ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the environmentalisation of the artistic and academic approach to the energy industry in today’s Scotland with a focus on the interaction of environmental aesthetics and strategies of self-representation in Scotland’s twenty-first-century photography and film. It pays particular interest to the representations of the oil industry and renewable energy in Roseanne Watt’s filmpoem Sullom (2014) and in the photo-textual primer ebban an’ flowan by Alec Finlay, Laura Watts, and Alistair Pebbles (2015). It examines the ways these contemporary poets and visual artists engage with the environmental issue to “re/view, re/form, re/search, re/use, re/create, re/act” (Brown, 2014) the allegedly “wild” lands (or seas, for that matter) of Scotland. It does so by considering the interlaced social, political, economic, and environmental issues that affect and inform the way the Scottish arts contribute to the global and pressing concern for environmental sustainability. The selected body of works and practices are viewed within the broader frame of reference of today’s increasing preoccupation with environmental issues and sustainable energy, as well as within the powerful political and cognitive processes of globalisation and internationalisation.
