Three Works Selected for VAS Biennial Exhibition: The Thread That Pull

I’m honoured to share that three of my works—Gather from the Gather Collection, and Echo and Vein from the Trace Collection have been selected for Visual Arts Scotland’s Biennial Exhibition, The Thread That Pulls.
The exhibition will take place in the Upper Galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh from 6 December 2025 to 2 January 2026.

This year's theme reflects on “the enduring nature of attention” the quiet pull of curiosity, memory, or connection that draws artists back to certain subjects again and again. It is a thread that can be literal or symbolic: a line, a bond, a story, a mark of time. My three selected pieces sit directly within this conversation, each exploring how place, memory, and material can hold traces of what shapes us.

Gather — From the Gather Collection

Gather draws together shifting tones of red, black and gold across a ridged surface that is both structured and organic. Its rhythm is rooted in the Scottish landscape where light, weather, and movement constantly reshape how the land is seen and remembered.

Each fold holds a subtle variation: a flicker of brightness, a moment of shadow, the suggestion of something half-remembered. Like walking familiar ground in changing light, the piece holds the gentle tension between order and transformation.

At its heart, Gather reflects on the act of coming together. It connects the traditions of silversmithing with objects of the table vessels, centrepieces, and utensils as sites of community and shared ritual. The piece considers how we gather fragments of land, memory, and one another, bringing them into a shared space where meaning is made.

Echo & Vein — From the Trace Collection

The Trace Collection explores how colour, form and material can hold the memory of place.
Across these works, Horizontal and vertical ridges create a surface of rhythm and shifting tone. Red, black and gold move across the metal like weathered layers of rock or patterns shaped by time. The pieces are rooted in research into heritage craft and material memory how the marks we make, and those left by landscape, can carry stories forward.

Echo and Vein are each a meditation on the way landscape imprints itself upon us. They reference the strata of landforms, the way colour settles into crevices, and the slow accumulation of history. The ridges shift gently as the viewer moves, revealing moments of depth, warmth, or contrast mirroring the way memories resurface in unexpected flashes, subtle but insistent.

Where Echo focuses on the resonance of the past what returns, repeats, or lingers. Vein follows the line of movement through material: the path of colour, the flow of form, the suggestion of something pulsing beneath the surface.

Together, these works reflect on what remains after time has passed, and how material can carry the traces of place long after we have moved through it.

A Thread That Pulls

To have these pieces included in The Thread That Pulls is meaningful. Each of them emerges from a long-standing attention—an ongoing return to land, memory, craft and the quiet stories held within material.

If you find yourself in Edinburgh this winter, I’d love to share this journey with you.
The exhibition runs from 6 December 2025 to 2 January 2026 in the RSA Upper Galleries, open daily from 10am to 5pm (closed Christmas Day and Boxing Day).