The colours are the deepest sapphire, with shades of rich amethyst purple and dashes of emerald green washed over jagged lines and gentle curves with, at the centre, a hunched figure – part man, part safety gear – hard at work, fusing metal to metal.
It’s just a shipyard worker welding, but as a new photographic exhibition of Scotland’s industrial heritage aims to show, amid the dust and dirt of brickworks, fabrication sheds, coal bays and engineering works lurk dramatic, vibrant and evocative scenes capable of conjuring up powerful feelings from nostalgia to respect and pride.
Industry + Aesthetics will feature photographs of Scotland’s lost and rapidly declining industrial sites, in some cases capturing workers going about their everyday duties in almost theatrical spaces, while others catch the dying moments of industries that once supported hundreds of employees and dominated the landscape.
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And for a modern generation that has never fully experienced first-hand the grime, dust and sheer scale of Scottish industry in full flight, it offers a glimpse of how the working day once was for countless Scots.
The exhibition, which will be launched from today at New Lanark, itself a former industrial site, draws on survey images of industrial sites that form part of the National Record Of The Historic Environment, maintained by Historic Environment Scotland (HES).
The photographs were chosen for the exhibition after a crowd-sourcing exercise that invited participants to look at the images and choose which words, feelings and emotions were conjured up by each.
Miriam McDonald, industrial survey and record projects manager at HES and curator of the exhibition, said: “The purpose is to capture those first emotions that grab us all when we look at an industry for the first time.”
The image of the welder at his bench was captured at Ferguson Ailsa Shipyard in Port Glasgow in 2009 – more than a century after the firm was founded by the Ferguson brothers, Peter, Daniel, Robert and Louis – and long before the firm would evolve into Ferguson Marine.
The firm went on to build countless ships, churning out more than 30 vessels in seven years to help the Second World War effort before being nationalised in1977 and merging with Ailsa shipyard in Troon in 1980.
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The last civilian shipyard on the Clyde, Ferguson Marine, is now in Scottish Government control awaiting a new owner.
Another dramatic image captures scrap merchant workers in a beam of sunlight as they grapple with the task of dismantling brickmaking machines at Mayfield Brickworks in Carluke in December 2011.
Established in 1948, the brickworks was one of the last factories in Scotland to hand-make bricks.
Alongside the industrial photographs will be a series of images from the New Lanark Archive that show the once-thriving 19th-century cotton mill and associated tenement homes in decline, close to being lost forever despite being celebrated across Europe as a perfect example of industry, engineering and social reform.
The exhibition will be accompanied by contemporary pictures submitted by summer visitors to the World Heritage Site, and a series of projects from Architectural undergraduate students from Glasgow School of Art that imagine what direction industry, life and work in New Lanark could take in the future.
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Helen Martin, collections and exhibitions officer at New Lanark, said: “We are delighted to be hosting Industry + Aesthetics. We are presenting the images from HES alongside images from the New Lanark photography collection, and projects from students at the Mackintosh School of Architecture.
“The wider exhibition, Snapshots Of A Lost World: The Decline Of Scottish Industry, explores the past, present, and evolving future of New Lanark, using the Industry + Aesthetics exhibition as a jumping off point.”
Industry + Aesthetics will be on display until Sunday October 27. Entry is free. Two free photography workshops inspired by the exhibition will also take place on September 28 and October 5.
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