Socially Engaged Work

As part of Nevis Landscape Partnership's Creative Rainforest Project for Nevis Nature Network, I co planned and delivered a series of 4 socially engaged art sessions.

Sessions 1 and 2: Working with young pupils from a local primary school, as a follow on from some educational visits by the NLP team, the children creatively explored what it felt like to be living in a temparate rainforest. Each class collaborated on a 1m x 1m acrylic canvas painting, to represent their final ideas. These paintings were then displayed as part of the Creative Rainforest Showcase.

Session 3: As part of the Fort William Mountain Festival 2026 explore events, I led a creative outdoor walk on behalf of NLP, with the aim of engaging people with the temparate rainforest. Using our senses as a framework to consider the environment, participants produced a variety of responses in their concertina sketchbooks.

Session 4: I delivered a drop in mono screen printing session as part of the Creative Rainforest Showcase, hosted at the Highland Soap Visitor Centre. Creating 3 stencils on the screens of native leaf types - a hazel, rowan and oak - participants selected which they would like to paint in and produce a screen print of.

A Seamless Landscape was a 2-part collaborative and participatory walking art project that took place in the Glenmore area of the Cairngorms and in partnership with Cairngorms Connect. Participants from the Cairngorms Connect partners, including RSPB, NatureScot, and the Cairngorms National Park Authority walked together with artists Louise Emslie and Louise Kernaghan to explore concepts of the physical and metaphorical boundaries within the Cairngorms Connect partnership area. By walking to the edge of the mapped boundary and taking part in a series of creative exercises, we discovered a different way of looking and being in a familiar landscape.


A digital zine was compiled with the participants contributions and can be viewed here. It is a collective piece of work bringing together some of those thoughts, words, drawings and sketches in response to the first walk.

Final MA Art and Social Practice project with University of Highlands and Islands.

During the first phase, I facilitated a series of walking art sessions which sought to bring community members together to creatively explore existing woodlands and create 'tree notes' which were then hand stitched into a collective concertina book.
The second phase of the project involved the artist and participants who worked in the outdoor and environmental sectors walking to the potential tree line on local mountainsides, creating a physical line with the collective tree notes and asking questions about the future of our tree scapes.

Find the digital publication on Issuu here. [[fix link]]

A socially engaged one-off walking project inspired by the methods of psychogeography.

3 participants, 1 artist and 1 dog. Taking it in turns to decide which way to go at each junction point, where do we end up and how do we experience our familiar local environment?

As a response to the slight easing of restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020, I set out on a quest to see if I could engage participants more directly with the decision making process around deciding where to go whilst walking- with no predetermined route in mind before setting off.

​Find the digitally compiled project on Issuu here. [[fix link]]

As part of my MA Art and Social Practice course through the University of Highlands and Islands, I was tasked with delivering a project in the social realm. Myself and Louise Emsile who is also based in Fort William share similar interests on land use and connecting with nature and landscape and so this task seemed like the perfect opportunity to turn our many conversations over the last year into a project- Landscape Mindscape.

We got together a group of 7 willing participants and walked a 4.8km circular walk around Glen Nevis, hosting 4 connecting exercises along the way in pre planned places to engage the participants with their surroundings in a deeper and more reflective way.

I ran 4 1hour long workshops on a weekly basis at Glencoe Visitor Centre based from an outdoor gazebo space. Participant numbers ranged from 5-8 each week and there was a variety of ages taking part from toddlers to adults.

The aim was to further engage visitors with the wildlife and surroundings the Glencoe has to offer.

Working with Room13 in Caol, I ran a project over a series of 3 days for 10 primary school children.
Day one we walked along Caol beach to collect items, and came back to work on ideas in the studio.
Day two we started in the studio with a recap looking at our work, and then took this work around the building to see how it changed in different locations. They had the chance then to develop their work further in the studio.
Day 3 they each selected their favourite item or piece of work they had made and we walked up to Outlandia in Glen Nevis, documenting the work in its new enironment. They also had the chance to respond directly to this new place and make work in situ.

The idea was to educate the children on how they might carry their creative ideas forward; to not focus solely on a 'finished' piece, but to focus on how they might carry their ideas to the next place. The physical act of walking provided us with a metaphor for taking their ideas on a journey.

​You can find a write up about this project in the Nevis Landscape Partnership Journal here. [[fix link]]

I spent one week, walking up and down to the off grid tree house, Outlandia, responding to the environment by making site specific installations, paintings and eco prints.

Working in collaboration with Matt Lander and the Outward Bound Trust to deliver a bespoke 3 day residential outdoor and art experiential learning course for high school students. Going to different outdoor venues around Lochaber allowing participants to interact with the environment and creatively explore their ideas outside of the classroom.

Since 2013, I have been working with Ellen Wilson to create works under our collaborative name Poster Girls. We combine the use of text and image to raise questions on culturally imposed binary oppositions such as text vs. image, culture vs. nature and masculine vs. feminine.
We have worked in a range of contexts and formats including site specific work, books, works to be displayed in gallery contexts, note taking style work, and digital work with the use of social media.

With Ellen based in Edinburgh, and myself in Fort William, we continue to experiment with ways to continue having a conversation around our topics of interest.

Since 2013, I have been working with Ellen Wilson to create works under our collaborative name Poster Girls. We combine the use of text and image to raise questions on culturally imposed binary oppositions such as text vs. image, culture vs. nature and masculine vs. feminine.
We have worked in a range of contexts and formats including site specific work, books, works to be displayed in gallery contexts, note taking style work, and digital work with the use of social media.

With Ellen based in Edinburgh, and myself in Fort William, we continue to experiment with ways to continue having a conversation around our topics of interest.