Art, Landscape & Connection

I'm an artist, educator and professional beachcomber based on Fife's rugged coastline. For 25 years, I've used collaborative art projects to connect people with their environment and one another.

Growing up in Fife shaped a practice rooted in place. I work with landscape, seasonal change, local ecologies, natural processes, found materials and Fife's industrial heritage, using slow and accessible activities to encourage attention, care and connection. The region's industrial past has shaped the landscape around me, and I'm drawn to the relics it has left behind, weathered by tide, time and experience.

After studying Drawing & Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and completing a scholarship MFA, I taught and worked as an artist-in-residence at Repton School and Edinburgh Academy. During this time, I fell pregnant with my first-born son - a turning point that prompted a permanent shift away from traditional darkroom chemistry and its harmful compounds, toward plant-based developers, natural emulsions, and safer, more sustainable photographic processes. In many ways, I had come full circle: back to crafting the same plant-based potions I had made throughout my childhood, though then entirely unaware of the photosensitive properties those concoctions quietly possessed.

My practice is grounded in inclusion and wellbeing. As a neurodivergent artist living with autoimmune dysfunction, I understand the value of flexible, welcoming ways to participate. This shapes my work with people of different ages, abilities and circumstances, including children outside formal education.

Between 2022 and 2024, I had the privilege of serving as Fife's Lead Artist for Remembering Together, a national Greenspace Scotland initiative that co-created responses to the Covid-19 pandemic with communities in every local authority. The result was PROCESS: a handmade boxed publication - which doubled as a working camera obscura - housing two handbound books, artworks, teaching aids, wildflower seeds and tools for connection, reflection and renewal. It was produced as a limited edition of 500, with each box gifted to civic spaces across Fife.

Whether I'm leading a workshop or combing beaches for sea-worn treasures, I work with the rhythms of family life and the landscape around me, looking for ways creative practice can nurture calm, rootedness and care for place.

- Katie