VACMA Field Notes VIII: Turning the Map Up

This week the work became louder.

Not louder in a messy way — louder in the sense of colour finding confidence, structure becoming graphic, and the map beginning to assert itself as an artwork rather than a reference.

Up until now, much of this project has been built through slowness: walking, tracing, reading old plans, testing Harris Tweeds, translating line into stitch. I’ve been interested in hesitation, in how a route softens once it passes through cloth. But these newest studies push in a different direction. They ask: what happens when the map stops whispering and starts performing?

The answer, it turns out, is colour.

The Portobello composition has shifted into a much more graphic palette — hot pink, teal, yellow, dense blue, and violet. At first I thought this might move too far away from the Edinburgh/Portobello atmosphere I’ve been working with. But the more I sit with it, the more it makes sense. This isn’t about naturalistic colour. It’s about emphasis, rhythm, tension, and edge. It’s about allowing the map to behave like a contemporary textile object.

What I like in these images is the contrast between systems.

The black-and-white line drawing still holds the grammar of the place: coastline, railway, roundabout, street network, water. It’s the skeleton. But once colour enters, the work begins to operate differently. Blocks become fields of pressure. Roads become ribbons. The railway becomes a sharp interruption. The border starts behaving like a woven frame, almost architectural in its own right.

One version feels bright and civic — open, legible, graphic. Another moves towards aubergine and plum, becoming moodier, duskier, more interior. Both are useful. One speaks in public; the other in evening.

And that seems important. A map is never just informational. It always carries an emotional weather.

I’m realising that this body of work may need to hold both ends of the spectrum: the quieter stitched cartographies on tweed, and these bolder, flatter, more declarative compositions. One is close to the body. The other is closer to poster, banner, signal. Together they open a more interesting territory.

What still matters, even in this more graphic language, is restraint. The strongest moments are not where everything is described, but where the composition allows a place to become abstract without becoming generic. Portobello remains in the coastline, in the particular angle of roads, in the pressure of the railway cutting across the lower part of the frame. It doesn’t need to be named. The structure carries it.

That feels like a breakthrough.

The map doesn’t always need to explain itself. Sometimes it needs to declare a rhythm, a set of intervals, a way of holding place through colour and form.

VACMA Field Notes VII: When the Line Becomes Stitch

Something has shifted again.

Earlier in this process, I was still thinking in terms of maps: roads, burns, coastlines, blocks, plans. Then came the tweed samples, the tracing, the first transfers. But these new studies feel like a different threshold altogether. The map is no longer sitting on top of the cloth. It is starting to behave like embroidery — slower, more bodily, less certain, and much more alive.

What I’m noticing is that stitch changes the authority of the line.

A printed or drawn map often arrives with a kind of confidence: this road goes here, this edge ends there, this space is fixed. But once translated into thread, everything softens slightly. A line thickens. A corner hesitates. A route starts to feel less like instruction and more like memory. That’s where it gets interesting for me.

In one sample, the roads are held in pale mint and white against grey tweed, almost like a quiet urban pulse. They feel clean, modern, reduced — less about naming the city than sensing its structure. In another, the palette opens out completely: pinks, yellows, blues, soft olive, pale lettering. Suddenly the map begins to feel almost conversational, as though neighbourhoods are no longer abstract blocks but inhabited fragments — place as pattern, route as mood.

And then there’s the more composite study, where blocks of colour, stitched lines, and small contained areas begin to behave like a patchwork cartography. That one feels important. It suggests a direction where the work can hold several systems at once: street map, field structure, allotment logic, embroidery grid, and the memory of walking. Not a single map, but layered ways of knowing a place.

I’m drawn to the fact that embroidery refuses neutrality. Even the smallest colour decision changes the emotional temperature of the work. A pale blue line becomes water, or distance, or coolness. Pink reads as warmth, human presence, maybe even domesticity. White lines feel factual until they cross tweed, and then they start to resemble paths traced through mist. Stitch is never just descriptive. It always carries feeling.

That may be why this stage matters so much. I’m no longer asking only how Portobello or Joppa can be mapped. I’m asking what kind of stitched language a place demands. Does a road need to be crisp, or should it bend? Should a block be flat, or textured? Should the map explain itself, or remain slightly withholding?

I think the strongest work will live somewhere between legibility and tenderness. Clear enough to recognise as a place, but open enough to hold drift, memory, and the pressure of the hand.

These are still studies, but they no longer feel tentative. They feel like propositions.

VACMA Field Notes VI: When the Map Lands on Cloth

Something changed this week.

Until now, the maps have mostly lived in books, on tracing paper, in my notebook, or in my head — as routes, fragments, old road structures, remembered turns. But here, for the first time, they begin to land on Harris Tweed.

Not perfectly, and not yet permanently. Which is exactly why it feels exciting.

I’ve been testing what happens when parts of Edinburgh — and more specifically Portobello, Joppa, and the older structures around them — are translated onto tweed samples. Some of the cloths are grey and restrained, almost stony. Others carry more movement in their weave: flecks of green, blue, brown, a kind of weather already built into the surface. What interests me is how differently each one receives the same line.

A road on paper behaves one way.
A road on wool behaves another.

On some samples, the map feels almost absorbed into the cloth, as if it had always been there waiting to surface. On others, the lines sit more sharply, more graphically, closer to print culture, closer to signage or plan-drawing. And then there are moments where the weave starts arguing back — the herringbone redirects the eye, the check interrupts the grid, the softness of the cloth pulls the geometry slightly off its authority. I like that. I don’t want the map to arrive as pure control. I want it to be altered by material.

That, I think, is the real proposition here: not simply printing or drawing maps onto tweed, but allowing cartography to become textile.

Some of these tests carry labels — Edinburgh, Portobello — and I’m noticing how text changes once it sits on wool. It loses some of its neutrality. It becomes less like information and more like a voice. Elsewhere I’ve been placing fragments of older plans alongside contemporary route systems, letting different versions of the city overlap without fully resolving into one image. The cloth begins to hold multiple times at once: old roads, current infrastructure, walking memory, planned line, woven structure.

What’s exciting is that these are not “designs” yet. They’re closer to proofs of feeling. Small negotiations between surface and system.

The strongest samples so far are the ones where the map doesn’t dominate the tweed and the tweed doesn’t swallow the map. They meet somewhere in between. The line remains legible, but softened. The cloth stays itself, but becomes newly readable.

That feels close to what I’ve been looking for from the beginning.

A map, yes — but one held by weather, labour, and touch.

VACMA Field Notes V: Cloth as Cartography

Today felt like a real beginning.

Not a grand beginning, not a resolved one — but the kind I trust most: cloth on a table, samples shifting around under my hands, colours finding each other before they know what they mean.

I started laying out the Harris Tweed pieces I’ve gathered for this new body of work, and almost immediately the project moved from abstraction into surface. Until now, so much of this VACMA period has been about walking, mapping, reading, noticing. Routes. Burns. old road structures. The graveyard on Milton Road. Portobello becoming visible in layers. But fabric changes the pace of thought. Once the wool is there, the questions become more precise.

What does a shoreline feel like in tweed?

What kind of grey holds a map without becoming dead?

How much pattern can a surface carry before it stops listening?

The strongest thing today was realising that not all of these samples behave in the same register. Some are structural: the sober greys, the blown herringbones, the quieter checks that can hold line, print, route, annotation. They feel like ground. Pavement. Mist. Old paper. Stone. The kinds of cloth that don’t ask to be admired, but make everything else legible.

Then there are the interruptions: the mossy olive check, the deep blue-black tartan, that pale mineral cloth with flecks of yellow moving through it like weak sunlight. These feel less like “base fabrics” and more like incidents. Weather. Water. Drift. Memory entering the system.

I found myself building little temporary compositions on the table — not yet designs, more like arguments between surfaces. Grey against blue. Blue held down by herringbone. Olive crossing a pale ground at an angle. One square insisting on itself, another receding. It reminded me that patchwork, at its best, is also cartographic: one piece presses against another and suddenly a territory begins to emerge.

There is one grey sample in particular that I keep returning to — a blown check, marked “Orvis,” soft but graphic, almost like a map already waiting to happen. It holds multiple scales at once: from a distance, atmosphere; up close, grid. That feels important for this project. I want these works to operate similarly: readable from afar as coast, route, drift, and then, on closer looking, full of smaller decisions, crossings, tensions.

What I’m after is not “using tweed” in a decorative sense. I’m trying to understand how Harris Tweed can become a thinking surface. A material that already carries weather, labour, and structure — and that can then receive other systems: mapping, old roads, route lines, text, stitch, memory.

Today was also a reminder that colour in this project needs discipline. Portobello and Joppa are not asking me for spectacle. They are asking for tonal intelligence. Grey-browns, sea blues, mineral greens, off-whites, dark crossings. A palette that can hold coast, cemetery stone, railway logic, horizon, and the strange inwardness of the walk itself.

Nothing is fixed yet, which is exactly as it should be.

For now I’m letting the samples speak to each other. Letting the cloth propose its own geography.

VACMA Field Notes IV: The Portobello Library Map Treasure Hunt

Today I went to Portobello Library “just to look.”

You know how that goes.

I walked in thinking I’d spend twenty minutes, maybe borrow a book, maybe behave like a normal person. Instead I fell straight into the kind of rabbit hole I secretly live for: old maps, strange labels, neat little cartographic decisions that feel like poetry dressed up as administration.

And suddenly my Portobello/Joppa walk had ancestors.

One of the first things that hit me was a tiny shock of time: Portobello wasn’t always Portobello—at least not in the way the city now assumes it has always been there. In one map, the logic is so blunt it becomes hilarious: all roads, and no Portobello. Just lines, burns, old ways, and the sense of a landscape being organised long before a seaside neighbourhood becomes a destination.

There’s something almost theatrical about these documents. They aren’t just maps. They’re beliefs. Someone decided what counted as a road, what counted as a boundary, what deserved a label. Someone drew a burn like a sentence and gave it authority. Someone placed a compass rose and said: this is how you should orient yourself.

I found myself grinning at the titles.

“Old Ways — and Means.”

As if the map is admitting it’s not neutral. It’s a method.

Then there’s this gorgeous plan-like view — a neat little world of ponds, lochs, garden forms, and careful edges. It’s the kind of drawing that makes you realise mapping can be intimate. It’s not only about getting somewhere. It’s about controlling what gets seen, what gets named, and what gets remembered.

And in the middle of it all: Duddingston, Figgate, Brunstane, Milton Road, the burns.

Places I pass without thinking—suddenly drawn like they matter deeply. Which, I suppose, they do.

It made me see my own walking route differently. The path to the promenade isn’t just a commute to the sea; it’s a thread laid over older threads. My “Valleys” from Attar sit on top of these earlier systems: roads that carried people before I carried my thoughts, burns that moved before I noticed them, names that survived because someone wrote them down in ink.

I left the library feeling oddly energised—like I’d just been given extra layers to print, stitch, and misread in the best possible way.

What might become cloth:

A small “before Portobello” inset map printed faintly onto wool; an old road structure simplified into thick lines; my own route stitched over the top like a newer hand refusing to erase the old one.

VACMA Field Notes III: Attar on the Promenade

I’ve been thinking about whether a walk can hold an inner map.

Not the kind of map that tells you where the Asda is, or which road folds into which roundabout—but the quieter cartography: what changes in you as you move, what becomes visible only once you’ve walked through it.

Lately, I keep returning to Attar’s Conference of the Birds. The birds travel looking for the Simurgh, and the journey is told as a passage through valleys—states of being. It’s not a story about destination as much as it is about refinement: the long work of shedding certainty, learning to listen, arriving at something that was there all along.

My Portobello route has its own valleys.

It begins at The Jewel—noise, junction logic, the modern insistence of movement. A place that feels designed to keep you passing through. Then the route threads toward Brunstane, where water runs nearby in hidden lines, and the city softens into green seams. A station appears like a hinge: people arriving, leaving, returning, not always naming what they’ve carried back with them.

On Milton Road, the graveyard is the point I cannot pretend is neutral. My grandmother is buried there. And suddenly the walk isn’t only a walk. It is a form of visitation. A pause in the city’s rhythm where time stops behaving politely. Grief is a landmark that doesn’t show up on most maps, but it quietly reorganises everything.

Then the promenade. The horizon arrives. The sea doesn’t explain itself—it just holds its distance, and in that distance something in the mind loosens. At Joppa Rocks, the time-scale breaks open again: deep stone, older than our narratives, older than our urgency. You don’t stand there and feel important. You stand there and feel correctly sized.

I’m not trying to illustrate Attar. I’m using him as a framework: a way to name the inner shifts that happen along an ordinary route. A way to treat walking as research, and mapping as something more than streets and edges.

Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to make in cloth: a cartography where the visible and the invisible sit together—route and weather, infrastructure and memory, sea and burial ground, the city and what it asks from the body.

Map legend (for the work):

Valley I — Departure (The Jewel)

Valley II — The Hidden Water (Brunstane / burns)

Valley III — The Hinge (Station)

Valley IV — Remembrance (Portobello Cemetery)

Valley V — Horizon (Promenade)

Valley VI — Deep Time (Joppa Rocks)

Return — Same route, altered body

What might become cloth:

A faint printed grid; the route stitched as a single continuous line; small breaks at each “valley”—like breath-marks—where weather and memory interrupt the logic of the map.

VACMA Field Notes II: A Map Held Like Cloth

17:42 / wind from east

Maghrib / shoreline

08 April / Cloudy

I’ve been thinking about maps as something you hold, not something you read.

Years ago, in Istanbul, I picked up an old biennale flyer—folded paper, blunt lines, grey water, roads like arteries. It wasn’t trying to be pretty. It was trying to be precise. And yet the creases, the worn corners, the way the ink sat on cheap stock made it intimate—like the city had been carried in someone’s pocket and slowly softened by the body.

That memory returned this week as I began sketching Portobello and Joppa.

I wanted the coastline to feel like a seam: a long edge where land and water negotiate with one another. I wanted the streets to sit like warp and weft—systems of movement, interruption, return. A faint grid underneath, not as control, but as quiet structure. An inset map, a reminder that a place is never alone; it belongs to a wider pull.

The map I’m making is not a claim to accuracy. It’s a way of noticing: where the wind turns, where the shore opens, where the town thins. A route from home to sea, drawn from memory. Weather as mark-making. A small archive beginning.

I don’t have my tweed samples with me yet—many of them are still in Chitral—but perhaps that’s the point. Before cloth, there is attention. Before embroidery, there is line. Before the object, there is the slow gathering of what insists on returning.

For now, I’m letting Portobello become a set of signals: shoreline, grid, road, drift. A cartography softened by hand.

What might become cloth:

A faint printed grid; a shoreline line held in grey; one chosen route stitched in gold—broken, returned, insisted upon.

• “wind turned here”

• “salt in the air”

• “after prayer”

• “stone holding rain”

• “I walked without arriving”

• “the sea kept its distance”

VACMA Field Notes I: Beginning in Edinburgh

This new body of work begins not with finished cloth, but with attention.

Over the coming months, I will be using this space to document a period of research and development supported by a VACMA Edinburgh bursary. The project begins in Edinburgh, through sketchbooks, walking routes, weather notes, mapping exercises and early textile thinking. Rather than moving straight into resolved pieces, I want to begin more slowly: by noticing how a line can hold a journey, how weather can become mark-making, and how cloth might act as a surface for memory, movement and return.

My practice often moves between Scotland and Chitral, between wool traditions, landscapes and systems of making. For this project, I am interested in what happens when mapping becomes less factual and more tactile — when a route is drawn from memory, when wind is recorded as rhythm, when a shoreline begins to resemble a seam or hem.

At this early stage, I am gathering rather than concluding. Sketchbooks will hold fragments: paths, slopes, interruptions, repeated gestures, small weather archives, words that return. These will eventually inform a new series of textile “map studies” developed through drawing, print and hand embroidery.

Field Notes will follow that process as it unfolds.