Visual Artists and Craft Makers Awards 2025/26

Thanks to Creative Scotland funding from the National Lottery, in partnership with High Life Highland, I’ll be undertaking the OCA / Open University course Investigating Place with Psychogeography in 2026. The programme explores how locations shape human emotions and collective memory by using psychogeography as a creative framework for navigating place and occupying space.

Undertaking a period of CPD at this juncture will meaningfully support my portfolio development, providing space-and-time to experiment with new techniques, materials and approaches. Whilst concurrently providing a structured (and critically informed) space to reflect upon collaborative action within the context of a rapidly changing climate.

As a workshop leader, the training will further inform my ability to guide others; honouring lived experience and place-based meaning in the co-creation of learning programmes where participants can reflect upon entanglement, land-use, loss and tentacular resilience. Transforming passive observation into embodied, imaginative and pro-active climate contributions.

Ultimately, I hope to investigate how psychogeographical methods can reinforce regenerative & relational networks. Acknowledging deeply embedded affective responses so as to create space for reflection, for the processing of loss and grief, and for the cultivation of emotional resilience. A perspective that resonates with Amitav Ghosh’s observations on the entanglement of human narratives and environmental crises - highlighting the necessity of attending to the emotional dimensions of ecological change as a foundation for meaningful action.

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*Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals and was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.

As a founding member of the avant-garde movement Situationist International, an international movement of artists, writers and poets who aimed to break down the barriers between culture and everyday life, Debord wanted a revolutionary approach to architecture that was less functional and more open to exploration.

Psychogeography gained popularity in the 1990s when artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller began using the idea to create works based on exploring locations by walking // Tate