CURRENT RESEARCH

My work sits at the intersection of ecology, heritage, and place - using slow, material-led processes to trace the histories held in Fife's landscapes. Through foraging, image-making, and experimental photography, I explore how the ground beneath us carries the memory of the industries that shaped it: the linen and flax mills, the papermakers, the glassworks and potteries, the salt pans strung along the coast.

Daily walks along the shore are central to this practice. I gather sea-worn fragments - brick shards from Silverburn's flax mill, scorched soils from the St Monans salt pans, weathered glass and pottery - objects one or two hundred years old that hold untold stories. Ground into pigments and inks, or read as artefacts in their own right, these materials become a way of listening to the coast: reading its tidelines as archives of labour, chemistry and change.

Seaweed has become a central thread in this research. Long before it was valued for climate mitigation, kelp was burned along Scotland's shores to produce soda ash - a raw material that fed the glass, soap, linen-bleaching and pottery industries that flourished in Fife and beyond. It is a history largely absent from the coastline today, yet it shaped the economies, labour and chemistry of the region for generations.

I'm currently investigating the photosensitive properties of seaweed as a way to make these overlooked economic and ecological histories visible: images developed by the very material that once underpinned the region's industrial life. Drawing on 18th and 19th-century alternative photographic processes, this work asks what it might mean for the coast to picture itself - for kelp to become both subject and medium, holding its own layered past and its possible ecological futures.