PT 3 - CARE, HEALING & REGENERATION
The third part of Looking North addresses our central themes through the lens of care, healing & regeneration. This is to acknowledge the interconnectedness of this planet’s ecosystem as well as the interdependence of all its inhabitants, including ourselves. Environmental, public and personal health are closely intertwined. Together with our speakers, we wish to explore ways in which healing, care and regeneration provide a framework of being with our surroundings and planetary co-inhabitants. By pursuing positivity rather than neutrality, as in net zero for example, we wish to present care, healing & regenerating practices as central to constituting a shared sense of agency, empathy, and engagement – all of which we believe to be crucial in a healthy society that shares this space peacefully with other beings.
PT 3 ARTISTS
SIOBHAN MCLAUGHLIN
Siobhan McLaughlin, Cromarty, The Black Isle, 2023
Experiencing landscape through walking constitutes an integral aspect of Siobhan McLaughlin’s artistic practice. Impressions of her surroundings and her place within it are translated into paintings that comprise of sewn-together remnant materials and paint whose pigments the artist often gathers on location. Working in this way presents an interesting response to the question of energy ethics in art making.
HANNA TUULIKKI
Hanna Tuulikki, seals’kin, 2022
Hanna Tuulikki is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. In her multi-faceted oeuvre, she explores landscape in its entanglement with folklore and relationships between human and other-than-human beings. At the heart of her works are the artist’s forays into modes of storytelling that transcend verbal realms. Sound, performance and embodied hybridity become ways of interspecies kinship, of exploring the spaces in between offering moments of encounter between different beings.
MHAIRI KILLIN
Mhairi Killin, On Sonorous Seas, 2018 - Present
Iona-based artist Mhairi Killin is the creative director of Aosdàna, which provides affordable workspaces for nine island microbusinesses while continuing a 120-year tradition of making jewellery on Iona. Living on Iona exerts a distinct influence on Mhairi’s artistic practice, which explores the physical and metaphysical spaces that surround her, taking into account the multi-faceted belief structures – religious, mythopeic, and socio-political – which shape them.
PT 3 AUTHORS
SOPHIE STRAND
Sophie Strand, an ecofeminist poet and writer situated in the Hudson Valley, explores the convergence of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology in her work. Rooted in the belief that cognition unfold interstitially - between beings, ideas, differences and mythical gradients - Strand invites readers to contemplate the interconnected essence of existence.
BATHSHEBA DEMUTH
Bathsheba Demuth is writer and environmental historian specialising in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern places and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she trained huskies for several years. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, and ecologies intersect.
AMY LIPTROT
Amy Liptrot, a journalist and acclaimed author, has shared her insights through various publications, including numerous magazines, journals and blogs. Her regular column for Caught by the River was part of her creative journey toward her first book and memoir The Outrun. Awarded the 2016 Wainwright Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Prize, The Outrun shares the story of Liptrot’s return to Orkney after living in London for seven years.