A visual artist and author exploring how quietness, slowness and attentiveness can be ecological.
I'm a visual artist and author based in Orkney, an island environment dominated by wind and water. I write non-fiction and lyric essays, and make intricately detailed drawings built up from a simple repetitive mark-making process that mirrors natural processes of growth and accumulation.
My most recent work, in both drawing and writing, is an extended meditation on water and time. Water's a good teacher. It's an everyday presence in our lives, but it's full of paradoxes: it's mutable but also eternal, it's fresh and also ancient, it's both local and global, its surface is at once reflective and transparent, it's a boundary and a solvent, it's microscopic and vast, it's intimate and familiar and yet also deeply strange. We can learn a lot from water.
I’m interested in exploring how creative practice can be a form of contemplative practice, how solitude and community are entwined, and how quietness, slowness and attentiveness can be ecological.
Originally trained at Edinburgh College of Art and the Slade UCL, I have a PhD in creative writing and a Master's in Environmental Philosophy. My memoir The Clearing was published by Little, Brown in 2020. I have taught at several art schools and now teach at the University of the Highlands and Islands and mentor artists and writers 1:1.