An exploration of the grammar  of our navigation in the digital realm. Up, down. Left, right. Scroll up. Scroll down. Swipe left. Swipe right. It’s flat, but we move through it. These motions have become second nature, yet they come loaded with meaning. Swipe left, swipe right. A decision, a judgment, a gesture. I come from a generation that met the screen when it first came into the home — not as a window to everything, but as a place. My first computer was an Amstrad CPC-464, mid-to-late ’80s. It had a green monitor — all colours rendered as shades of that glowing phosphor green. Most games then — the ones with real movement, real action — used the keyboard. Q for up, A for down, O for left, P for right. Spacebar to fire. Those keys were actual buttons. They required pressure. Muscle. Response. There’s something wholesome about that now. Something we’ve lost. The tactile is missing. Not just from digital media, but maybe from life more broadly. The feel of keys under fingers has been replaced by the swipe, the tap, the barely-there gesture on a pane of glass. The screen — our portal, our tool, our trap — is flat. Charlie Brooker called it the black mirror, and it is. In this piece, I wanted to reflect that flatness — the artificial surface, the pixelated logic — but balance it with something more human. Something made. Traditional mark making. Hand-drawn lines, physical gestures. To bring back a sense of the body, the hand, the imperfection.

Maighdean Mhara, is a title borrowed from Scottish Gaelic meaning Maiden of the Sea. Pronounced phoenetically in English as Maych-tune Vaara, it's a contemplative work rooted in memory, distance, and the quiet resonance of place. Initially conceived through a more figurative lens, the piece gradually shifted into something more distilled — an evocation rather than a depiction. It became a way of holding open a space for reflection, even as the original context faded into abstraction. Entilted as to be respectful to the memory of the people who came before and lived in the part of the world that it makes literal references to. Set against the remote west northern edge of mainland Scotland, the work draws on the experience of entering the boundary between land and the vastness of the North Atlantic — facing westward towards sunset and infinity. The horizon, impossible to reach,  becomes a metaphor: for longing, deep time, and the enduring presence of moments in our lives. There’s a quiet emotional current running through Maighdean Mhara — a sense of stillness paired with vast, unseen movement. It speaks to how particular landscapes can absorb and become living vessels for memory.