Mhairi Killin
Photo by Shannon Tofts
In residence: February 2025
Mhairi Killin is a visual artist from the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. She makes her return to Svalbard this February to continue the research and development of ‘Svalbard & The Hebrides - Island Archipelagoes in the Anthropocene’, which started at Artica in October/ November last year.
This project sits in the wider context of the generative force of ‘islandness’ as a recognised geographical form of the Anthropocene, and the prominence of islands in recent contemporary thinking, scholarly research, policy making and activism around climate change.
Mhairi says of this return to Svalbard, “By being in situ, engaging with the local artistic, research and educational community, and through my own methodology of situated drawing as a process of enquiry, I will continue to research why and how contemporary art practice should engage with islands, and how this is being approached on Svalbard in relation to the climate emergency, post colonial island environments, and islands which have experienced cultural and resource extraction.
The residency is an opportunity for research and knowledge exchange between two island locations. I will bring my island context and artistic approach to Artica Svalbard and in return discover how artistic practice and research on the Svalbard archipelago is approaching the above mentioned issues.
I will also be thinking about the metaphysical connection to place so evident in my own location and culture in the form of the Gaelic Otherworld, and enquiring if this connection is evident on Svalbard despite there never being an indigenous population. Perhaps there is an equally powerful contemporary Arctic Otherworld or imaginary at play in the relationship of the human to the non-human and more-than-human worlds of Svalbard - a future paradigm which might act as a guide through what is coming next?"
Mhairi Killin is a visual artist from 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 supported by Creative Scotland.
