Almost every day in life, I step out of my house and into a wood, accompanied by my dog. For me, this wood is a place of sanctuary and reflection; a place where nothing stays still.

For the last eight years, I have been in the wood on my own in all weathers and in all seasons. Unlike Dominique Cameron, I haven't taken drawing materials out into the wood, but I have photographed it and written about it at length in a series of haiku short poems, counting out the syllables as I go on the fingers of both hands. I've even ventured out in the pitch black in search of a lost dog.

So the minute Cameron's small book, The Wood, dropped on my doormat, I was intrigued. Created to accompany her forthcoming exhibition of the same name at Fidra Fine Art in Gulllane, East Lothian, this beautiful book charts a nine-month period during which Cameron ventured into a wood near her Fife home every other day armed with drawing and painting materials.

At 3am on the first day of 2018, she even gathered up her drawing materials and took herself into the wood until dusk started to spread through the trees. "It wasn't pre-planned," she explains. "I was wide awake at 3am and I thought… I really want to go in at night so I walked into the wood with my head-torch and started painting in the black. By the third hour, I had turned off my head-torch because there was a full moon. To be honest, the torch was casting shadows and scaring me!"

From winter 2017 through to spring 2018, Cameron kept a notebook to hand, jotting down her haiku-like thoughts in-between planting herself on different parts of the forest floor and losing herself in trying to convey the heart and soul of this most complicated of spaces. These notes-to-self are sprinkled in among images of her work which is made up of large sheets of mixed media on paper, charcoal and ink on paper and oils on panel or board. The works in colour – some of which are circular in shape – are all smaller and were executed at her home studio on her return from the wood.

"At times, I used to feel like I was melting into the landscape," says Cameron, who trained as a photographer at Napier University in the early 1990s before going on to gain a Masters in 2014 from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee.

"I'd be there for three to five hours at a time, sitting on the forest floor with my paper spread out in front of me, bending over for hours at a time. Squirrels and birds would gradually come up and sit on the paper. I'd see a deer out of the corner of my eye.

"The environment completely changed when the snow came. I have paintings which have snow and paint on them. I'm definitely not a fair-weather painter although I did have occasional days when it rained so hard that even under trees I'd be drenched. I only had to pack up early and leave the wood twice because of the bad weather. I'm not all that interested in summertime. A space feels to me more visceral in wintertime."

Cameron only ever met a couple of people during her exploration trips into the deep, dark wood.

In an extract from her diary on October 30, 2017, entitled, The Quiet of Rain, she writes about meeting a man with his dog. There's a pin-sharp brevity to her descriptions which pull you in as both reader and viewer, making you feel like you are inhabiting the same space in the wood; breathing in the same chill in the air.

Monday. North wind. Bright, cold. The buzzard ushers me into the wood, sharp crack of twigs under foot. I decide to cross the burn but half way across realise its too deep so turn back and clamber my way up the bank where I am met by a man and his dog. This is my first encounter with someone in the wood. He asks if I am ok and I feel embarrassed by my clumsiness. I introduce my self as an artist as if that might explain things and he asks if I am famous to which I laugh and apologise and say no. […] I paint the fragile day. It starts to rain, the drops settle on the paper. I stop, not wanting the rain to obliterate my marks, carefully roll up the paper and quietly take my leave.

This new series from Cameron follows on from a couple of immersive projects in which she carried out intensive pictorial observations around the north east town of Montrose before turning her attention to Leith in Edinburgh last year.

The resulting exhibitions at Wall Projects in Montrose and Fidra Fine Art (recently relocated from North Berwick to Gullane), brought her work to the attention of a wider audience.

There is speed and movement in all Cameron's work. Her rapid quick-fire style of making marks, coupled with a photographer's eye for tone and composition, makes for a lyrical mix. Her work is on the one hand, simple and representational, while on the other, complex and mysterious; a scumble of rain and snow marks catching fleeting weather patterns as they blow through the woods.

Her titles are lyrical too; from I hear the geese fly south to The sky in the burn, there's a sense that, as viewers, we are instantly planted on the forest floor as the seasons ebb and flow.

As humans, we all have an in-built desire to understand our environment. As an artist, Cameron, who moved to Fife fairly recently, feels that need more keenly than most. "The repeated action of going back to a place helps me build a relationship with that place," she explains. "It heightens my senses as well as helping me make sense of my locale. I don't want to be travelling thousands of miles away. I'm not interested in the picturesque. I'm interested in the ordinary."

The Wood: Dominique Cameron, Fidra Fine Art, 7-8 Stanley Road, Gullane, EH31 2AD, 01620 249389, www.fidrafineart.co.uk, September 1 – 30. Open Tue-Sat 11am-5pm, Sunday 12.5pm (closed Monday)

CRITIC'S CHOICE

Artists David Harding and Ross Birrell have been collaborating for 12 years and in keeping with their own interests, their work explores the hinterland between politics, music, poetry and place, composition and colour. For the last month a new work, Triptych, has been on show at Trinity Apse in Chalmers Close, Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival's commissions programme.

Absence and loss are the cornerstones of this affecting work, the centrepiece of which is three separate screens showing a filmed performance of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No 3: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976). This film features a collaboration between the Athens State Orchestra and the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra. The orchestras are filmed from the back of the central screen. Syrian soprano Rasha Rizk eventually comes into view to sing a haunting 15th-century lament on loss through war.

Nothing changes.

Together with the setting – Trinity Apse is a section of what once was a Gothic kirk – the vaulted ceiling and light from the windows converge to create an immersive timber-shivering experience.

Originally created for contemporary art festval, documenta 14 last year, the piece was filmed in Athens. There is also a new piece called Fugue, developed in collaboration with Syrian composer and violinist, Ali Moraly.

As the exhibition draws to a close, a new work, Keep me like the echo, will be performed in the nearby Scottish Parliament's Garden Lobby, this evening. The final recital with feature the artists’ collaborator Ali Moraly (composer and violinist) along with invited classical musicians members of the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra (SEPO), and the Damascus Quintet. Members of the Glasgow School of Art Choir will also take part.

Ross Birrell & David Harding: Keep me like the echo, Scottish Parliament

Edinburgh, EH99 1SP, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ross-birrell-david-harding-keep-me-like-the-echo-tickets-47429605226. Today (Sat August 25), 6.30pm-8pm)

DON'T MISS

Jenny Matthews: Colori, Union Gallery, 4 Drumsheugh Place, Edinburgh, EH3 7PT, 0131 225 8779, www.uniongallery.co.uk. Until September 3.

Jenny Matthews is known for her exquisite watercolour paintings of flowers but her most recent work sees her venturing into new territory in the shape of landscape painting. Matthews travelled from Edinburgh to the Italian town of Fabriano last summer to undertake a two-week residency, hoping to paint the famous fields of flowers on the Piano Grande plateau in neighbouring Umbria.

Finding the roads around the town blocked because of earthquakes, she found a paucity of flowers and instead turned to the hills around Fabriano for inspiration.

The resulting works are currently on show exhibited for the first time at Edinburgh’s Union Gallery; Italian landscapes, saturated with colour, from the deep blue of the mountains in early morning to the coral skies of sunset. The title of the exhibition is the Italian word for “colour”.