Land Makar

The final portrait is also the longest, as she not only includes the person portrayed but also the landscape and seasons that surround her. Margaret Tait patiently accompanies Mary Graham Sinclair on her farm on the Orkney Islands for three years to capture this seasonal rhythm of the sun and the moon in which the open landscape shows us the passing of days as “a number of canvases”, in Tait’s own words. The title is translated from Gaelic into The Poet of the Land. And this is the case, the farmer writes the furrows in the land with firm lines that work like rhyming verses or builds the tall mountain of grass with ancient wisdom as a perfect sculpture on which the farm depends. Only by watching the tenderness with which she approaches a swan sitting on her nest or the gentleness with which she strokes a calf is enough. The future of the land is written in her hands.