keen for the stones to ‘tell their story’. Underlying Palmer’s work is an acute awareness of the Anthropocene, which goes hand in hand with her appreciation of Harris’ geology and concepts of Deep Time. ‘As modern humans, we have occupied less than 0.07% of the Earth’s existence’, she writes, ‘yet in that infinitesimally short time, we have done untold damage to the planet.’

Regarding her chosen material, White Anorthosite, Palmer elaborates: ‘it is the same type of rock that was found on the moon and recovered by astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971; it became known as the Genesis Rock and to this day remains a precious specimen held under high security at NASA’ as Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.’

The Isle of Harris has attracted artists from further afield for its extraordinary landscape, often described as resembling elsewhere in the cosmos. Indeed, Stanley Kubrick found the surface of Harris to be the ideal landscape for resembling Jupiter in his 2001 film, A Space Odyssey. Last year, two Pangolin London directors – Polly Bielecka and Peter Millican – set off on their own odyssey to reach Harris by boat. The exhibition’s accompanying catalogue includes a text by Bielecka, reflecting on the relationships that Julie Brook, Steve Dilworth and Angela Palmer have with Harris, which she began writing on a previous expedition to visit artist Julie Brook where she was involved in the firing of one of Brook’s Firestacks.