In the lead up to the interim show, conversations with my twin sister Kirsty have become far more than a supportive discussion around the work. We’re collaborating both as artists for the first time in many years.
Our conversations have formed a basis for working together. They’ve been a way of researching, exploring ideas and uncovering common ground in ways of thinking.
What began as an exchange about images, writing, anatomy, shells, systems and possible directions for the exhibition has actually revealed something deeper. It’s shown me that this collaboration wasn’t simply helping me arrive at the work, but has actually created the conditions through which the work has become visible.
This has made me think again about the idea of authorship. Throughout this MA I’ve been trying to move away from the notion that artist is sole author, creating work in a vacuum away from the influence of the world. Increasingly, I understand practice as relational, porous and in a constant state of flux. I’m shaped by materials, memory, the systems in which I function, the people I’m around, forms of attention and ways of seeing that are beyond my ability to control. The work emerges through my interaction and contact with these influences.
The collaborative process with my sister has made this impossible to see as a minor factor in my practice. This isn’t a typical collaboration where who separate practices are brought together. Our way of communication is faster, very associative. Words are less important in our exchanges than gesture, rhythm, shared reference, knowing looks. Because the way we think is so similar, our conversations are less about explanation and more about recognition. We see each others minds so clearly. The way we interpret imagery, express words, build visual propositions from our shared experience. This is our process.
I’m aware it might sound far fetched to say that to us, words can feel like an unnecessary scaffold between us but I say it based on a lifetime of shared experience. Once, during art classes happening at school across the corridor from each other, we were each given hefty books of botanical imagery to work from. Hundreds of pages. We both chose the same image to work from. That’s not surprising in any way to me. Of course we did, we have the same internal systems negotiating this world.
We sometimes phone each other at the same time so there’s no need for the phone to even ring. This isn’t remarkable to us. Just an extension of our mirrored, deeply intuitive way of communicating. Our ways of attention and perception run in parallel, like train tracks. There is a shared, foundation on which we notice, select and respond to the world. That’s what’s shaped this collaboration in a way that’s difficult to compare to a more conventional co-operative project.
What’s been especially significant is hearing Kirsty talk about her role as a teacher. Although she now works in education rather than in the art world, I still see her as an artist. Not only because we went to art school together twenty years ago, but because of the ways she thinks. The way she approaches teaching is fundamentally a creative process to me.
Her reflections on learning, neuroplasticity, nurture, systems and how to change them are creativity in action. In our conversations, she spoke about the ways minds become saturated, how too many inputs can clog and overwhelm a system. She spoke about how in teaching she takes dense theory, institutional pressures, emotional labour and the needs of learners which she transforms into digestible pieces that can be received. That process to me, sounds profoundly creative. It’s not secondary to art, but art in an active form. In a school, inside a classroom rather than a studio or gallery. The housing doesn’t matter, it’s the activity within it that’s important to me.
One image that emerged repeated while we talked was the funnel. What struck me was that she mentioned it spontaneously when it so clearly related to my ideas I’ve been developing in my study statement about distillation. The funnel became a shared image of process. The funnel suggests that our experience, incoming information, memory, sensation, don’t simply accumulate inside us, unchanging. Instead, they pass through a shaping structure. Inputs go in, are digested and the creative process turns them into something new.
In my work, that process might happen through drawing, scanning, writing and reflection. In hers, as an educator, it happens through transforming complex theories and knowledge into digestive, supportive, usable material. We spoke about the mind as a system of inputs and outputs and what happens when that system becomes overwhelmed. One line from our conversation that seemed particularly important was: if we don’t do it, the machine gets clogged up. That feels true of both of us. She was referring to creativity as an important process which digests the inputs we consume as a way of keeping the system running. The inputs need to go somewhere.
Because our minds operate in such similar ways, this collaboration feels symbiotic. Not only do we understand each other’s essential frameworks of thought but we build on them. We originated from one egg that split in two. Two physically separate systems but our ways of thinking are conjoined. Parts of one living system, like a vascular or tree root networks that nourish and sustain each other. What matters here is not only the practical support but the rarer experience of being fully seen and understood. The kind of recognition that is hard to find elsewhere and it has shaped the speed and intensity of this collaboration.
This shared system has deeply informed my recent use of anatomical imagery. I had already been thinking closely about the body through a conversation with Jonathan and through my own reflections as research as a form of intake. In one tutorial, I described my practice in terms of all the materials I gather: screenshots, voice notes, sketches, found objects. I didn’t want to think of this as passive consumption. I wanted to understand and explore how these inputs are actually processed. This led me to think about the image of the stomach.
The stomach has become an important metaphor for me. Not in an illustrative sense, although I do enjoy anatomical drawing. It’s more of a way to think about practice. It’s a muscular, layered, forceful, selective and very highly tuned organ. It contains hydrochloric acid which is highly corrosive and potentially damaging to itself. This is the agent that breaks material down with the help of four transverse layers of muscle wall. The strong acid is necessary to break down what is dense, sharp or difficult into nourishment for the body. This feels very close to what I want research to be in my practice. I want to take things in, pull them apart to understand them, break them down to absorb what’s useful and use that energy to feed my work.
Another important strand has been to return to mussel imagery, and the way that imagery unexpectedly led me to the anatomy of the heart organ. Mussel shells have carried a strong symbolic charge for me. Initially in childhood experience of collecting them from the shores in Sutherland. To me as a child, the tiny pearls inside the mussels were akin to finding treasure. Although we often crunched them down as we ate the mussels, they still felt like something precious. The memories -sensory experiences of hunting for mussels on the black, harsh rugged shores. Of seeing the open shells painted on the inside with iridescence and finding pearls, like precious jewels has always stuck with me.
In conversation, my sister also remembered an old prophecy I’d forgotten about associated with Loch Laxford where we grew up. The Brahn Seer had spoken of identical twins finding a pair of pearls in the River Laxford that would be worth more than the Westminster Estate. The image has remained strangely resonant to us both. Another layer of meaning to the pearl and mussel imagery, especially given we’re travelling to London together thinking about twinship, value, pressure and what forms slowly over time.
What fascinates me about the mussel is not only its visual appeal, but its structure and process. It is a bivalve..two shells joined by strong muscle like fibres to form one organism. It filters constantly, taking particles from the sea and transforming them into food.
Mussels often lives in long strings; close communities. Their insides are coated with a surprisingly pearly sheen. All of this feels symbolically rich to me. The mussel is protective and vulnerable, muscular and soft, communal and individual. It contains within it a powerful image of transformation: irritation slowly becoming something precious and luminous.
This became particularly important when I found a rare mussel on the beach with both shells still intact and joined together. Holding it in the palm of my hand, I laughed to myself and thought: a “cardiac mussel.” It began as a play on words, but it stayed with me. I had already been struggling for weeks to draw mussel shells observationally and felt repeatedly stuck. I was trying to render the shell itself, but the drawings were not coming alive. Then, in the middle of drawing, I had the sudden realisation that I was not really trying to draw a mussel shell at all. I was drawing a heart organ instead.
That moment has become very important to my understanding of practice. I did not reach for an anatomical diagram, because I did not want to illustrate the heart literally. Instead, I followed the shape that was already emerging. Two opened mussel shells already carry something heart-like in their form, and as I drew, the colours that appeared almost by accident became iridescent. More like layers of pearl than muscle fibres of the cardiac muscle. The heart emerged through the mussel rather than replacing it.
My interest in the heart also goes back further. When I was at nursing school, we were shown real specimens of the human heart. Cross sections. What stayed with me most powerfully were the fibrous structures (Chordae Tendonae) which are literal heart strings.
These are physical cords that tether the important valves of the heart to the heart wall, so that blood can’t flow back out when the heart pumps. Seeing those structures was deeply affecting. It made me realise that the language we use around the heart is not merely romantic poetry about a mechanical organ. In some ways it is the opposite. The physical heart itself seems already to contain the roots of poetry and metaphor.
That mattered to me because it changed how I thought about words. The power of words is not only that they describe what already exists, but that they help catalyse ideas into physical form. Mythology, poetry, thinking and language do not sit outside making. They are methods of distillation. They are ways of digesting experience and giving it form. In that sense, text in this project is not there simply to explain the images from the outside. It is part of the same physical and imaginative process. Writing stretches thought. It builds muscles in thinking. It shapes how reality is perceived and held.
This is why I have felt drawn to work with school jotters, with lines of text, with fragments of language as image. Human language is one of the ways we form our reality, even as it fails to contain everything we mean. It matters that words are blunt tools and also powerful ones. They are part of the apparatus. Part of the machine.
What this collaboration has clarified for me is that making is not a matter of imposing a fixed theme and then illustrating it. It is a matter of attention. Of listening closely. Of noticing what returns, what resonates, what shifts in the body when I find something important. In that sense, this process has become a practical exercise in attending: not mastery, but receptivity. Not forcing the image, but allowing it to emerge, and having the conviction to follow where it leads.
Maybe this is what I mean by the anatomy of collaboration? Not just two people making something together, but a shared field of attention in which ideas, memories, references, frustrations and sensations move between bodies and minds, taking on form as they go. I am not only trying to show images of anatomy. I am trying to show the anatomy of my machine, my practice, and the anatomy of a shared system of thought. A way of shared being.