Cella

Cella has exhibited photographs at the Berlin Biennale, Lisbon Architectural Triennale, Tallinn Print Triennale, Rochester Museum of Fine Art, Melbourne Photo Biennale, Ruhr Biennale and Santorini Biennale. Cella holds an MFA degree and studied at Washington Square Institute for Psychoanalytic Training in New York, l’École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and l’Université Paris-Sorbonne and independently with Nicholas Nixon and Robert Frank. She often collaborated on projects with Klaus Knoll. Their photos are in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Bibliothèque Nationale Paris; National Austrian Fine Art Photography Collection and Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg. Knoll and Cella also co-founded the Transart Institute for Creative Research, a nomadic platform for cross-pollination offering PhD degrees in partnership with UK institutions. She designs and edits the occasional journal ELSE and writes lyric essays. Cella has a suitcase design patent pending. She lives between Berlin and New York.

keywords: Liminality, Hauntology, Minimalism, Architecture, Lyric essays

Rosie Cunningham

I often describe myself as a professional enthusiast, despite officially being a freelance illustrator specialising in hand drawing. I am Glasgow based and the city experience influences my work significantly. I work with clients; usually for community and arts organisations, I create live, real-time illustration for events, and I design ethically produced, UK made illustrated products for retail. Some of these products evolve from self-initiated work I do as part of my professional development and interest. I journal as part of my practice and this past year I have been shifting towards a creative community development and arts focus. I am often engaged in storytelling, and ‘writing’ using my artwork, this has included linking imagery and research to create a visual text or using panel comic technique to explore narrative. I’m interested in (being in) nature, the climate, ancient sites, grief, the experience of neurodivergence, the sea and creating joy.

keywords: Stories, Community, Heritage, Sustainability, Grief

Jean Shields Fleming

Jean Shields Fleming is a writer living in Greece. Publishers Weekly called her novel, Air Burial, published by Carroll & Graf, “soulful and unsentimental,” plumbing the intersection of grief and love. She is the founder and editor of Certain Age Magazine, audacious ideas for modern women, and her essays have been published by Moxy Magazine and others. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, and holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her mentors include Robert Stone, Carl Hiaasen, and Lynn Freed. A lifelong animal lover, she and her husband share their home in the Peloponnese with five feral cats – and one fox.

keywords: Curious, Persistent, Synthesizing, Penetrating, Joyful

Lauren Kayes

Lauren Kayes is a queer, disabled writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. They previously worked as a prosthetic makeup assistant for film and television productions such as Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and their writing has been featured in publications such as Allure Magazine and The Rumpus. They live in the DC area in the US with their dog, Pan.

keywords: Witness, Fragment, Dissolve, Distill, Untame

Anna Tallach Kennedy

Anna Tallach Kennedy is an academic and writer based in Portobello, Edinburgh. She teaches psychology for the Open University. Her academic writing focuses on the history of emotion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and she has had two chapters on the topic published in 2024. Creatively her writing is in the main narrative non-fiction. It encompasses subject matter such as family, loss, journeys, place, and linguistic and psychological legacies, e.g. https://www.certainagemag.com/post/ripples-the-laughter-of-the-medusas. She is working on a book about Hugh Miller, the nineteenth century geologist and writer, focusing on his trip to Orkney in 1846. Since the residency she has developed a series of wee films which seek to capture the essential nature of fleeting psychological states.

keywords: Einfühlung, Essence, Presence, Journey, Language

Giovanna MacKenna

Giovanna MacKenna grew up on Scotland’s west coast. She was an actor and a journalist and is now a poet and workshop facilitator. At present she is poet in residence at Dundee University's Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research and is also working with South Lanarkshire’s Remembering Together Covid Memorial project. She recently judged Glasgow Women’s Library's Calm Slam 2023 and has been a Visual Verse lead writer. You can find current work in Sídhe Press, Stanza Cannon, Black Bough and Nine Pens. Giovanna’s first collection is available from The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing.

keywords: Environment, Communication, Experience, Matrilineality, Observance

Polly Poupore

Polly Poupore was born in Wyoming, raised in Texas, grew up and raised her kids in Wisconsin and returned to the family farm in Dudley, Texas in 2018. After teaching for 20 years, Polly created and managed a community arts non-profit called SHEnanigans, which encouraged art-making and community in rural Wisconsin. In 2020, she and her kids started BEANDREAM.fun, making and selling colorfully handmade and hand-dyed accessories. She has been a maker of all sorts of things since a young child. Lucky to be descended from quilters, she has spent a lot of time discovering how cloth can fit together. Fabric, dyes, and stitches have given her much joy over the years. Her recent passion is combining her love of collage with paint, fabric and thread to create tangible political posters. A vegan, a meditator and a yogi, Polly is deeply committed to social justice, democracy, and to making the world a better place.

keywords: Stories, Arts, Rituals, Mysteries, Connections

Priscilla Poupore

Relational history is the focal realm of my written work. Relationships with land, and its indigenous creations including the humans, plants, stones, soil, stars, water seek to be expressed. Research into each of these areas delights my soul. This curious crone is a 6th generation Texan whose ancestors were European colonists. Revealing other ways of thinking about the land and its inhabitants is my goal for this time of life - a REVEAL! Before settling back on the family farm in West Texas, I studied at University, was an aircraft control operator in the Air Force, mothered two children - artistic dragons born 12 years apart; taught at elementary level incorporating local history into the curriculum and honoring the Dutch heritage of the local citizens; lived abroad and sailed an old sailboat for five years; formed educational partnerships with a mule, horse and 3 donkeys; nurtured a wildlife sanctuary and tended organic gardens.

keywords: Genealogy, Myths, Revealing, Healers, Storyteller, Spirits

Alison Scott

Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker often working with other artists on projects. Her work is research-led, driven by film, performance and writing practices, and forefronts collaborative, speculative approaches to knowledge production. Recent projects—drawing on encounters with weather, oil, land, and the idea of the commons—engage with aspects of environmental politics on an everyday, situated level. Recently she has worked as an artist, researcher, editor or arts worker with organisations like Cove Park, Radiophrenia, Collective, Hospitalfield, Cooper Gallery DJCAD and MAP Magazine. Alison makes lens based work predominantly in collaboration with Rachel McBrinn, develops expanded writing projects with Rosie Roberts as again+again, often works in relation to energy matters with curatorial platform Fertile Ground (Rachel Grant), is currently supporting the artist Annette Krauss and the Common Good Study Group, and is part of the feminist-DIY-radio-collective open-weather.

Alison was invited to participate in WRITING INTO PLACE to make
the new piece of writing that features in this publication.

Antonia Thomas

My research explores the relationship between Art and Archaeology, using these as reference points from which to explore wider creative engagements - across and beyond a range of different disciplines. I am interested in mark-making and inscription, and how drawing – in its expanded sense – works to connect time and space. I am influenced by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s suggestion that the doing of archaeology is a form of dwelling in its own right and find synergies between archaeological fieldwork and participatory art practice. I am also inspired by archaeologist Helen Wickstead, who discusses how archaeology draws within an expanded field and her suggestion that activities such as excavation, surveying and geophysics can be considered as drawing practices. Running through all my research is an abiding interest in the relationship between traces and marks, gesture, scale and time, whether when photographing an artefact, drawing a site map, digging a trench, or walking lines in the landscape.

Rebecca Ford

Becky Ford was born in Orkney to parents who were incomers to the islands, and is a development officer for Community Energy Scotland, working on the Island Centre for Net Zero Project. She is also a relief lecturer at the Institute for Northern Studies UHI, where she completed her interdisciplinary PhD. In her thesis, Words and Waves: ecological dialogism as an approach to discourse, community, and marine renewable energy in Orkney, she developed ecological dialogism, an approach to understanding language and communication as occurring within ‘ecologies of meaning making’ which are simultaneously physical and cultural. Her research seeks to understand community as a process, which shapes relationships between people and place, and the role of shared cultural narratives and storytelling in this process. Her lived experience of community in Orkney informs her approach to navigating the space between research, community development, and climate action - recognising the fundamental interdependency between people and place and how the world we make is shaped by the stories we tell.

Rebecca was invited to participate in WRITING INTO PLACE to make
the new piece of writing that features in this publication.

Emily Orley

Dr Emily Orley is a London-based artist, researcher and educator, whose work includes performance, scenography, installation, video, and hybrid modes of writing. Publications include The Creative Critic: Writing As/About Practice, Orley, E. and Hilevaara K. (Eds) (2018) Routledge. She is interested in exploring ideas to do with memory, maintenance and enchantment, as well as the un-fixing of time, heritage and place. Always open to new forms of experimentation, she is endlessly inspired by lively discussions, new encounters, and unlikely assemblages.

As a practitioner-researcher, with a mixture of academic, artist and physical theatre training, she is a firm believer in breaking down the false binaries that separate practice and theory, making and thinking and writing about making. Long-term collaborators include artists Katja Hilevaara and Elinor Brass.

Emily is an academic at Guildhall School, London, and prior to this was Reader in Drama at Roehampton University, London. She has degrees from the Wimbledon School of Art and Cambridge and Roehampton Universities and trained at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris.

Tracy Mackenna

Tracy (SCO-IT) is an artist and educator, Professor Emerita, and an alumna of The Glasgow School of Art and The Hungarian University of Fine Arts. She exhibits and publishes internationally and in her practice and research she employs drawing, video, walking and writing as dialogical processes to activate playful, provocative and non-linear properties of language within visual art practice, giving new and refreshed voice to collaborators and subject-matters. Her art practice is a discursive site for production, collaboration, presentation, co-learning and reflection.

Tracy is a co-founding Curator of The Museum of Loss and Renewal and The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing, both of which she leads and curates. She explores and communicates Orkney and Collemacchia’s environments through e.g. drawing, collecting artefacts, photographing and filming, exhibiting, developing ‘memory maps’ (counter mapping), engaging with local archives and collections, participating in and contributing to field-guide and interdisciplinary group walks, leading residency programmes and publishing.

Fernanda Aránguiz M.

Fernanda (SCL) is a publishing artist and independent curator. Her artistic research focuses on written language as a graphic form and representation scheme of 'the real', an issue that runs through her creative production. Since 2016 she participates in art book fairs and international exhibitions linked to books and art publications, in talks and workshops related to publishing as a practice and books as artworks, and in the production and curatorship of collaborative and interdisciplinary art projects. In 2020 she developed the research project Publicar como práctica..., from which she edited and published the book PUBLICAR (2021), a collection of textual, visual and graphic reflections on publishing as an artistic practice in Chile, and created the publishing house and web platform publicarcomopractica.com.

Fernanda was invited to participate in WRITING INTO PLACE to make
the design and programming of this site / digital publication.

writing into place

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