When the Grass Dances
Over several years, photographer Rebecca Marr and poet Valerie Gillies have cultivated a deep, shared engagement with the world of grasses. Through distinct but complementary practices, they have explored this often-overlooked subject with care and curiosity. Their dialogue - carried out in different regions of Scotland - now culminates in When the Grass Dances, a new book of poetry and photography, and a collaborative exhibition, Buss o Gress / Tuft of Grass, which opened on Saturday 9th August at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.
Working in parallel - Marr between Orkney and the Highlands, Gillies in Galloway, the Borders, South Lanarkshire, and Edinburgh - the two artists exchanged photographs and poems, building a creative dialogue across distance and time. This exchange shapes the structure of When the Grass Dances, where poems sit alongside photographs - sometimes in direct response, sometimes as subtle, parallel reflections. The result is a book that doesn’t just identify the plants - though it does that too, using both common and scientific names - but invites us into a relationship with them. It draws attention to the beauty, history, and resilience of grasses: plants that have shaped human life since the dawn of agriculture, and which continue to sustain life today.
Rebecca Marr’s photography reveals the incredible variety of the grasses – some growing in simple, spiky clumps, others in tall, graceful sprays. The photos don’t illustrate the poems, and the poems don’t explain the photos. Rather, the two ways of looking interact with each other, bringing fresh perspectives and richer understandings of their subjects.
Marram, Burray, Orkney
At first glance, Gillies’s poems may seem modest when read individually, each one like a single blade of grass. But as the collection unfolds they gather into something far more expansive: a richly textured meadow, alive with depth and variety. Her writing draws from many roots: folk tales, herbal knowledge, natural history, and personal experience, weaving through the lyrical and observational, the formal and the familiar. What first seems like “just grass” reveals itself as a tapestry of diversity and meaning.
Marr’s photography mirrors this depth. Her images are sensitive and exacting, attentive to the fragile but resilient character of grasses. With an almost architectural eye, she captures the structure and gesture of each plant, revealing their drama and form. Her compositions hold both clarity and complexity - a visual richness that, like Gillies’ poetry, invites us to look again, to notice what we might otherwise pass by. Together, the poems and photographs form a slow, grounding experience, rewarding the kind of close attention that our fast-paced lives often prevent.
Mat-grass found uprooted on the heath, / too harsh to eat, avoided by the sheep, / take these tufts into your hand, / feel the grass of bairnheid land.
The book, and its accompanying exhibition, invites an immersive, attentive experience that mirrors the artists’ own process of creation. The work gently challenges us to slow down and reorient our way of seeing - a process which feels necessary in a world shaped by habit and haste. As philosopher Malcom Turvey notes, "Normal vision misses a lot; art helps us see more and better." It’s this expanded seeing - slow, engaged, deliberate - that Marr and Gillies helps us achieve.
This meditative way of seeing resonates with Ola Gorie’s own collections, many of which are inspired by the quiet beauty of grasses, meadows, and wild landscapes.
Our collection Mistral, named for the wind that sweeps down the Rhône Valley and across the Mediterranean marsh meadows, carries with it the texture of grasses swaying in the breeze. Its flowing design reflects movement and grace, much like Marr’s photographic studies of plants in motion.
The Meadowlark Collection is inspired by birds in full song, framed by delicate seeded grasses. Ola nods to the luscious, intricate designs of the Arts and Crafts Movement in this collection:
Machair takes its name from the fertile coastal plains of western Scotland and Ireland. These sandy meadows, rich with grasses, reeds, and wildflowers, shift constantly in the wind and tides. The collection reflects this living landscape of movement and resilience.
