A long-standing exhibition at the University of Stirling’s Pathfoot Building focuses on a group of pioneering Scottish artists who, as early as the 1970s and 1980s, anticipated the climate crisis. They share a common instinct to engage with the topography, ecology and wildernesses of the north, stretching from Scotland’s northwestern coastland and archipelago to Canada’s High Arctic and, in one case, to the North Pole itself.

History also plays its part, notably the economic disruption known as the Highland Clearances, which in the 19th century saw the forced emigration of communities due to industrial-scale sheep farming, leading to widespread deforestation. This scar has attuned these artists to the plight of today’s indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle and those in other precarious environments.