Kirsten Millar

Based on the west coast of Scotland and originally from Dundee, Kirsten’s practice questions notions of centre and periphery in the contexts of modernity and temporality.

Kirsten is interested in cultural documents, how we engage with industrial and environmental sites over time, and how these shape our current interactions with the landscape and rurality.

Kirsten’s work connects the archaeological and industrial by looking at the varied and forgotten legacies, tales, oral-histories, previous-industries and manipulations of the environment, dissecting perceptions of landscape and how historical narratives shape our current interactions with the environment.

Her practice centres on the consideration, deconstruction and re-making of images and representations of Scottish landscape, questioning examples often imagined as romanticised, wild, untouched and separate-from-modernity and human influence, by eroding the binary categorisation of nature and technology.

Existing in-between fact and fiction, ancient and modern, Kirsten’s work is speculative and traverses time periods by exploring and blurring these overlapping relationships and notions of historical time. Using psycho-geographic techniques of ‘drifting’ and ‘playfulness’ to (re)discover, (re)construct and connect with unseen and intangible temporalities and histories. Kirsten uses field research, material investigations, archival materials and sounds, which generate a process of interrogation into how layers of history and identity in the landscape are expressed/represented through natural objects and man-made interventions.

These findings are expressed through visual experiments and sound using materials that exist within the landscape, playing with layers of time by referencing artefacts found, structures that exist, and those yet to be created.