Where We Are, How We Care

In this talk, I’ll focus on my practice as an artist and a writer who makes work about the Scottish highlands, landscape and the environment. I’m interested in how we come to know place, and how we might conceptualise places given their multi-layered histories and possibilities. I’m also interested in the confluence of how different knowledges impact on how we read, interpret and make sense of place, and I’ll draw on my practice-based PhD research, which used fieldwork and a methodology that involved walking with ecologists and foresters, to help me understand the forests at the heart of my investigations. I will talk about my multi-disciplinary, multi-modal way of working, and what that’s allowed me to do. In many respects my work is about what it is to notice, and a feeling that, through noticing, we will, perhaps, care. As I have turned to writing I’ve become even more interested in how personal history and other aspects of self can come into view, and how the essay form has become an important method of being able to consider a myriad of different approaches, knowledges and perspectives