Farm Signs

Claudia Massie

As a landscape painter and a rural dweller, much of my time is spent pootering about the unclassified back roads in search of interesting landscapes to paint and new tracks to explore with the dogs.

A perpetual element in these wanderings is the farmed landscape, be it well ordered tracts of lowland arable or rough upland sheep grazing and each farm, of course, has its own identity.

I have come to develop a keen interest in the names and, specifically, the name signs of these farms and have begun documenting them in a series of photographs.

 

I like the obscurity of farm names, so frequently the most ancient names in an area; their original often meaning lost or mangled by the passing of time.

 I am also drawn to the actual signage itself which can also have a wonderful, subtle language and artistry of its own.

 

 

Claudia Massie is the visual arts editor for NLP and is a successful artist in her own right, exhibiting regularly across Scotland. Peruse her work here. Her most recent article as Arts correspondent to the Spectator arts blog can be found here.