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During his residency at Drumlanrig Castle, Sebastián Espejo approached painting as a practice of attentive wonder – observing the subtle gestures of light, the shifting rhythms of the landscape and the fleeting moments in which nature and perception meet.
The castle, with its centuries-old stone, Baroque architecture, and the layers of history held within the Buccleuch Collection, offered a quiet presence, a lens through which the artist considered his own act of looking.
In this space, time unfolds differently. The sun appears briefly, casting red and yellow across the landscape, while thick skies turn blue or pink, swallowing the world and reshaping it in unexpected ways. Trees dissolve into forests, forests into figures; trunks shed their summer skins, and leaves make final, silent encounters with the flight of birds. Wind and water trace the passage of days, while night transforms fallen matter into black mud. Mushrooms bloom on decaying trunks, shoots push tentatively through wet earth, and the cycles of life quietly persist.
Espejo’s paintings capture these ephemeral transformations.
The castle and its surroundings become both canvas and collaborator, a place where memory, nature, and history converge. Occasional Blue invites us to enter this suspended world, to witness the delicate poetry of change, and to inhabit the fleeting moments when light, colour and matter meet.
Artist-in-Residence Programme | HeritageXplore x The Dot Project
