In 2010 Alicia Bruce spent the summer collaborating with the residents of Menie, a small community in Aberdeenshire. The area was catapulted into the press following the threat of compulsory purchase orders on several of their homes as part of Trump International’s planned golf course and housing development. In Bruce’s series of portraits she approached the subjects from an art historical stand point, with the residents restaging compositions from famous paintings. This image shows Mike and Sheila Forbes re-enacting Grant Wood’s sinister painting, ‘American Gothic’. Although parodied numerous times, Bruce evokes something of the tension in the original painting, with the Forbes defiant subjects ready to fight for their land.