Jason Hicklin | Skye: The Vast Silence Boxed Set Launch

...Jason Hicklin works a range between, walking Skye to its watery limits, connecting the Atlantic world through an engraved silence. This seems true to the place in its luminous specifics, the machair fibers of the paper imprinted with the small ink marks that together make a representation of life. Every image is in a sequence of time and place, the first glimpse giving way to sketchbook, notebook, the tugging memory that stays in the mind’s eye miles away, the paper, the press and the slow turn of the heavy wheel a composition that raises the stony bed of the sea to the heavenly light of the sky.

This is landscape as a dream book of the actual, the cliffs and hills a pulse of dark through lochs and sea. The effect is always up, and this is the truth of the matter, the compact of millennia scrimmed in the metal of etching plate, the acid of human history overlaid on the wax of the earth.
Together, Hicklin’s islands form a chorus of light and water, with Skye the melody that joins each to the other. His etchings, like his watercolours, are variations on a theme as old as time, given new tone and accent by the infinite variety of the rising world, silence the space between the music of what happens, in all its intimate, planetary scale.

- Nicolas Allen