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 opens 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. 

 

Yes by a burn in Achnagairn woods  /  the gleam that lives among the leaves  /  silvers our land, lights luminous globes,  /  lamps that shine in the darkest weather

 

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.

 

Looking over to Hoy from Citadel, Stromness, Orkney

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. 

 

All photos are by Rebecca Marr and all poetry by Valerie Gillies. Discover more of their work here