I’m excited to have be selected as one of the artists-in-residence with Connecting Threads in 2026, along with Savinder Bual. The residencies take place across 8 weeks between July–October and are fully supported opportunities for creative practitioners with socially and environmentally engaged practices to spend time along the River Tweed and respond to its unique ecologies and culture. The residency will enable us to pursue a range of creative and research areas in response to the river and the Connecting Threads 2026 programming theme, ‘Under, over, round and through’.
During the residency, I will be exploring the boggy areas around the river’s source. I will engage with the porous boundaries where wetness and land overlap, attending to ideas of seepage and permeability across bodies, peat, moss, and plant and animal communities – and how this helps us better understand the complex ecological relationships we are part of.
Savinder is interested in how listening to water invites a deep form of presence and attention. Through a series of community workshops, she plans to make soundscapes with experimental instruments through which river water will flow, recruiting the Tweed as live collaborator. She also brings an interest in the 12th century hydraulic systems used by the Melrose Abbey monks to siphon water from the River Tweed.
Our work will be publicly shared at the upcoming second edition of the Tweed River Festival, which takes place in Melrose on 30-31 October, 2026.
Connecting Threads will also be commissioning writers to respond to the residents' work. The resulting texts will be published in a book, shared at the Tweed River Festival, and online later in the year.
Connecting Threads is the cultural strand of the landscape-scale project Destination Tweed. We connect creative practitioners with conservationists, environmentalists, scientists, river specialists and communities of place and purpose, to celebrate the River Tweed through our five-year programme of cultural activity.
Running through the south of Scotland into north Northumberland, the Tweed’s distinctive environments are rich with cultural heritage and contemporary creative practice. The river is a living presence through our towns and villages and reminds us that we are all part of something culturally and environmentally bigger than ourselves.