One of the things we love about working in the Art Collection at the University of Stirling is the surprising connections that we often find across works and artists. This year, when we were planning our Pathfoot exhibition series, we found an interesting symmetry between two works by very different artists.
Coming Autumn by Brandon Logan and Dumyat, Mine Wood (Rewild) by Kieran Dodds have been brought together in Gallery One of the Pathfoot Building and provide us with a lens by which to consider how contemporary artists are reinterpreting landscape and heritage in new and exciting ways.

Brandon Logan is an emerging talent in Scottish art. After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2018, he has gone on to have solo shows in the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness. His innovative style involves a slow, meticulous process of setting a warp with string and then flooding the warp with paint. The resulting works create rhythmic, soothing meditative topographies.


Some snaps from The Pier Arts Centre, a place which greatly inspires Logan.
We were lucky to visit Brandon in his studio in Stromness in August last year, a few weeks before the opening of his solo show, Skeleton Stories, at the Pier Arts Centre. We loved Brandon’s playful but disciplined approach to his work and his love and reverence for his local arts institution. We dream of having such a positive impact on future artists!

We picked out the work Coming Autumn very instinctively, knowing that its home should be in Pathfoot. The colours and pattern felt entirely appropriate for our space and we love how Brandon was inspired by Barbara Hepworth and the domesticity of the Pier Arts, something very akin to our Pathfoot setting. When we learned its name was Coming Autumn, this cemented our decision. In our life as a university collection, Autumn is so significant to the rhythm of how we work. It is the time when we refresh our galleries and new students arrive, brimming with nervous enthusiasm. Visually, it is also when our campus looks best, bursting with colour and late summer golden sunshine. These seasonal rhythms are also of importance to Logan as an islander. He reflects:
“While the most immediately clear thing a painter might draw upon is the colour, which arrives in the islands in strange quantities and qualities, I’m influenced too by the cycles which dictate that arrival, and much of daily life with it – weather, seasons. Colour in that sense becomes a bodily thing which we receive in doses determined by the turning of the year”.
He goes on to say, “the cycles of seasons mirror the human cycles of birth, life, death, as a history constantly happening, constantly beginning in a sense. Time becomes something very physically apparent when in the islands themselves, where the remnants of past lives are so visible, in ruins and wrecks. If I work by a repetitive, potentially time-based process, it might be in part due to these considerations.

Next to Coming Autumn, we are pleased to have borrowed Dumyat, Mine Wood (Rewild) from the artist Kieran Dodds. This intriguing work marks a new phase of Dodds photography and is a radical departure from his style of work.
Dodds is a non-fiction photographer known for his research-driven photo stories and portraiture. His personal work considers the interplay of environment and culture, tracing global events through daily lives and he is particularly interested in how humans shape their landscape in an age of ecological crisis.
Dodds has a deep connection to our collection. In 2020, we exhibited his work Seabird Cities, and we are lucky to have four works of his in the collection. Growing up in Bridge of Allan, Dodds describes Pathfoot as his spiritual home. It’s fitting, therefore that this new experimental direction should be on display here in Pathfoot.

In 2023, Dodds began to find inspiration in the practice of weaving his work together in a series of works titled Fabricated Land. In this radical departure from his previous work, Dodds physically cuts and weaves together images, based on standard tartan and tweed weaving patterns. The photographic textile, or ‘photoweave.’ on display Dumyat, Mine Wood (Rewild). combines a post-industrial forest and rewilded moorland around the University, landscapes that are of personal significance to the artist. By creating this work, Dodds has reappraised his understanding of the environment, questioning his childhood understanding of wild environments. These works personally resonate with me: synthesising the landscape through the lens of tartan poses some thought-provoking questions about our nation, which is in a sense its own fabricated landscape, fabricated through notions of heritage, tourism and the search for the ‘authentic’.

These works together provide an opportunity to think about our shared heritage of appreciation of land and history, roots from the breadth of the country, how even in our search for innovation, we are intrinsically tied to our contexts and land.
Coming Autumn and Dumyat, Mine Wood (Rewild) are on display in Gallery One of Pathfoot Building until 9 August 2025.
There’s a wonderful short film about Dumyat, Mine Wood (Rewild) by the filmmaker Duncan McGlynn on youtube and a lovely film of Brandon in his studio on the Ingleby website.
Written by Emma McCombie
Deputy Head of University of Stirling Collections