Sitting half-way up Salisbury Crags in Edinburgh, The Radical Road got its name from the unemployed West of Scotland weavers who were set to work paving a track round the Crags, following their failed efforts during the Radical War of 1820. This Scottish Insurrection came about as a result of social unrest from workers fed up with what they perceived to be unjust working and living conditions from the government. April 1820 gave rise to a national strike which began in Glasgow, with protest leaders across the country arrested and some executed or transported to the colonies for their actions. After King George IV visited the city in 1822, author Sir Walter Scott suggested that unemployed weavers could be used to build a footpath around the route. As Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow has said ‘Apparently his idea was that these political insurrectionists would be better employed creating the path out of the hard Dolerite stone than developing revolutionary ideas, but the legacy is ambiguous. It has always seemed to me that the road runs alongside the rock itself as if they’re both permanent reminders of the relation of the struggle for social justice and the assertion of the earth itself.’
In 2023, I started to collect plants that grew freely alongside The Radical Road. Aware of the revolutionary history of the path, I wanted to use these plants to document a period in history that has left little visible trace. As Riach observed, the Radical Road represents both the ‘relation for social justice and the assertion of the earth itself’. It seemed to me too that the social history of the Crags was inextricably bound up with the natural world and in documenting the flora that persists alongside the Radical Road, I also wanted to explore the tension between these two things.

I photographed plants at various stages of the life cycle, usually bringing them back to the studio and pressing them first. The resulting images with their ‘ghost’ shadows and variable focus, refer back to the earliest photographic experiments where objects – often plant specimens – were exposed to light sensitive plates. The resulting prints – which use traditional as well as contemporary imaging techniques – look at the natural world through a lens mediated by technology. Aware of the complex relationship between science, nature and commerce that are all implicated when we look at something as apparently simple as a flower.

Wendy McMurdo, 2024