A seminal artist has touched on eternal truths via her obsession with water.

One of the most significant Scottish artists of her generation, Elizabeth Ogilvie works with a fusion of art, architecture and science, using water itself as her main medium and research focus. Ogilvie’s work embraces universal and timeless concerns, offering her public a sort of innocent pleasure at the same time as underlining critical philosophical and ecological issues.

Using the language of our times – installation and video – Ogilvie produces vast environments dedicated to water in various states. Ogilvie regards water as having a remarkably collaborative nature. Bringing water inside introduces an artificial state. By creating an artificial state inside, Ogilvie’s intention is to bring others attention to the distance between their everyday life practices and elemental resources.

Taking and isolating water from its natural habitat highlights its fundamental qualities and therefore points back to the place of origin.

Ogilvie’s projects are a testament to her love of the natural world and desire to pass on appreciation through her installations. As an artist Ogilvie has a role to play in conveying complex questions which might promote awareness and a greater consideration towards the environment. Art is an excellent communicator of contemporary issues and can address such profound topics.

Her research involves collaborating with scientists and engineers, giving Ogilvie the possibility to expand and extend her knowledge of how technology can support interaction between artist and audience. The success of Bodies of Water lies with Ogilvie’s commitment to the audience enabling them to interact with, experience, explore one of our most precious natural resources. Through a series of installations the viewer is offered the opportunity to share in Ogilvie’s experience of sensorial engagement within an environment. The effect of the work is then to affect.

The projects reflect what the anthropologist Dr Wendy Gunn wrote about her recent installations, including Bodies of Water and The Liquid Room: ‘Visitors were asked to immerse themselves within experience itself. This experience relates to the body and the installation is designed to draw people in through the senses. Drawing people in is another way of bringing their lives into the work; it is another way of learning new things.’

“My interest in water lies deep within my personality and ancestral background. My mother’s people, the Fergusons, came from the remote archipelago of St Kilda.

This seminal island and its grouping of stacs far out in the Atlantic fired my imagination from early childhood as did my mother’s striking accounts of living there off and on as a child, often left with relatives by her father who came from the island but had emigrated to Glasgow and continued to travel back and forth in his yacht.

Owing to this personal history, my inbuilt compass always points me North and to remote locations.

While this island within directly influenced earlier stages of the work shown at the Arnolfini and Talbot Rice Gallery, for example, I can still identify its power within my current practice.”