Artist
Calum Wallis
Landscape & Drawing
Calum Wallis
Themes:
Landscape & Wilderness, Time, Repetition, Expanded Drawing Practices, Erosion and Transformation.
Meet Calum Wallis
Calum Wallis is a landscape artist from the Highlands of Scotland. His childhood fostered a close relationship with the landscape, with climbing hills and trees and swimming in rivers an important part of growing up.
Moving to the city of Dundee to study Fine Art in 2013, sprouted the first saplings of his landscape art practice, including exploring ways expanded drawing could interact with the wilderness.
His artwork attempts to find ways of relating the limited scope of a human lifetime to the great pool of deep time. Largely this is done by means of drawing, print and film, which are all made with an eye on geology. Through detailed and repeated observation of very specific geological features, his work attempts to see stone in its true, liquid, changing state and to understand that the world under us is not static, even for a second.
Calum is also a life drawing teacher at DJCAD.
Education
Calum studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee and later completed a Master’s in Drawing there in 2023, graduating with distinction.
Biography
After moving to Dundee in 2013 to study Fine Art, Calum developed the foundation of his landscape-based practice.
There, he focused on observing geological erosion over the course of his lifetime, work that earned him a distinction.
Since then, he has exhibited widely across the UK and received public funding to investigate the Highland Boundary and Great Glen Fault Lines through drawing and film.
He has delivered talks on his practice at the Geological Society in London, DJCAD in Dundee, and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh.
Calum has taught life drawing at DJCAD since 2023 and has led a wide range of drawing classes and workshops for both young people and adults. These include self-organised outdoor drawing events as well as workshops associated with exhibitions and arts organisations. He also taught a masterclass in stone lithography at the DCA Print Workshop in Dundee.
Awards
Calum exhibited as the featured artist in the Society of Scottish Artists group exhibition The Land at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock.
He has exhibited broadly across the UK and received public funding for a major drawing-and-film project exploring the Highland Boundary and Great Glen Fault Lines.
Professional language Experience
From 2018 to 2019, Calum spent eleven months living and working in Sicily, where he learned practical skills such as building furniture and dry stone walling. Last year he sailed across the North Sea from Shetland to Norway and back on a 100-year-old herring boat to deliver an exhibition as part of a cultural exchange with Norway, celebrating 500 years of the Norwegian national constitution.
