art about place

I grew up in a coastal region of Scotland that was part rural idyll and part coal mining and heavy industry. As a result of living with these contrasts, my art is concerned with the environments we live in: how we shape them and how they shape us. Known for my colourful landscape painting and for my inspiring art workshops, I also work with digital media, audio and assemblage. I’m co-author of two books on environmental accessibility; and have undertaken several large-scale public art projects in the UK and Australia. I live and work on Wadawurrung Country in Australia.

You can find me on Instagram although recently I’ve moved to Substack as its more relaxed pace suits the brain dumping I’m doing for my latest project. You can also sign up to my email list. You might get half a dozen emails a year if you’re lucky, and you’ll also get advanced (as in, before it goes on social media) notice of exhibitions, open studios, workshops and new collections.

Landscapes of Belonging

In February I’m starting a painting project that I hope will help me unpack my sense of identity as a migrant to Australia from Scotland.

I’ll be easing off on the social media. The schedule of posting and responding, and the high frequency dopamine hits don’t fit well with the slow, focused, “Nan-style” experience of place. So here and my Substack are the places to see what’s going on.

I’ve come back from a couple of weeks of hiking in the Scottish Highlands and I’m now sifting through drawings, photos and videos to see what emerges.

My work has always been about the memory of landscape. Central to this project is the Gaelic concept of cianalas – a Gaelic word meaning a deep-seated longing for your homeland. Importantly, although cianalas is often translated into English as ‘homesickness’, it is more nuanced than simple nostalgia. Cianalas is the recognition, without sadness or sentimentality, of belonging to a place that you no longer inhabit. As a migrant living in Australia, I experience cianalas as a more or less constant undercurrent: a longing for the Scottish Highlands that I know is shaped as much by imagination and memory as by physical geography. This project will explore how that longing shifts when I return to the Highlands, and how it reconfigures itself when experienced from within the radically different environment of the Australian outback. Read more…

Acknowledgment of Traditional Owners

I acknowledge the Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung people, Traditional Owners of the land on which I live and work, and I pay my respects to their Ancestors and Elders, past and present.