AIR, SEA AND SOIL: WRITING INTO PLACE
SEPTEMBER 2023
PLACE: BIRSAY, ORKNEY, SCOTLAND
The Museum of Loss and Renewal was delighted to invite applications for the Group Residency AIR, SEA AND SOIL: WRITING INTO PLACE.
AIR, SEA AND SOIL is The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Group Residency programme that takes place in Scotland’s Orkney Islands and is a partnership with the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness.
WRITING INTO PLACE took place at Linkshouse, in the historic area of Birsay beside the Atlantic Ocean, and at sites of natural and archaeological importance in Orkney, accessible by foot and vehicle. The Group Residency was devised by Tracy Mackenna (The Museum of Loss and Renewal) and was lead by Tracy and invited partner Emily Orley (artist, researcher and educator). Between us we activate diverse skills and expertise when we employ text, language, writing, publishing and performative modes of working to investigate place(making), (un)belonging, memory, (personal)narratives and imaginary futures.
The Group Residency was of particular interest to those who make, think and write in experimental ways about, around, into and out of place. Applications were welcomed from those working in creative practices, writing, poetry, performance, publishing, scenography, research, education etc. and those who have a strong interest in ‘writing’ as an area of practice.
‘Writing’ is understood as creative and critical, and situated writing as an area of practice in its most expanded sense. In other words, writing that is experimental, inventive in its form, and responds to place.
FOCAL POINTS
– Immersive experience
– Writing in an expanded sense
– Semi-structured programme
– Co-learning
– Individual practice
– Collective platform for encounters
– Expert facilitators and guest contributors
– Supportive, caring, non-hierarchical environment
– Fully catered
– Interdisciplinarity
– Technologies
– Books, reading, voicing
– Experimentation
– Location specific, including Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site
– Imagining futures
– Human—non-human relationships
– Cultural and environmental ecologies
– Memory, loss, renewal
CONTEXT
The Group Residency was devised around the relationships of ‘Air, Sea and Soil’, encompassing the Orkney Islands’ remarkable natural environment. Residents were welcomed to the historic Birsay area, where the bespoke programme took place in the excellent accommodation and work facilities of the Pier Arts Centre’s Linkshouse. Expert introductions to the Group Residency’s subject matter and to Orkney’s land, culture, and contemporary issues e.g. ecology and renewable energy were provided by the facilitators and guest contributors to the programme, and through visits to Neolithic Orkney’s World Heritage Sites.
AIM
The aim of the Group Residency was to develop ‘writing’ and approaches to ‘writing’ that are experimental, inventive in their form, and that respond to place, in a specific environment. Creating a new international network was made possible by bringing together residents from a range of countries and practice and research areas.
The Group Residency provided opportunities for creative practitioners and researchers to share and establish a bank of knowledge and creative strategies, both globally interconnected and hyper local, digital and analogue, for imagining new responses to places and the multiple, layered and contested histories they hold.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gods of the Earth/Gods of the Sea, (with Nicholas Sloan), Portland stone, 74 x 210 x 330 cm.
Commissioned by the Pier Arts Centre and sited in Rousay, Orkney in 2005
APPROACH
The Group Residency provided a partially-structured and hands-on programme of site-based ways of working that were shared to enable residents to develop their skills and understanding of how to investigate site as part of a creative practice and for public presentation to a global audience.
The programme was designed around a bespoke itinerary, with carefully crafted indoor sessions that focused on expanded approaches to ‘writing’, discussion, presentation, making and sharing. Outdoor sessions introduced residents to the stunning natural landscape and world-class archaeological sites.
Working together across site-specific, participatory, performance and writing practices a group of residents from diverse cultures and creative disciplines focused on different ways of responding to place through ‘writing’ in its most expanded sense.
Designed to be supportive, the partially-structured programme enableed residents to develop their skills and understanding of ‘writing’ across a range of approaches and technologies. The residency experience stimulated new ways of thinking and experimentation through production, research, co-learning and presentation. The programme provided a framework and acted as a catalyst for deepening observation and expanding awareness in life and art, by engaging with the non-human and human world through ‘writing’.
Residents stepped out of Linkshouse on to the St Magnus Way pilgrimage route that is inspired by the life and death of Magnus, Orkney’s patron saint. A few minutes walk from Linkshouse at the Atlantic Ocean, Birsay Bay’s 400 million year old spectacular rock structures reflect how landmasses have moved, and how glacial erosion has sculpted the islands that we know today as Orkney. Intricate and immersive geological masses draw us in whilst signalling climate change in the past, perhaps helping us predict future scenarios. These locations along with world heritage archaeological sites were the positions for a series of tailored exercises.
WAYS OF WORKING
A range of ways of working were invoked and provoked while residents were also encouraged to share and develop their own practices. Participants investigated, shared and connected their experiences of ‘writing’ with those of fellow residents through facilitated co-creating and co-presenting modes. By listening, looking and doing, residents activated writing while investigating sites.
Residents worked collectively and individually. Value was given to the individual knowledge and experience of each resident, exploring the act of ‘writing’ as a fundamental means to analyse, document, record and translate the worlds we inhabit. Over shared meals, residents, facilitators and guest contributors expanded the time for exchange and developing relationships and networks.
Together, we considered what it means to listen to a site and respond through invention, drawing on (for example) Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘critical fabulation’, Donna Haraway’s ‘speculative fabulation’, and Jane Rendell’s ‘site-writing’. If we see places as multiple, layered and contested constellations (to use Doreen Massey’s words), then how might we respond to them in equally open-ended ways?
Residents and facilitators came together to undertake exercises in ‘deep listening’ and ‘slow-looking’, experimenting with what it means to transpose and transcribe, and inventing while sifting through the multiple histories and geographies of specific places that are carefully chosen locations in the Orkney Islands.
Guided walks and readings happened in selected locations that evidence occupation, abandonment, and renewal: delicate places in the group residency’s environment, triggers for imagining and inventing new futures and histories. Members of Orkney’s creative and research communities who hold precious knowledge of local history past and present, contributed to bespoke sessions.
FACILITATORS
The Residency was lead by Tracy Mackenna (artist and curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal) and Emily Orley (artist, researcher and educator).
Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen
Tracy Mackenna (Professor Emerita; SCO-IT) & Edwin Janssen (Dr; NL) are the founders and co-curators of The Museum of Loss and Renewal. Their collaborative art practice is a creative and discursive site where production, presentation, exchange, co-learning and research meet. The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s key areas of focus address issues of societal concern such as well-being, care, (personal)histories, (in)formal collections, land use / land futures, habitation and sustainability.
Tracy & Edwin’s work activates and presents language, text and expanded approaches to creative-critical writing in artworks, exhibitions and publications. They play with and test ‘writing’ as material, image, form, and as a central element of their artistic processes.
The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing
Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen Publications
They are highly experienced, award winning educators who have devised and lead multiple group learning projects situated within the international museum and gallery sector, and higher education.
In her individual practice and research Tracy employs drawing, video, walking and writing as dialogical processes to activate playful, provocative and non-linear properties of language within visual art practice, giving new and refreshed voice to collaborators and subject-matters.
Emily Orley
Dr Emily Orley is a London-based artist, researcher and educator, whose work includes performance, scenography, installation, video, and hybrid modes of writing. Publications include The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice, Orley, E. and Hilevaara K. (Eds) (2018) Routledge. She is interested in exploring ideas to do with memory, maintenance and enchantment, as well as the un-fixing of time, heritage and place. Always open to new forms of experimentation, she is endlessly inspired by lively discussions, new encounters, and unlikely assemblages.
As a practitioner-researcher, with a mixture of academic, artist and physical theatre training, she is a firm believer in breaking down the false binaries that separate practice and theory, making and thinking and writing about making. Long-term collaborators include artists Katja Hilevaara and Elinor Brass.
Emily is an academic at Guildhall School, London, and prior to this was Reader in Drama at Roehampton University, London. She has degrees from the Wimbledon School of Art and Cambridge and Roehampton Universities and trained at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris.
LOCATION
Orkney is an archipelago of about 70 islands (16 inhabited) off the north coast of Scotland. The highly respected Pier Arts Centre is based in Stromness and curates a year round programme of changing exhibitions and events, and its permanent collection is a Recognised Collection of National Significance to Scotland. Orkney is famed for its natural beauty, archaeological sites and its First and Second World War heritage. It contains some of the oldest and best-preserved Neolithic sites in Europe and the ‘Heart of Neolithic Orkney’ is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site. Orkney also has an abundance of marine and avian wildlife, and the sea is almost always visible wherever you are located. Orkney is home to a significant number of artists, writers, musicians, archaeologists etc. and to University bases and a research campus that hosts Orkney’s wide range of energy and low-carbon expertise.
The Group Residency was centred in the area of The Palace, Birsay, Orkney’s ancient capital, in the islands’ West Mainland. Birsay has sustained communities of Neolithic peoples, Picts, Vikings, and Scottish Royalty and today is home to a multi national community. Outstanding sites include prehistoric and Norse settlements on the tidal island of Brough of Birsay, and the ruins of the Earl’s Palace in the village.
photographs of Linkshouse and interior spaces by Studio Niro
FACILITIES
Residents were accommodated at Linkshouse, the Pier Arts Centre’s residency facility that is a bequest from Barbara and Edgar Williamson, whose son artist Erlend Williamson drew inspiration from Orkney’s landscape and environment. Linkshouse is situated on the St Magnus Way pilgrimage route, on the Atlantic Ocean and amidst farmlands.
Linkshouse is fully equipped, and comprises twin and double bedrooms, one of which is partly accessible. Work spaces include ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ spaces.
The residency programme took place in Linkshouse and at sites of archaeological, cultural, historical and social significance in Orkney, accessible by foot and vehicle.
PARTICIPANTS
Cella
Bergmannkiez Berlin, 16 x 20 cm
Cella has exhibited photographs at the Berlin Biennale, Lisbon Architectural Triennale, Tallinn Print Triennale, Rochester Museum of Fine Art, Melbourne Photo Biennale, Ruhr Biennale and Santorini Biennale.
She holds an MFA degree, and studied at Washington Square Institute for Psychoanalytic Training in New York, l’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and l’Université Paris-Sorbonne and independently with Nicholas Nixon and Robert Frank.
She often collaborated on projects with Klaus Knoll. Their photos are in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Bibliothèque Nationale Paris; National Austrian Fine Art Photography Collection and Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg.
Knoll and Cella also co-founded the Transart Institute for Creative Research, a nomadic platform for cross-pollination offering PhD degrees in partnership with UK institutions.
She designs and edits the occasional journal ELSE and writes lyric essays. Cella has a suitcase design patent pending. She lives between Berlin and New York.
Rosie Cunningham
Annabel in her studio, 2022
I often describe myself as a professional enthusiast, despite officially being a freelance illustrator specialising in hand drawing.
I am Glasgow based and the city experience influences my work significantly. I work with clients; usually for community and arts organisations. I create live, real-time illustration for events, and I design ethically produced, UK made illustrated products for retail. Some of these products evolve from self-initiated work I do as part of my professional development and interests.
I journal as part of my practice and this past year I have been shifting towards both creative community development and an arts focus.
I am often engaged in storytelling and ‘writing’ using my artwork, and this has included linking imagery and research to create a visual text or using panel comic technique to explore narrative.
I’m interested in (being in) nature, the climate, ancient sites, grief, the experience of neurodivergence, the sea and creating joy.
https://www.illustrationetc.co.uk/
Jean Fleming
Excerpt from The Land Where Rhodes Fell
Published by Moxy Magazine
On this clear blue day in July, ninety-three years after his death, no ululations honor Cecil Rhodes. The air is dry, the sun doing the long work of warming stone. In fact, there isn’t much to explain his presence here at all. No signage, no descriptive placards. No context. He is simply here, resting in the rock. I prefer it this way. He has had his time to dominate the land. Now the land can dominate him. It is bigger than he turned out to be, its history longer. Time’s arc is bending away from him, so now he must earn his keep, bringing in enough tourist dollars for the park to stay viable, the sacred land preserved and consecrated, its spirits free to do what they will.
Now that I have done what the site requires and seen his grave, I return to my spot to wait for my bush guide. The rocks brighten as the sun climbs, and the quiet comes alive with birds and insects.
And now I see him, an old man, weathered as driftwood. He stands still, in crisp khaki shorts and olive drab shirt, red neckerchief, a military beret. A park ranger.
‘Wait and I will call the lizards,’ he says. These are words I’ve never heard before. He has my full attention. He makes subtle gestures and clicking sounds, the glottal stops so prevalent in the local language.
A few people from the tour linger too, waiting for the lizards. But the lizards are shy, maybe, or reluctant (and who would blame them?), and they do not show, and they do not show. So the last Kiwis leave, disappointed and disbelieving.
The man does not seem to mind. His gift does not require an audience. He has his magic, and now, now that the tour moves on, now the world’s gone still, now the lizards emerge, rock by rock.
Speckled black, yellow, green, hundreds come, small, large, middling, eager to see this beloved man who speaks their language, the language of sun and stone, of cold-blooded bodies warming as morning lengthens into noon.
Jean Shields Fleming is a writer living in Greece. Publishers Weekly called her novel, Air Burial, published by Carroll & Graf, ‘soulful and unsentimental’, ‘plumbing the intersection of grief and love’.
She is the founder and editor of Certain Age Magazine, audacious ideas for modern women, and her essays have been published by Moxy Magazine and others.
Jean is a graduate of the University of Michigan, and holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her mentors include Robert Stone, Carl Hiaasen and Lynn Freed.
A lifelong animal lover, she and her husband share their home in the Peloponnese with five feral cats – and one fox.
@jeansfleming
Lauren Kayes
Excerpt from You’re in a Car (2016)
California has been burning all summer and some days I feel like I’m catching, too. I wake up one afternoon to fire sky: the sun fuming orange-red through charcoal smoke, an uncanny quality to the light. The birds are gone, a fine layer of ash coating our patio furniture, muffling sound. I feel like I’m the last person alive in the world. I feel like I might not be alive at all.
Mom visited Dad in the hospital the night before he died. His liver would start failing a few hours later. He asked why there was water pouring out of the TV, was pleasant and peaceful the way all people on high doses of morphine are. He told her: “You’re in a car and I’m in a car and we’re driving to the end of the road. It’s okay. We’re the same. We’re good.”
We scatter his ashes on Seal Harbor in Maine, not thinking of Poseidon or the twin fish of Pisces, the stars he was born under. We think instead of the depths we return him to. The bone and blood and guts that aren’t him and are all of him. The body that we choose to let go.
Lauren Kayes is a queer, disabled writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They previously worked as a prosthetic makeup assistant for film and television productions such as Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and their writing has been featured in publications such as Allure Magazine and The Rumpus.
They live in the DC area in the US with their dog, Pan.
Anna Tallach Kennedy
Mohair and Memory
I am looking at a photo with five people, plus one behind the camera who I cannot see but whose eyes I see through. I remember that in Camera Lucida Roland Barthes says something along the lines of photos of people being about mortality. About how they pass on from that picture. The after, as well as the during, and the before. A moment in time caught, between.
The one I have in my hand is taken outside Honeysuckle Cottage in Halkirk, in the province of the Cat, a few miles from the great top edge of the Scottish mainland. It is probably 1978. In it are three Tallach adult siblings and two elderly Sinclair sisters. Jessie-Jo is, as ever, the photographer. If you look at enough of them, you see that her photos hold her way of being. Taken on the hoof. A sudden thought to capture, as everyone is about to leave again. No time to prepare.
The open door of a car appears on the left. Perhaps it is a rust-coloured Ford Cortina, I think. It’s not easy to tell. Margaret Tallach holds a dustpan in one hand, a red handled brush in the other. She wears the suede waistcoat with the round metal buckle over her brown polo-neck. Ian, my father, in ministerial black as usual, stands hands in pockets, feet together and Catherine…her arms are folded. Maybe she doesn’t have time for this.
The descending sun lights them from the west and each is swept by a swirling Caithness wind. They have stopped their goodbyes, their preparations to go, to say ‘cheese!’ as their aunt has commanded.
Holding onto each other for ballast on the left are Anne and her twin Helen. At 78 now they, more than ever, need a little of each other’s strength.
When I send the photo to my cousin on Whatsapp, she replies,
‘Aw that’s a lovely one!!! Your dad has a look of uncle James there. Auntie meg looks like a wee doll, A. Cath with those beads! A. Helen so cute and granny, well that’s a beaut, she’s got her boots her fur, her mohair cardi, hat and bag! Just love this pic.’
And, yes, it’s a thing – the brown, mohair cardigan, big buttons, little collar. Soft, and warm. Tight cuffs, which held the cotton hankie that was pulled out to clean noses and faces.
And now I remember the mohair I can see the back of her as I sit at the kitchen table, as she leans over the sink, hands in suds, her little shoulders a little rounded. I see yellow Marigolds. I smell pancakes steaming on the rack, under a folded tea towel. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of her purple dressing gown, shiny, flowery, nylon, as she disappears into her bedroom to dress. I smell 4711 eau de cologne and I see the navy-blue wool knitted suit. It contained a hankie too. The skirt of it is down to her ankles and beneath are black patent Van Daal shoes, with a little heel for elevation. Then it’s Sabbath morning and we’re preparing for church. Her left hand is clamped on the top of my head to stop the pain from her brushing. I’m struggling to escape.
And I feel anxious because she seemed to know how things were supposed to be done, and that there were rules about girls and how they were to be, and what they were to do, that I was still learning. That I am still to learn.
Anna Tallach Kennedy is an academic and writer based in Portobello, Edinburgh. She teaches psychology for the Open University.
Her academic writing focuses on the history of emotion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and she will have two chapters on the topic published later this year. Creatively most of her writing could be described as narrative non-fiction. It encompasses subject matter such as family, loss, journeys, place, and linguistic and psychological legacies.
She is also interested in what takes place inside art galleries and artistic dialogue. She has written several short pieces, some of which have been submitted for publication, and is working on a book about Hugh Miller, the nineteenth century geologist and writer, focusing on his trip to Orkney in 1846. She is speaking at the Portobello Book Festival on the subject in October 2023.
Giovanna MacKenna
key hole
There is a small brass key with a hollow barrel,
the kind that demands pinched fingers and the odd
straining of muscles hidden in front of your knuckles.
Its head is flat and pungent with the ting of old metal.
The barrel is hollow, female, and must be guided, reluctantly,
first slipping off the thrusting pin, to meet its male counterpart.
If you kneel, hands to the floor to knees popping, vulnerable,
careful to keep the tiny key pinched between aching forefinger
and thumb, if you do that, you can peer into the rough wooden
cave and glimpse the lock’s jag glinting in its always dark, fixed
and waiting for the inevitable fumble before the forced slide completes
the match and all that’s left is the turn, if your sore bones can take it,
if they’re not now locked themselves, frozen in a fake ok when nothing is.
It’s then you look above and see the damage the crowbar did,
how pointless this key’s existence is. This place is always open
Giovanna MacKenna grew up on Scotland’s west coast. She was an actor and a journalist and is now a poet and workshop facilitator. At 2023 she was poet in residence at Dundee’s Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research and was also working with South Lanarkshire’s Remembering Together Covid Memorial project.
You can find current work in Sídhe Press, Stanza Cannon, Black Bough and Nine Pens.
Giovanna’s first collection HOW THE HEART CAN FALTER is available from The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing.
@giovmacpoet
Polly Poupore
Our Sun
Our sun glows bright on the tall yellow rye across the street
regardless of the cloud of Canadian fire smoke billowing grayly in her way.
The truth flames from the fire of that sun,
consistent in our sky, revolution after revolution.
So far away, yet so dependable…
bringing brightness and allowing darkness;
creating life and making shadow.
She consistently returns again and again.
There for us always,
despite clouds, rain, smoke or plague that may disguise her.
Our sun.
Polly Poupore was born in Wyoming, raised in Texas, grew up and raised her kids in Wisconsin and returned to the family farm in Dudley, Texas in 2018.
After teaching for 20 years, Polly created and managed a community arts non-profit called SHEnanigans, which encouraged art-making and community in rural Wisconsin. In 2020, she and her kids started BEANDREAM.fun, making and selling colorfully handmade and hand-dyed accessories.
She has been a maker of all sorts of things since a young child. Lucky to be descended from quilters, she has spent a lot of time discovering how cloth can fit together. Fabric, dyes, and stitches have given her much joy over the years. Her recent passion is combining her love of collage with paint, fabric and thread to create tangible political posters.
A vegan, a meditator and a yogi, Polly is deeply committed to social justice, democracy, and to making the world a better place.
https://www.pollypoupore.com/
Priscilla Poupore
Carry On
Jincy Texia Ussery the 4th child of Sam and Mary Ann Pipes Ussery arrived late on a cold February afternoon with the pale sun, in the water-pot sign of Aquarius, hidden behind heavy clouds.
Ever since her Celtic/Scottish recognition of Imbolc as halfway between Winter solstice and Spring equinox 4 days earlier, Mary Ann had felt the life in her belly being squeezed toward life outside the watery womb.
This morning, upon awakening in their 14x 20 foot pine wood cabin she sensed Sam’s irritation that she was not willing to have sex that he demanded almost daily. Mary Ann softly reminded him that their neighbor Elizabeth Finley had offered to tend to their children Phillip Rufus 7, Richard Bennett 5 and Phillip Rufus 3, for several days when it was time for the new baby to be born. “Today will most likely be the day”.
Elizabeth’s husband, Billy Finley, worked with Sam on the Central National Road of the Republic of Texas. Both men and their young families had come over from Union Parish, Louisiana in 1846 when Texas let out contracts to build a roadway connecting the Red River waterway to the Trinity River waterway as well as to the Military roadways further south, in effect making an international highway between St. Louis and San Antonio.
These two men along with another neighbor, Sterling Barnes, a pair of mules and Sam Ussery’s team of red Durham oxen chopped and hauled off ancient trees and cleared stumps “over 12 inches high” to prepare a roadway 30 feet wide that would some day be 90 miles long. As was common in the cash-poor Republic of Texas, land was the method in which the commissioners, the surveyor, and all other associated hands such as Billy and Sam were paid for their efforts. The act specified that George Stell would receive 1280 acres for his surveying work, while all assistant surveyors and hands would receive 640 acres each. Each appointed commissioner was also granted 640 acres for their work. “The road was along the high ridge that transverses the territory, with no stream more formidable than Turtle Creek to cross, and, therefore, with no bridges to build, through the whole length of the ninety miles between Dallas and Preston. The road threaded, or rather, overlooked, a region of indescribable primitive beauty and grandeur, peopled by millions of buffaloes, deer and antelope, and by turkeys and prairie chickens. For their work they were to be given land – Caddo land. Land the Caddo people had honored as a home for over 3000 years. Carry On young hardy unaware Louisiana Texans.
Relational history is the focal realm of my written work. Relationships with land, and its indigenous creations including the humans, plants, stones, soil, stars, water seek to be expressed. Research into each of these areas delights my soul. Dabbling in alchemy and herbal healing within the stories enchants my being. I attempt to intertwine and incorporate essences of the elements – air, water, earth, fire, ether – as they may relate to cultural recycling as we envision new realities and reveal lives, possibilities and influences including the arts. Specifically I am thinking of George Mackay Brown and how his poetry could reveal things about Orkney relations who show up in my genealogy. I seek to expand my skills in critical and situational composing that responds to place, specifically Orkney.
Psst – some of my stories are illustrated with multimedia images.
This curious crone is a 6th generation Texan whose ancestors were European colonists. Revealing other ways of thinking about the land and its inhabitants is my goal for this time of life – a REVEAL!
Before settling back on the family farm in West Texas, I studied at University, was an aircraft control operator in the Air Force, mothered two children – artistic dragons born 12 years apart; taught at elementary level incorporating local history into the curriculum and honoring local citizens’ Dutch heritage; lived aboard and sailed an old sailboat for five years; formed educational partnerships with a mule, horse and 3 donkeys; nurtured a wildlife sanctuary and tended organic gardens.
Still I “Carry On”
Alison Scott
Ditto, ditto, ditto, Satellites Programme, Collective, Edinburgh, 2021
Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker often working with other artists on projects. Her work is research-led, driven by film, performance and writing practices, and forefronts collaborative, speculative approaches to knowledge production. Recent projects – drawing on encounters with weather, oil, land, and the idea of the commons – engage with aspects of environmental politics on an everyday, situated level.
Recently she has worked as an artist, researcher, editor or arts worker with organisations in Scotland e.g. Cove Park, Radiophrenia, Collective, Hospitalfield, Cooper Gallery DJCAD University of Dundee and MAP Magazine.
Alison makes lens based work predominantly in collaboration with Rachel McBrinn, develops expanded writing projects with Rosie Roberts as again+again, often works in relation to energy matters with curatorial platform Fertile Ground (Rachel Grant), is currently supporting the artist Annette Krauss and the Common Good Study Group, and is part of the feminist-DIY-radio-collective open-weather.
https://alison-scott.co.uk/
Edwin Janssen