Based in Aberdeenshire on the edge of the Cairngorms National Park, Bethan Bray creates work rooted in landscape, material intimacy and traditional craft practices. Alongside her artistic practice, she co-runs Woodland Tannery, a small family-run traditional tannery and one of the last in Scotland still producing rawhide and bark-tanned leather entirely by hand. Working with carefully sourced hides and locally gathered bark, the tannery transforms materials that are by-products of farming, forestry and estate management into objects designed to honour both origin and place.

Bray’s artworks emerge through processes of gathering, tanning, dyeing and making. Using naturally tanned hides, foraged plant dyes, earth pigments and handmade supports, her work explores ancestry, reciprocity, death and renewal, creating pieces that sit between painting, sculpture and ecological remembrance.

The three deerskin sculptural paintings presented here were created using roe deer hides sourced from roadkill in and around Glen Lyon, Highland Perthshire. Each hide was traditionally bark tanned using locally harvested oak, willow and alder, then painted with earth pigments gathered and processed in the glen, including ochre and umber. Wooden elements were also foraged locally, embedding each work within the ecology of its place of origin.