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"Midwinter"
No full textFrom the Midwinter series, 2025, digital c-type prints, each 60x80cm
Since 2020, I have been periodically returning to and making work in the Black Wood of Rannoch. The Black Wood of Rannoch is one of the oldest and largest remnants of the native pinewoods remaining in Scotland - the great wood of Caledon. Continuous tree cover has been present in these woods for over ten thousand years, and this is one of the very few woods in Scotland where none of the trees have been planted by humans, instead having seeded and grown naturally. It’s home to indigenous varieties of Scots pine that grow only here.
I have been interested in making images in the Black Wood on the shortest day (21st Dec), chasing fragile light on these trees at the turning point of the year.
This is part of an ongoing and expansive project, but works have so far been shown as part of the exhibition "Practicing landscape - Field Notes" held in the Annex Gallery of The Glasgow School of Art between 22 April –16 May 2025
BATA (a stick)
No full textLetterpress prints and holly wood round.
Preliminary prints and small typographic sculpture from the project Scottish Gaelic: Uncovering and Promoting Visual Identity through Print and Book Culture.
This practical aspect of the project is focussed on exploring the value of materiality to the language through the identification, manufacture and use of traditional print equipment for use with the Scottish Gaelic language. The left-hand print BÀTA (a boat) uses a prototype 'floating' grave accent created in the development of a Gaelic wooden type conversion kit for traditional letterpress printing poster types
Passages: A Cultural Trail on the National Cycle Network Route 754: - Auchinstarry to Craigmarloch - Greendykes Shale Bing
No full textThe National Cycle Network route 754, between Winchburgh and Kilsyth. This trail traces the historic waterways of the Union and Forth & Clyde canals, paths that have long connected communities and landscapes that have been deeply shaped by Scotland’s industrial past. The project, titled Passages – A Culture Trail, responds to the rich industrial and social histories embedded within this route, and the ways these histories continue to influence the our lives today.
Passages, curated by Emmie McCluskey, brings together five artists and writers—Alan Bissett, Ciorstaidh Chaimbeul, Cal Flyn, Janice Parker, and Amanda Thomson—all of whom share long-term engagements with people and places along the route. Responding to a specific site along the canal, each artist has created an audio recording designed for those walking or cycling the trail that offers a personal reflection, story, history or imagining to accompany them along their journey.
The Union and Forth & Clyde canals are living monuments to the cycles of use and transformation that have defined and shaped the area. Constructed in the height of the Industrial Revolution, these waterways were once filled with the movement of goods and people, providing vital routes for commerce and industry. Throughout the 20th century life along the canals changed significantly as transport, industry and local communities have been radically reshaped.
I contributed two sound pieces to this:
Auchinstarry to Craigmarloch
Amanda’s work is about her experience of walking and cycling the canal since childhood. Interweaving personal, social and historical material with field recordings, she creates a living portrait of the canal, the environment around it and its past and present lives.
Greendykes Shale Bing:
A conversation between artist Amanda Thomson and botanist Dr Gregory Kenicer, we hear them walking from Broxburn up the Greendykes Shale Bings talking about the animal and plant life they see on a day in April 2025
Mural (after Mahmoud Darwish)
No full textMural is a collaborative composition for solo flute. The project is devised by myself and developed in collaboration with Lebanese flautist and composer, Wissam Boustany.
This project continues my ongoing exploration of 'Music as Method', which seeks to explore relations between musical forms (from classical musical forms to free improvisation) and socio-political events. Works in this series include Fugue, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, A Beautiful Living Thing, Flattening the Curve, Audi Altera Partem. These projects investigate the ways in which musical modalities - counterpoint, duet, harmony, dissonance - offer metaphors and models for socio-political morphologies, and underpin a radical democratic politics of listening.
Mural is the title of a long poem by Mahmoud Darwish, but the composition for flute itself is based upon the transposition of a line from a different poem by Darwish, the poem ‘I Belong There’: ‘I have learned to dismantle all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.’ Following Darwish, the line from the poem itself has been ‘dismantled’ in that individual letters are transposed into musical notation to develop an initial phrase (or potential refrain),
Mural is developed in collaboration with Lebanese flautist and composer, Wissam Boustany. Boustany is an established musician and teacher who teaches according to A Method Called Love. Boustany will respond to the initial phrase and develop an extended composition for flute which we will discuss and shape together as rehearsals progress towards a planned public recital in Rome in late Spring 2025.
The public recital of Mural performed by Wissam Boustany took place on 27 May 2025 at the site of Love: Dante Desire Line Poetry Path by Birrell and Harding, commissioned for Lavinia exhibition at Loggia dei Vini, the Villa Borghese Gardens, Rome 2025-2026
The Event - A collective response through ink. (Part of 'Field Notes' Exhibition).
Get PDFThis work formed part of the 'Practicing Landscape: Field Notes' exhibition in the Annex Gallery, Stow Building (GSA). The exhibition was initiated by curator James N. Hutchinson who invited the Reading Landscape research group to respond to the idea of site both inside the gallery and beyond it.
My initial response was to make ink using rust harvested from the railings that demarcate the land occupied by Stow Building. Some ink was made mixing rust with linseed oil to be used for printing. I used this to make a photo etching which depicts the heavily corroded railing which I called 'Untitled (rust)'.
Another type of water based ink was made using oak gall and rust from the railings and this was given to a number of invited artists and writers to respond to a photograph I had taken of a tree forcing it's way through the metal railings: "My invitation to you is to make a drawing (or a written response) to this ‘event’. I call it an ‘event’ to help us consider time and change on a different scale. I invite you to witness the event first hand, on site…" (quote taken from invitation letter)
Digital Innovation in Social Care in Scotland
Get PDFThis poster presents an overview of the work led by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI) in collaboration with colleagues from the Scottish Government Digital Social Care Programme to facilitate a series of workshops and aligned activities involving national social care and social work stakeholders in Scotland, to map ongoing projects and develop future opportunities for innovation and acceleration
Correspondences and Fractures: Lesbians Talk Queer Formations
Get PDFThis interview between poet Cherry Smyth and writer Laura Guy focuses on Smyth’s contribution to feminist and queer activism and cultural production after she arrived in London from Ireland in the early 1980s. The conversation covers a range of activities that Smyth was involved in in the ensuing years, including Greenham Women’s Peace Protest and the Troops Out Movement; feminist and community film and video production; Irish women’s writing and her contribution as a cultural critic to the formation of new queer perspectives and politics in the early 1990s, particularly evident in her books Lesbians Talk Queer Notions (1992) and Damn Fine Art by New Lesbian Artists (1996). In the correspondences and fractures signalled by these connected yet heterogeneous practices, the category of “queer” emerges as a site of potentiality not only in the recent past but also for a younger generation of artists working in Ireland today
Domestic Divas: Tunten at Home
No full textIn Chapter 1, Cole Collins studies the representation of drag culture in the photo project Tunten, Queens, Tantes. Ein Männerfotobuch (1988) by the German photographer, Jürgen Baldiga. By exploring the queer potential of the domestic space, Collins demonstrates how the occupants of this space can redefine and reclaim home thanks to the roles that they play in it
Assembly
No full textAssembly is a solo exhibition of new work by acclaimed artist-filmmaker Margaret Salmon. Resulting from and reflecting upon a process of community outreach, story counselling and cinematic experimentation, the exhibition encompasses a film, photographs, and sculptures in an installation that will expand over time, inviting local audiences to return to The Hunterian’s galleries as materials shift and evolve.
An intimate enquiry made by a socially-committed, locally-engaged artist, Assembly highlights the voices of a diverse range of residents within the areas of Kelvinside and Maryhill, Glasgow. The exhibition, grounded in everyday Glasgow and its residents, asks: how have years of austerity and a global pandemic affected individuals and community in Glasgow? How has a mass collective loss affected that community’s understanding of death, healing and the future? Central to the exhibition is a long-form narrative film. The artist describes To a God Unknown as 'a feminist existential melodrama and ghost story', to be researched and filmed on 35mm during the exhibition throughout summer and autumn 2025.
Key collaborators on To a God Unknown include: G20 Works; Jo Sunshine; AMMA Birth Collective
For this solo exhibition at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, I made a multi-stage installation, Assembly (2025). Resulting from a process of community outreach, story counselling, cinematic experimentation and stakeholder dialog the exhibition encompassed film, photographs, sculptures and a publication (forthcoming).
Reusing display structures from the institution’s previous exhibitions, I presented a multiplicity of sculptural objects that reflect daily life in Scotland as well as the materials and histories that inform my artistic practice.
These objects revalue what is often ‘left behind’, like my sonʼs outgrown football boots or flowers that have died, and materials no longer fit for their original purpose, such as punctured balloons, shrunken jumpers and empty bullet shells. Visceral and pensive, these small-scale sculptures contain news clippings, words, colours and surfaces both universal and unique to my experience and memories. I calls them ʻthought objectsʼ and they process visual information, social experiences and critical perspectives.
Elsewhere a range of items and photographic images printed onto diverse papers and fabrics create a ‘mural’ around the gallery’s walls. Hand-printed in the darkroom, some photographs are from previous exhibitions and illustrate a continuous body of research and enquiry, including my work on To A God Unknown, a film that was generated through and during the exhibition. Test strips, solarizations, newspaper and handwritten notes combine to display a network of personal, political and cultural realities and sights.
Assembly hosted the work of Maryhill artist Jo Sunshine, who’s ink and pastel drawing of a heron along the Kelvin River was positioned on the gallery wall adjacent to the title. The wall text itself has been made by Glaswegian graffiti artist Ronan. In the hallway leading to the cinema space I shared my written and text based research circling the conception of To a God Unknown. Eclectic and poetic these papers highlight moments of vision and enquiry, research and reflection made within a small scale creative process
Group Exhibition: The Problem with People, Oceans Apart Gallery, Salford, UK, 2025
No full textArtists: Reece Adair, Keith Ashcroft, David Ballantyne, Andrew Bracey, Kate Dunn, Simon Foxall, David Gledhill, Gareth Griffith, Mary Lou Lawless-Gill, Andrea Medjesi-Jones, Dougal McKenzie, Paula Newton, Alex Roberts, Wayne Robinson, Luke Skiffington, Geraldine Swayne, Michael Stubbs, Mikey Thomas
The Problem with People is an exhibition of 18 painters, focusing on different ways that artists deal with the figure in painting today. The title refers to the difficulties and challenges often associated with the figure in painting, both in a literal or representational sense, but also in philosophical, ethical and material terms.
The idea of (the) painting – which is not a ‘person’ – performs as a kind of surrogate or stand in for the body. This enables artists to see and re-see themselves through painting, be it through locating the figure inside pictorial space, emphasising the figure beyond the stretcher, notions of the figure with or without a body, the figure as gesture, a shape, a place, an outline, an anthropomorphic object, or through material itself.
For this exhibition I had the opportunity to show a brand ne piece made from new materials and which consisted of sprayed stencils onto builders dust sheets which contained the spilled detritus (household paints and tinted floor varnishes) of previous studio activities.
This new and major move in my studio activity, although process-based and still ustlising found signage in opposition to poured paints, offers an entirely different 'sensation' of finish - the painting takes on a much less colourful and seductive patina which is exacerbated by the utilitarian use of the spray paints onto the builders dust sheets (with all the added social and popular cultural implications of what those material's refer to)