Moira Third

My name is Moira Third, I am a professional Artist and maker working from my small attic studio in Glenmuick, a beautiful, romantic highland Glen in Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park, an area of outstanding beauty, wild and remote, the changing seasons are much more apparent here, geese and migratory birds are a transient reminder.
A walk up the Glen reveals a landscape to rival a Sir Edwin Landseer painting; furnished with stags, waterfalls, heather moorland, snow capped mountains and a dramatic loch. Whilst the more gentle birch woodlands around my house and the river which tumbles its way along the bottom of my garden is a sanctuary for flora and fauna and an open invitation to daydream. I spend lots of time outdoors, becoming part of this picture as often as I can. We still have an irrational fear of the wilderness and more so after dark, when night falls here in the wild there are no street lights to illuminate and moonlight serves only to transform the known. Things become shapes and forms, familiar and yet unfamiliar. My stripped back imagery embraces the  dreamlike; landscape, animals, birds, objects- not facsimiles of the real thing but a shadow form, an idea if you will; drenched in moonlight, devoid of detail, recognisable but changed.
A pared back romantic sense of North is to be found in my work derived from the fairytale, folklore and my Celtic heritage  and my intention is always to evoke quiet contemplation. I would like the viewer to experience liminality, sensing the space between the real and the imagined, the dream and the waking moment, dusk and dawn.

I studied Fine Art at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen and have both an Honours and a Masters degree from there.
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Having lost my hearing as a result of a viral infection I have had to adjust to many challenges and changes. The white hare featured in much of my embroidered work is for me an analogy for the ability to change, adapt, transform and represents the resilience of the survival instinct.

My stitched work is made firstly by painting artists canvas, this is important to me, it’s not traced or printed on a computer  but a freehand drawing and painting, original in both idea and process.I then layering with millions of tiny stitches, using only straight stitch and just the needle, guided by my hand on my domestic sewing machine (this of course with a profusion of richly coloured thread). The background painting can be glimpsed at times through the thread, but it’s totality will remain hidden, a secret landscape. Simplicity is at the very heart of my work​.