Tilleadh Don Ghleann
(Return to the Glen), 2025
Hessian, satin, river silt, soil, spirulina, iron oxide, peat, silk thread, heather, horseshoe, salmon nursery stones.
‘Tilleadh Don Ghleann' emerged from the remains of an ancestral site as a living landscape of Scottish heather and hessian. The installation included a naturally dyed tapestry, hand-stitched with old place names like Todd Holes and the gravel pit in Ogham (an early Celtic writing system). I reinterpreted the flat topographies of a 1910 ordinance survey map of Glen Clova, redrawing borders and water networks that have disappeared or eroded.
Summer has broken and the salmon are returning to their birthplace to die. The womyn of Tod Holes gather on the banks of t-Esk, to break stones where the heather grows.