Passages

Alan Bissett

For Passages, Alan has re-edited two pieces of work titled More Moira Monologues (2017) and What The F**kirk (2015). 

The extract from the More Moira Monologues, comes from the third in a series of plays that depicts the character of Moira Bell, a straight talking single mum performed by Alan as a one-woman show. Moira is from Falkirk and based on all the women in his family. 

The extract from What The F**kirk was originally conceived as a stage play for theatre, focusing on Falkirk and its overlooked histories. It went on tour around community halls in 2015 and details the view of Falkirk taken by local people themselves, interweaving jokes, commentary and a series of films featuring clubbers, schoolchildren and senior citizens reflecting on what Falkirk means to them. 

Alan is a novelist, playwright and performer from Scotland. He lives in Renfrewshire and was born in Falkirk in 1975. Alan has won numerous accolades for his writing and has performed and published his work worldwide. He is well known for writing in Scots in a dialectic specific to his hometown of Falkirk.

Amanda Thomson

For Passages, Amanda has created a new sound piece based on her experience of walking and cycling the canal between Auchinstarry to Craigmarloch since childhood. Interweaving personal, social and historical material alongside her own field recordings (both under and over the water), Amanda creates a living portrait of the canal and the communities past and present who have inhabited it. 

As part of the Festival of Movement Amanda will be giving a talk on walking and the joy of repeated visits on Saturday 29th March 2025 in Cross House, Linlithgow.

Amanda Thomson is a visual artist and writer, Amanda is originally from Kilsyth and now lives and works in Strathspey in the Scottish Highlands, and Glasgow. Trained as a printmaker, her interdisciplinary work is often about notions of home, movements, migrations, landscapes and the natural world and how places come to be made. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her writing has appeared in The Willowherb Review, Gutter and the anthologies Antlers of Water, Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland, edited by Kathleen Jamie, and The Wild Isles: An Anthology of the Best British and Irish nature writing edited by Patrick Barkham. She has written for BBC Radio 3 & 4 and is a regular contributor to the Guardian Country Diary; her books about nature, Scots language, identity and culture are widely celebrated; and her recent artwork is on show at the V&A after premiering at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Cal Flyn

For Passages, Cal reads an extract from the opening chapter of Islands of Abandonment, this audio recording depicts the landscape of West Lothian’s shale bings, distinctive, man-made heaps formed by waste shale rock created during the oil shale mining in the area that took place between 1942 to 1962. These heaps known locally as the Bings are now protected as scheduled monuments and landmarks and are now home to many rare animal and plant species. 

Cal Flyn is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland, she currently lives in Glasgow. She writes long form journalism and literary nonfiction. Her latest book, Islands of Abandonment (written in 2021 and published by HarperCollins), has been a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for numerous awards. In 2022 it won her the title of Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the UK and Ireland’s most influential prize for young writers, and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Ciorstaidh Chaimbeul

For Passages, Ciorstaidh has created three new pieces of music that respond to the mythological figure of the Kelpie or Water Horse, a figure that spans both Scots and Gaelic folklore, her work acts as an ode to the Highlanders that tirelessly built the infrastructure for the canals, many losing their lives.

Ciorstaidh Chaimbeul is a musician from Lochalsh in the Scottish Highlands currently based in Copenhagen. Ciorstaidh’s music is largely influenced by her Gaelic roots as well as her classical training. She is a graduate in Accordion from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is currently completing her Masters Degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Music.

Dr Gregory J. Kenicer

Dr Gregory J. Kenicer is the author of Scottish Plant Names, Scottish Plant Lore, and Plant Magic. A botanist and educator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, he has spent two decades inspiring learners of all ages. While he has published extensively on the evolution and diversity of peas and beans, his true passion lies in exploring the rich and imaginative connections between plants and people.

Emmie McLuskey

Emmie McLuskey is an artist and producer who lives in Glasgow. For over fifteen years Emmie has worked collaboratively to create artworks that challenge what is undervalued by capitalism. Emmie works across mediums, disciplines and communities to create work with others that make connections between language, belonging, context, collectivity and the human condition. Alongside choreographer Janice Parker, she is currently working towards a new children’s book titled The A – Z of Movement that depicts a vocabulary for movement that every ‘body’ can do.

Recent presentations have taken place at Govan Project Space, Talbot Rice Gallery, The Travelling Gallery, Collective, Sissi Club Marseille, Dogo Residenz für Neue Kunst, Switzerland, nad0ne, Brussels and KW, Berlin. Since 2021 Emmie has led The School of Plural Futures with ATLAS Arts and in 2022, she was the Associate Artist for Edinburgh Art Festival.

Janice Parker

For Passages, Janice has created an audio piece that acts as an invitation to feel, to experience and to be with the joy of moving in public space. 

On Saturday 29th March 2025, Janice will lead a movement workshop as part of the cultural trail that welcomes all ages and abilities to join her outside along the canal. 

Janice Parker is an award-winning independent artist and choreographer, who over the past 40 years has created a vast body of work. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, working locally and internationally, her primary passions are: to develop and strengthen each person’s innate and unique movement potential; to create artworks that deepen our potential to feel, think, imagine and question; and to strive for a more just world through personal, collective and cultural change. 

Her work has been recently commissioned by Necessity Social Justice Network, The Edinburgh Art Festival, The Edinburgh International Festival, the Travelling Gallery and the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh. Janice is currently working with visual artist Emmie McLuskey to create an A-Z of Movement in book form and through a series of open workshops.

Richy Carey

For Passages, Richy has created a new soundscape that prefaces each artist and writer’s recording as well as providing new field recordings and sound mixes that respond to the aural atmosphere of the canals. 

Richy is an artist-composer from Glasgow living on the Isle of Skye. He works collaboratively with community groups and other artists to make communal sounds that explore the pluralities of authorship, agency and understanding that can emerge through listening and sounding together.