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Indoor Environmental Quality in an Occupied Whole Life Straw Bale House in England, UK.
Get PDFIn response to policy and legislative requirements aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, building designs are increasingly becoming more airtight and energy-efficient. However, previous literature raises concern that buildings designed to meet these requirements present significant challenges relating to overheating and poor ventilation. Concurrently, some designers are opting for low-carbon materials, such as straw bales, not only to reduce embodied carbon dioxide emissions but also for occupant health benefits. While straw bale buildings are recognised for their thermal efficiency, there is limited knowledge regarding their indoor environmental quality (IEQ) performance during occupancy. This paper presents a case study of the environmental performance of an airtight, energy-efficient straw bale dwelling with a decentralised ventilation system. The dwelling is located in southern England, UK and through this case study, the research aims to assess whether the home provides thermal comfort conditions year-round, with attention to summer and winter comfort, as well as a review of the relative humidity and total volatile organic compounds (TVOC). Data were collected for 14 months and assessed against recognised IEQ benchmark guidelines. The findings indicated no overheating occurrences despite a summer heatwave; however, elevated TVOC concentrations were observed during the summer compared to those measured in the winter. Results for the indoor temperature differ from those reported in previous research on UK airtight homes, highlighting the necessity for comprehensive IEQ research in a larger number of dwellings constructed with natural building materials to ascertain whether sustainable building practices enhance occupant comfort
Ageing in place, local high streets and well-being
No full textAs people age, many prefer to stay in their familiar homes and neighbourhoods to maintain well-being, using local services and facilities—an approach known as 'ageing in place'. Despite the perceived decline of local high streets in the UK, they remain central locations offering essential services that can support this approach. This paper examines three case study high streets in Edinburgh, Scotland, exploring how these locales can influence ageing in place and subjective well-being for older adults. The findings reveal four key dimensions of well-being that high streets provide for the ageing population: social well-being, a sense of place, aesthetic enjoyment from being active outside the home, and a sense of mastery and autonomy in pursuing daily activities. The research highlights the potential of local high streets to sustain older people’s well-being, reinforcing their importance as urban spaces that support later life. Our study emphasises the important role high streets can play in shaping ageing-in-place policies, expanding the concept of ‘place’ beyond the home. This aligns with broader health policies in Scotland, where there is a growing focus on the role of place and communities in promoting strengths and resources they already have to support health and well-being
International Women's Day - Women of Donegal
No full textIn this event I worked together with two arts organisations Artlink in Buncrana Co. Donegal, and Govanhill Baths in Glasgow to realise a public art project which took the form of a simultaneously projection work in Glasgow and Donegal on the evening of International Women’s day (8th March 2025)
React! React! React! or Three Stories of Autoimmunity or Another Reason Not to Smoke
No full textWorking in response to the work of Dr Megan Macleod and her team at the School of Infection and Immunity, University of Glasgow, I made React! React! React! or Three Stories of Autoimmunity or Another Reason Not to Smoke, a risograph publication that imagines the immune system as a bunch of delinquent schoolboys, last spotted belting seven shades of snow out of each other in Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet (1932).
Made for Pint of Science 2025 and first distributed from the Pint of Science Exhibition, The Alchemy Project, Glasgow, 19 May 2025
Kindling (for Isa)
No full textKindling (for Isa)
Duration 2min 20sec
Broadcast on Dundee radio Club's inaugural listening festival and Radiophrenia's festival 2025
Kindling (for Isa) is a short radio interlude, a small punctuation and call to action. It was the first in a series of works Bx has produced from their artist in residence at National Library Scotland’s sound archives, exploring women in activism. The piece travels with the rhythm of the everyday and the beats of protest, which carry us to a spoken excerpt by Isa Porte (from the Women in Communism interview series recorded by Neil Rafeek)
Activating the Archive
Get PDFIn 2023 and 2024, the Getty-funded Growing Networks project, organised by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, brought together curators from art galleries, museums and natural history collections in the UK and Europe. Through a series of well-received workshops held in Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Paris, the initiative began to build interdisciplinary connections between apparently disparate institutions that hold botanical art collections. The workshop also raised a number of questions, including a fundamental one around the definition of botanical art and around the colonial origins of many of the collections.
The Plants on Paper project was inspired by the Growing Networks conversations and was hosted by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, in recognition of the important contribution and potential role that the RBGE has to play in informing contemporary debate and research on decolonisation, and revised approaches to engagement with natural history collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation Paper Project, Plants on Paper drew on our art collections to develop much needed knowledge exchange workshops in Edinburgh, bringing together curators and artists from specific originating diaspora communities.
The website, and the articles written by participants on the Plants on Paper project, follow on from research carried out as part of this project. My contribution is this article, Activating the Archive
Who's Listening?
No full textWho’s Listening? (2025) (Aspect Ratio: 16:9; Dur. 4min 9secs) https://vimeo.com/1138484416
An artist’s film made in collaboration with The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM), Gaza, to mark UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 29 Nov 2025.
‘Who’s Listening?’ is a film developed by Birrell in collaboration with musicians Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha and Fouad Khader who both teach at ESNCM. The film features a voiceover reading in Arabic of lyrics from the song, ‘Who’s Listening?’ composed by the Palestinian musician, Ahmed 'Muin' Abu Amsha, music teacher with the Gaza branch of the ESNCM, Palestine. The video image features edited fragments of footage shot in the immediate aftermath of an Israeli bombardment in Gaza City on 13 September 2025 filmed on mobile phone by Fouad Khader, a musician and music producer from Gaza where he is the Activities Coordinator at the ESNCM. Abu Amsha’s voice speaks the words (presented in Arabic and English) from his song ‘Who’s Listening’, framed by fragments of Fouad’s phone footage edited by Birrell. Voice and image play over a haunting abstract soundscape created from Birrell’s re-mix of guitar tracks from Abu Amsha’s original song, and a re-mixed sample of the original recording of ‘Drone Song’. The film is released to mark UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 29 November 2025
Piracy, the State, and the Burghs of South-West Scotland, 1560–1603
No full textStudies of early modern piracy in Scotland have been weighted towards the North Sea and eastern sea ports. There are no comparative studies of Scotland’s west coast and Irish Sea regions during the late-sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. The maritime environment on Scotland’s west coast is markedly different from that of the east. Lowland Scots of the western burghs traversed the wider milieu of English, Welsh, Irish, Manx and Highland exchanges during the late-sixteenth century in a smaller, more intimate, body of water than that of the North Sea.
This chapter assesses the extent to which piracy affected Scotland’s sea ports along the southwest coast in this period, and how this problem was addressed. Scottish mariners on the southwest coast were not only victims, but also willing and able practitioners of maritime depredation. The preventative and reactionary policies of the Scottish crown and government are assessed in comparison to attempts to deal with piratical attacks by the seafaring communities themselves. It presents the argument that central authorities in Scotland largely failed to reduce piratical attacks, and thus created the need for the maritime communities themselves to act against pirates in the Irish Sea and North Channel. It demonstrates how piracy and maritime criminality presented a real danger to merchant shipping of the southwest, during a period where piracy was having a detrimental effect to the diplomatic status of mutual amity between the Scottish and English crowns
(Reading 1 – The Book / Object) The Olive Tree
No full textA show about a book
A book about a tree
A tree about a genocide
A Palestinian Olive tree was shipped from Gaza to Scotland as part of the Reading Landscape Exhibition held in the Annex Gallery of The Glasgow School of Art between 22 April – 16 May 2025.
The sapling will be taken care of for the duration of a calendar year
until it bears fruit or takes root
The systematic uprooting of Palestinian olive trees by Israeli forces and settlers is more than an act of environmental destruction—it is a calculated strategy of oppression that exemplifies the broader framework of Israel’s green colonialism. This phenomenon, which integrates ecological policies with settler-colonial objectives, serves as a mechanism of dispossession and control. The regulation and destruction of Palestinian olive groves highlight how environmental narratives are manipulated to justify land appropriation, surveillance, and the erasure of Palestinian identity. This small exhibition explores how green colonialism operates by targeting olive trees, illustrating the intersection of ecological rhetoric and settler-colonial ambitions. The olive tree is deeply rooted in Palestinian history, culture, and economy. These trees, some of which have stood for centuries, symbolise resilience and an enduring connection to the land. Beyond their cultural and symbolic value, olives provide a major source of income for Palestinian farmers, with olive oil production accounting for a significant share of agricultural livelihoods. As such, the destruction of olive trees is not just an environmental or economic issue—it is an attack on Palestinian identity and self-sufficiency.
Considering a re-thinking of the bibliographical approach 'ad fontes' (a Latin expression which means "[back] to the sources"), the publication traces all references of the olive tree and it’s cultural and socio-economic and symbolic significance from Linear B to the Quran with a particular focus on the bibliographical sources in the classical world. The book mirrors the migration of a particular splice of olive tree, of the Koroneikos variety to Palestine through an elliptical reference to sources and traces a history of conflict that exceeds the symbolic in language and history, examining the idea that sound knowledge depends on the earliest and most fundamental of sources.
The publication was made in anticipation of the migrant root arriving in Scotland
All proceeds from the sale of this work will be donated for humanitarian relief in Palestine, a place where olive trees grow despite all adverse conditions and continue to thrive against all odds.
The systematic uprooting of Palestinian olive trees by Israeli forces and settlers is more than an act of environmental destruction—it is a calculated strategy of oppression that exemplifies the broader framework of Israel’s green colonialism. This phenomenon, which integrates ecological policies with settler-colonial objectives, serves as a mechanism of dispossession and control. The regulation and destruction of Palestinian olive groves highlight how environmental narratives are manipulated to justify land appropriation, surveillance, and the erasure of Palestinian identity. This small exhibition explores how green colonialism operates by targeting olive trees, illustrating the intersection of ecological rhetoric and settler-colonial ambitions. The olive tree is deeply rooted in Palestinian history, culture, and economy. These trees, some of which have stood for centuries, symbolise resilience and an enduring connection to the land. Beyond their cultural and symbolic value, olives provide a major source of income for Palestinian farmers, with olive oil production accounting for a significant share of agricultural livelihoods. As such, the destruction of olive trees is not just an environmental or economic issue—it is an attack on Palestinian identity and self-sufficiency.
Considering a re-thinking of the bibliographical approach 'ad fontes' (a Latin expression which means "[back] to the sources"), the publication traces all references of the olive tree and it’s cultural and socio-economic and symbolic significance from Linear B to the Quran with a particular focus on the bibliographical sources in the classical world. The book mirrors the migration of a particular splice of olive tree, of the Koroneikos variety to Palestine through an elliptical reference to sources and traces a history of conflict that exceeds the symbolic in language and history, examining the idea that sound knowledge depends on the earliest and most fundamental of sources.
The publication was made in anticipation of the migrant root arriving in Scotland
All proceeds from the sale of this work will be donated for humanitarian relief in Palestine, a place where olive trees grow despite all adverse conditions and continue to thrive against all odds
Hold
No full textEssay produced for artist publication as part of HOLD, an exhibition by Jolanta Dolewska and Elke Finkenauer at New Glasgow Society, Glasgow (7-16 November 2025