Mhairi Killin
In residence: October - November 2024
Mhairi Killin is a visual artist who lives on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland where she works with the precious relationships between land, sea, humans, and other living beings. A Royal Scottish Academician, her practice seeks to counter the notion of islands as peripheral, romantic and marginal - rather it strives to reveal islands as progressive centres from which we can experience a unique yet relevant perspective on the forces shaping our futures.
Working across the mediums of drawing, print, sculpture and film, Killin’s work explores how belief structures - religious, mythopoeic, and socio-political - have shaped the physical and metaphysical spaces we journey through. Her recent collaborative work On Sonorous Seas, told with the voices of science, art, music and poetry, interrogates the power of and reliance on sound as a survival tool for whales and the military, and the complex relationship between the militarisation of Scotland’s seas and their existing ecosystems.
Killin has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. She has been artist in residence at the Leighton Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, and in 2021 was an invited artist on the international project, In Search of the Pluriverse, a Travelling Academy project for Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
Killin’s residency at Artica Svalbard is also supported by Creative Scotland.
