This piece uses the processes of making to unpick the mechanisms of myth, making visible the ways in which the Highlands have come to be imprinted with a romanticised identity. The piece then uses participation to set out how the reductive, romanticised conception of the Highlands might be subverted and nuanced through a recognition of the multifaceted narratives inherent in the Scottish landscape.

One of the earliest ‘correct’ and ostensibly ‘neutral’ maps of Scotland is overprinted with a collage of Scottish iconography collated from postcards. The process of collaging this iconography — romanticised depictions of glens, lochs, bagpipers, thistles, stags and highland cows — mirrors the merging together of various political discourses that have come to inform the Highland myth over time.

The act of then printing the plate under pressure onto the ‘neutral’ map mimics the process of impressing the myth onto the collective imagination. The resulting graphic is of a territory consumed by its own myth, for, as Roland Barthes and Edward Said have theorised, myths can come to replace the very thing they purport to portray.

Onto the ‘myth map’ a second map is then printed, this time showing the location of various industries and land uses across the country. The map forms the surface of an inflated, cushion-like form; a comment on the dominance, or overinflation, of the romantic Highland narrative.

Into this inflated cushion participants poke pins at specific points of industry. By pin-pointing places of industry — and by extension recognising narratives in the Scottish landscape beyond picture-postcard beauty — the map, and the myth, deflate.