Air, Sea and Soil: DRAWING WITH PLACE 2023, 2024

AIR, SEA AND SOIL is The Museum of Loss and Renewal’s Group Residency programme that takes place in Scotland’s Orkney Islands and is a partnership with the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness.

DRAWING WITH PLACE was devised around the relationships of ‘Air, Sea and Soil’, encompassing the Orkney Islands’ remarkable natural environment. Residents were welcomed to the Birsay area of Orkney, where the bespoke programme took place in Linkshouse’s excellent accommodation and studio facilities, and through visits to Neolithic Orkney’s World Heritage Sites.

It was lead by Tracy Mackenna, Curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal and invited subject experts. Between us we activate diverse skills and expertise when we employ drawing (in an expanded sense), publishing and performative modes of working to investigate place(making), (un)belonging, memory, (personal)narratives and imaginary futures.

Applications were welcomed from creative practitioners and researchers who think through drawing and for whom drawing is a way to investigate and understand place, and from practitioners who have a strong interest in drawing as an area of practice. ‘Drawing’ is understood as creative, critical and situated, and as an area of practice in its most expanded sense. In other words, drawing that is experimental, inventive in its form, and responds to place.

THIS GROUP RESIDENCY WILL NEXT TAKE PLACE IN 2026